Quote:
Originally Posted by NVash
Shocking parallel here but let me ask this. What makes you any different from a pirate?
|
The law.
(your jurisdiction may vary)
Personally, I don't have a problem with someone downloading an electronic version of any book they own, either. The publishers keep harping on how we haven't bought the content, just the right to read it. So we should have the right to read it however we want. If we want to read it as is, fine. If we want to slice it apart and stash it inside textbooks (I used to know someone who did) that's our right too. If we want to laminate it and read it underwater, anyone who's that crazy is welcome to do it. And yes, if we want to scan it for our own use -- or use someone else's scan (which is where most laws differ with me) that should, IMO, be just fine, because we've paid to read that content ... same person reading, same content being read.
I'm old enough to have grown up with books as
books, something you buy, instead of having the publishers "pay and pay and pay again" mantras drummed into me from the cradle. It's weird, I know. But they used to be in the business of selling
books, and once you bought that book, they didn't care if you read it, or propped up the couch with it, or loaned it to half the town. They sold a book, and so long as you didn't start replicating that book yourself, you could do anything you wanted with that one book. Now I hear the Boy Scouts have an award for turning in "copyright thieves". I'm sure it won't be all that long before we raise a generation that looks with horror on the fact that I read books
multiple times and only pay their authors once. Seriously, how could that be fair, right? I've read, say,
The Hobbit probably a dozen times, and I've only paid once. How dare I get 12 uses out of a book and pay only 1 time? And if I lend it to my mother ... how could that be legal?
P.S. Don't try to square right with legal or wrong with illegal. All too often they don't match up, and trying to make them correspond will just give you a headache.