Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
However, in point of fact, it does have a physical form: Electrons. Electrons, in specific collections corralled by your hard drive, essentially make up the e-book, in the same way as a constantly changing collection of atoms makes up your body. Any quantum physicist would tell you that an e-book as a distinct entity is as real as your body. The courts will agree with that assessment, too.
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However, I hope you realize that computers are constantly making copies of the ebook - whether you ask them to or not. When you download an ebook, the copy resides on the server, then in the memory of various routers across the internet, then into your own RAM, then onto the hard drive. When you display the ebook, you're copying it from the hard drive into the RAM, through the registers on the processor, potentially into video RAM (depending on the way in which you're rendering it), and finally it's displayed. As your hard drive ages, pieces of that ebook are copied all over the disk, potentially duplicating it many times. There are so many copies of data made during the normal working of a computer that pointing to one set of electrons as "the book" is similar to pointing at an area of the sky and saying "that's the air I was just breathing".
To bring in an analogy from another thread - society has got a genie that will give us any piece of content we ask for, for free. When we beg the genie for a book, we don't think about the financial effect our free copy will have on the author, the publisher, or the retailer. But getting people to see their wishes as wrong is an uphill battle. Here's a test for you: ask people what their wish would be from a genie, and see how many of them think about the moral implications of their wish. You'll see why getting people to stop copying is a hopeless task.