[HarryT]

Originally Posted by wgrimm

Here is what isn't sinking in- take 2 files, both .chm files containing content from a paper book, both with the same name, content, and date stamp. I created one, I downloaded the other. Assume I delete one of the copies, and can't remember which one I currently possess, the one I created or the one downloaded from the net- am I breaking the law? Prove I own an "illegal copy". What is your evidence- the file whose source cannot be determined? Now, is my argument starting to sink in?

Sorry, no, it's not.

To use an analogy, there's a big "black market" in the UK with people buying alcohol and cigarettes from France, where the taxes on these particular goods are much lower than here in the UK, and then re-selling them here. If I buy a bottle of Bell's whisky that someone has brought from France then I'm breaking the law in buying a bottle of whisky that hasn't had UK taxes paid on it. It doesn't matter that it's an identical bottle of whisky to the one that I could buy in my local supermarket and that, if I stood the two side by side, I couldn't tell which was which. One came from a legal source, the other from an illegal one.

If publisher's think most consumers are going to buy separate copies of books so they can be read on their readers, they are wrong. What's the next step in restrictive licensing- buying 2 paper copies of the book, so that one can be read on days Mon-Fri, and the other only on the weekends? The key factor here is that an ebook costs almost ZERO to produce- why should people have to pay for ebook content that they have already paid one time for?

Sorry - I've done both; rebought e-Books that I have paper versions of (I've just bought an eBook version of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, despite having it as a hardback already) and bought multiple paper versions of books, for all sorts of different reasons. I don't believe that I'm an idiot (although some may disagree, of course). I'm sure that I'm not alone in having done both these things.