Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Some people, Steve, appear to hold the rather odd view that a lost sale is not "depriving the author of money", since the author never had that money in the first place. The logic of this rather escapes me, but this is an argument that one not infrequently encounters.
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Yes... it seems especially popular around the subject of e-books and e-music, since the production cost of the file is
theoretically zero (though, in reality, there is a cost in energy and time used... it's just really, really small).
The logic seems to be that if "zero" cost was incurred in producing a product, it is okay to give it away for free. I don't agree with this, as it is not the physical medium (which, yes, even includes "electrons") but the
content that you are paying for. An author doesn't get paid for the physical pages you buy. They get paid for each transaction of the content, the text itself, the
idea. Buying an e-book is buying the
idea, and so the author should get paid.
The idea that the author didn't lose money "he never had" is a lot like saying "since I didn't take you on my voyage on the Titanic, you didn't drown." It's calling bootlegging a "victimless crime," which is immaterial to the fact that it is still a crime, even if there is no direct correlation to an amount of money lost. Bootleggers have no right to distribute material that is not theirs (as the Titanic owners had no right to risk lives which were not theirs).