Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
There is no special moral connotation to "free ebooks," nor have you advanced any such argument. All you've done so far is appeal to your own emotional position that "there is something rotten in Denmark." Unfortunately, it simply is not persuasive.
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It is not an emotional position, it is an ethical one. Business transactions require a certain level of "fair dealing." A seller is entitled to a "fair profit." In other words, business transactions occur in an ethical climate.
Kovid's position is a way of saying that when a seller, at no cost to himself, has done nothing to improve a product otherwise available for free, there is actually NO profit that can be regarded as "fair." Therefore, it is incumbent on the seller to reveal that the product can be had for free.
In the real world, of course, one cannot ignore the "convenience factor," nor can it be true that the product does not cost the seller something, if only the labor involved, to put up for sale. But under those circumstances, I think that an ethical seller would say something along the lines of "This product is in the public domain, and the identical product is available for free elsewhere. It is being made available here for charge of $X if you wish to have it immediately."
This makes it clear that the seller is selling "convenience." If he doesn't say that, he is misrepresenting what he is selling.
Earlier in the thread, Kovid asked someone if he allowed Congress to govern his conscience (or something to that effect.)
In asking this, he was identifying what I see as a very serious moral problem, which is that many people regard behavior which is lawful as coterminous with behavior that is ethical. But while the realm of ethical behavior overlaps that of the law, in some respects it extends BEYOND the boundaries of the law. Thus, asking "is it legal?" does not necessarily answer the question "is it ethical?."
It is not ethical to sell something a buyer something that he and everyone else already owns, and to hide that fact from the buyer.
EDIT: One interesting thing about this discussion is that the ethical dimension of the selling of PD books only seems to exist in the digital environment. It seems to somehow be related to the question of the legal implications of copying files (absent copyright law.) In some fashion, the absence of a physical object (in the Newtonian sense) seems to impact on how the ethical question is addressed.