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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
If age really is a factor, why is that? Is it a cultural thing? I don't think so. Do young people not understand the concept of fairness? I don't think so. I think it might have more to do with young peoples' having less personal experience with "working for a living," and so do not hold the same value of another person's work as a wage-earner... they cannot (or do not) imagine themselves in the position of being the creator whose work is pirated.
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Yes, I think this is a big factor. I also think at least part of the reason is likely to be that most young people have less money than older people with jobs. I don't mean that this
justifies taking work without paying for it, but I think it partially
explains it. Finally, adolescents have been shown to be lacking in the ability to predict consequences-- it's a brain development issue. The whole point that if creators don't get paid, they'll stop distributing their creations is lost on many of them-- they can't follow the chain of reasoning. (And that's what parents are here for-- to try to protect adolescents from their lack of ability to predict consequences.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
There is the concept that electronic files are "just a bunch of electrons, which are practically insubstantial, so they're essentially nothing," and therefore essentially worthless. Most arguments for the "rightness" of taking electronic content seem to reflect the idea that since it is "only electrons," they are taking "nothing," you can't make "something" out of "nothing," etc.
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I accept that there are people somewhere making this argument, but I think far more people make the argument that they should only have to pay once to license the content, i.e. if they've paid for a paper copy, they don't see why they should have to pay again for a digital copy. Try taking the format out of the picture-- if I've paid for an ebook, and my file gets lost in a hard drive crash or whatever, should I have to pay for it again? Hopefully I have backups. But many vendors will also let me download another copy. I've
paid for the license to read the book.
I look at it as a matter of paying for work. Buying a paper copy compensates the author for writing, and the publisher for all the other tasks, e.g. editing, printing, distribution, marketing, etc. If a paper book is then typeset especially for electronic readers, that's work that should also be paid for, if someone wants the nicely typeset version. But if a person pays for a paper version and then obtains a scanned version with no invested effort by the publisher (i.e. scanned and proofed by volunteers), the person has still paid author, publisher, etc. for their work.
Note that this doesn't mean if one has the hardcover one is entitled to the paperback, or some such nonsense. Both hardcovers and paperbacks cost money to print and distribute each copy. I could imagine a world in which one would bring in one's tatty water-damaged copy of a book and be able to buy a new copy at a discount, considering that one has already paid for the content, but so much of the cost is bound up in the physicality of the book at that point that it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to manage such a system.
Now, cracking a commercial ebook (or taking a non-DRM'd commercial ebook) and distributing that does cross a different line, IMHO. As much as I'm opposed to DRM, the only way I could see it being acceptable to receive a copy of a cracked commercial book would be if one had paid for the DRM'd book and wanted an uncracked version as a backup or to read on an otherwise unsupported device. One needs to pay for the effort the publisher spent to get the book into commercial ebook form.
I don't expect others to agree with this point of view, but I would like to see people who object to the idea of downloading a scanned copy of a book one has paid for at least acknowledge the actual details of the POV, rather than over-simplifying to "some people think it's ok to steal an ebook or a paperback if they own the hardcover."