Quote:
Originally Posted by taming
I’m sure that there were many times I could have slipped a book I wanted into my coat pocket and gotten away with it. Other people did it all the time.
I didn’t do it then, and I won’t do the equivalent now. I buy my books, use my library card, and I wait.
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If you slipped a book in your pocket back then, the store would be out whatever it paid for the book, and not get a chance to sell it to someone else. If you download a book from a torrent, you didn't make that one unsellable, and nobody is out the cost of producing that copy.
And if you waited, and bought a paper book, you could hand it to your friend when you were done, and another when he was done with it. You could give it to your nephew to give to a friend of his at school. You could sell it back to a store at 1/4 cover price and they might put it on the shelf at 1/2 cover price.
Until ebook publishers figure out how to allow these actions for ebooks, I'm not going to be overly concerned with extra copies floating around. If you can't loan it or resell it--can't share it--it's not a book, it's "digital content," and there's no moral superiority in finding a sharable version.
(There's an immorality in not paying the creators, which includes author and publisher, for their work. But if you've done that, there's no ethical reason to pay them multiple times for variants of the same work.)
I'm wondering how long it'll take for decent virtual terminal program to get popular, so people can load their own purchased, DRM'd ebooks and allow other people to have remote access to their computers and read them.