Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
With respect, Trenien, you're confusing "scarcity" with "having value". The fact that you can make 10,000 copies of an e-Book trivially does not mean that the e-Book has no value to the reader or to the author, and that the author is not entitled to fair recompense for his or her work. Whether the book is distributed digitally or on paper does not alter that basic principle.
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By your own admission, you don't consider neither second hand shop nor getting a book from a friend (not a gift, mind, just one he read and hands to you for a while).
Considering that although there are exceptions people read most books only once:
Exactly what makes these two very mundane occurences (where the author doesn't see a dime) morally superior to that of downloading a book from said author (who, again, isn't compensated for the labour from which you benefited)?
If you think hard about it, you'll realize there are no differences.
What makes you think it's different is that you
know that at some point in time there's been money exchanged for the book in the first two cases, whereas it feels like the ebook has fallen from the sky in the latest one. But it didn't. Somebody, somewhere, did buy the book - usually a pbook. That person, for reasons of her own decided to devote a significant amount of time to scan and convert it back to a text file. Afterward, the same or other have spent time to improve the formatting and correct the mistakes that came from the scanning process.
All these people have decided to make the result of their work (although the material is copyrighted, it
is work) available - probably for the same reason the guy who'd cracked mrkai's software did: it'd seem a waste not to do it.
At the end, there are people who read the book who could have bought it at a second hand shop, or got it from a friend. Slight difference though. Maybe one or two in that chain of events found the book to their liking and went and bought it brand new.