|
It occurs to me that we are missing the boat by talking about payment to authors. I think that piracy should be defined as downloading a file without permission.
It was fairly recently that I learned here that authors do not receive royalties for remaindered books. It is very possible that the majority of books I have purchased in the last thirty years have been remainders. Should I avoid remainders in the future because the authors receive no royalties? Is buying a remainder unethical for that reason?
No, we have permission to buy the remainder. Permission from whom? Well, the author I guess. But he was unlikely to have the power to negotiate otherwise with his publisher.
Permission from the publisher? Certainly. But I think that the Sonny Bono Act of 1978 shows that the industry does not have the moral standing to determine what our morality should be.
And what of the deceased? Everyone in the world considers death to be an important event. So why should an author have the power to give permission for a time after his death? For example, in Canada the estate can withhold permission for fifty years. We have no trouble downloading without permission a file of a man dead fifty-one years, but it is immoral to download one of a man dead forty-nine years? It seems to me that the date that changes things should be the date of death.
But let us get back to the idea of permission. Sometimes authors allow their books to be downloaded for free. See Baen. With their permission, it's not pirating. The failure to pay is not what pirating is all about. It is disobeying the wishes of the permission-giver.
So then one must ask, Do I care whether I have someone's permission?
|