Originally Posted by Enlil.S.Enki
While the original post was largely an unrealisable utopian dream. The majority of posts are all discussing a moral/ethical question as a legal one. We only have the ethos of not copying work because we are indoctrinated from birth with the law.
The law creates a market. Technology creates a way for the law to be easily and virtually undetectably circumvented. When the law can be circumvented and that circumvention goes largely undetected, we are back to ethics and morality. The law has failed. Our options are to enhance the law and strengthen the enforcement/detection capabilities of enforcers. Or to re-examine the situation from a moral perspective given what people will do anyway.
Consider a person lives in the third world, their average income is tiny by your rich first world standards, yet by local standards this person is well off. They save for a year and buy a second hand e-book reader on ebay. They can not buy e-books (even if they could afford them), because no one will sell them to them (their country is out of any supported zone). They can not afford to buy many printed books in their country, and the books they can buy are carefully censored by the repressive regime they live under. (It is the third world after all) Now it is illegal for this person to copy books, but they are left with two options (1, do not read many books or 2, read what they want, but it has to be pirated.)
The world is a better place if they opt for 2, even though they copied someone elses work. Morality wins over law, just because something is illegal does not mean it is wrong, the two concepts are not the same. Regardless of how you have been indoctrinated to think so.
As far as copyright goes in the first world, its far to extensive and over reaching, for something which in most cases amounts to effort only and not original thought. A Patent protects an original thought or invention and it has limited life beyond the date of invention. To get a valid patent the invention has to be novel, it has to never have been done before. It truly can be said to advance the human races collective knowledge in some area. Yet the copyright on a retelling of snow white will last for 70 years or more beyond the authors life. The system is screwed up, is designed to reap maximum returns for publishers, not writers. And is a method of controlling access to information for the poorest (the majority) of the earths peoples. E-books could allow massive and unprecedented amounts of information to reach anyone regardless of their wealth. Copyright in general and DRM in particular monetise information, which prevents this. "Oh, you can only afford to spend US$3 per year on books, sorry, you can only read 1 book every 3 years, the author needs a return, doncha know."
If you live in the USA and do one years work, you are entitled to on average earn $50,233.00. (*Wikipedia stat for 2006). If an author takes a year to write a book, and works 40 hours a week doing it, they should expect to earn the same from selling that book. Its the same amount of endeavour. One author who earns US$23 million for a years work is by that standard over paid. Everyone else needs to work for 457 years to achieve the same result. That author has not put in 457 times the effort of the average american in the same year. Yet few authors are that fortunate, it would be better for the human race, to pay many many authors a reasonable yearly income than pay one a huge amount, and others next to nothing.
E-Book Piracy will not be stopped. It is only growing, and for many of the earths people it is an arguably necessary evil. Ignoring it, or saying, "what about copyright" does not address the problem, the problem can only be addressed by considering, regardless of what's been done before, what should we do now, to sufficiently protect the interests of authors and editors so they keep creating, and to protect the interests of the human race at large so it can keep advancing and improving itself by ready access to information. I don't count the publisher in there, because in an e-book world they are a parasite, not useful part of the process.
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