My further thoughts on this subject are that analogies with other more identifiable acts of theft are a confusion of the issue and the typical way the 'industry' with a vested interest would like us all to think... Well I'm not prepared to think the way they'd wish just because they wish it and because from all I can determine they want nothing more than to protect their cash cow... They don't really give two hoots for the struggling artist.. They are in the money business - it is that simple.
The notion of copyright is a relatively new one but plagiarism is not the same... nobody who copies a CD, DVD or EBook electronically tries to pass off this work as being their own idea - well, at least - not any normal person without delusions.
The biggest intellectual property thieves in history were probably Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham-Bell who it seems had a little finesse going on with the patent office clerks that enabled them to steal other people's ideas and patent them as their own. But we are not talking about that kind of crime here are we. If you wrote out the entire content of a book - word for word - and kept it as your own copy.. would that be copyright theft? There comes a point when copyright protection becomes untenable. That we have got there so fast is testament to nothing more than the technology of electronics and in no small part because of over-charging by the industry. The media industry have created a market for copy by stiffing the public. I can buy a CD of a great classical work for 50p (30 US Cents) and there is a profit in it for someone.. so why do the Music Industry moguls think £15 is a fair price for the work of their struggling artist? I still maintain that most creative people I know like the idea of their work being listened to, seen or read by the widest possible audience and the mechanism for this used to be by traditional formal publication arrangements that allowed publishers the latitude to rip people off - but now? The revenue model of 'try it and if you like it send me a dollar' is becoming more likely to prevail along side those who still prefer to own a hard-copy.
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