Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
It depends where you are. Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment, performed an earlier deviance test:
If you read The Lucifer Effect, he goes on to state that one nice old gentleman actually closed the hood on the Palo Alto car when it was raining.
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really neat, thanks for the info. I sort of suspected this would be the case. It just depends.
I remember a thread here on MR in the Kindle section if I recall. Some dolt boasted of "finding" a Kindle at the airport and if it was OK for him to keep it given a set of circumstance and actions the poster claimed to have attempted to return the device.
Ultimately the answer should be no as it was never the property of the poster, it simply should have been handed over to the authorities to do with it what they will. If this results in the finder not getting the back if it's unclaimed, then tough luck. The poster whined about it being fine to keep it as due to "finding" the device it now belonged to the poster. It was appaling the number of long time members here who agreed. it never belonged to the OP of that thread and nobody ever acknowledged that fact. Many, including that poster, acted as if the act of finding an item was akin to buying or the transfer of ownership. It's not, well in an ethical society anyway. You find it, you turn it in and you lose nothing because you never owned it to begin with.
DRM is a lot like this. It's one thing to strip DRM for our own uses, maybe. And for now it seems to be OK in some countries. What the issue seems to be is the retailer and publishers have never made sure the buyer of the book is aware the transaction is not the same as buying a physical book. From there comes the confusion. We all are conditioned to understand any software we buy to run on computer brand-X will run on our next computer brand-Y as long as the operating system is the same. In some cases the software comes with a license for both Windows AND OSX (Adobe is good about this one...somehow I feel dirty in writing those words!!
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Now buy an ebook and suddenly it may or may not work on other readers. For Amazon who really does make a great effort in letting their books be used on almost any platform. Still the issue comes to a head if the unsuspecting consumer decides they like a different brand dedicated reader. Suddenly that consumer finds none of their books can be read on the new reader because it does not support then and there is no Kindle Reader app for the device. I believe this sort of situation is where Amazon and other bookstore branded readers are vulnerable to more general purpose devices.
Still even with DRM there are options. Those options have compromises and the consumer needs to refine what they are willing to live with over time. I still feel most people, especially those who have been long time Amazon customers, genuinely do not care.
What it will take to resolve these issues is some level of cooperation between either the various bookstore branded readers or the publishers come up with a "standard" format they all use. This would then pretty much require companies like B&N, Amazon, Sony and whoever to support that format and DRM it uses. This, I suspect will be the final solution used by the publishers. They have already done the "goose step" for pricing next is going to be a "standard" publisher determined format used by the whole industry. Mind also that a standard file format will reduce publisher overhead as well. Odds are this will be ePub but Amazon could easily make a compelling case for their format as well by offering some sort of extra perks to those publishers.
Time will tell and when all is said and done, our discussions here won't mean squat on the issue.