If I may disagree I think you are not looking at the big picture here. The point of view you are defending is the one of corporations and the industry in general, in other words the "establishment". A model created by them and for their interest, a system where they decide what is right and what is wrong, a system where if they can milk us dry they will. In fact they have done that in the past as I've mentioned previously, when there was no downloading and if you did not agree to pay whatever price they decided you just had to sit on your ass and do without it. They still do that with other products that cannot be downloaded (For those who live in Europe and have a car and go to the gas station, I think you know what I mean). The industry will suck the life out of us if they can and those who can't afford it well, they are left behind without mercy.
So nowadays there seems to be a turn of the tide (at least for digital content) and the establishment will do all they can to scare us (legal actions), threaten us (possible jail time), shame us (point an accusing finger at us and say what a bunch of bad and evil thieves we are, depriving the poor and innocent industry of their rightfully hard-earned bucks) in other words,
brainwash us into seeing ONLY their point of view, their side of the story.
You worry about the authors ? fair enough but do you ever worry for them when you know how badly some are ripped-off by their publishers that barely throw crumbs at them off the sales of their books with whatever excuse (they are liabilities, new authors and the poor publisher must take the chance on them and so on ...) In these cases the publisher takes from them the money that customers paid for the author's work and just throws crumbs at them, so to speak.
So you see the problem is not one of the malevolent and evil pirate vs the good and altruistic corporation because that would be over simplistic and simply wrong IMHO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
Because not buying a book is a choice, downloading someone else's work off the internet is stealing, two very different and completely unrelated things.
|