Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
llasram suggested Prohibition is a good analogy for the e-book situation. I believe a better analogy is speeding. Despite laws designed to protect society, people speed, and they always rationalize a good reason to do it ("I'm able to handle this speed"... "There's no one else on this street"... "I won't get caught").
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Its the best analogy to piracy I've read about ever.
Though you neglected to mention that it shows clearly that people will always be pirating books, no matter what laws are introduced, and that it won't ever work to show them how immoral and potentially destructive it is.
Reading the rest of the topic, I started to wonder... the typical person downloading an illegal ebook from the Net is motivated somehow to do it - those motivations have been described here, along with rationalizations many times. However, it's also been reported that many, if not most of illegal ebooks are produced by OCRing and proofreading the paper book. The person who OCRs the book already has it, OCRing and proofreading takes time and lots of work, there's no profit to be made from OCRing and releasing the book at all. What motivates those people, the people who introduce new content into Darknet?
Even with people who buy an ebook, remove DRM and release it, they still paid for it full sum - why do they release it? What motivates them to do such immoral action, with nothing to be gained?
I believe mostly it's a motivation to pay back to someone, or to a group of people. The average pirate might well think: I got quite some books from those people, let me pay them back: I'll scan a book or two and give them back. I don't really care where those books come from, they say there are people on other continents, authors, publishers, I never saw them, why should I care, I don't visualize their existence. But here are people I know, I conversed with, I got files from. I feel gratitude, I'll pay them back.
So the people are paying back, and are motivated by natural human emotions. They're just not paying to the person we'd want them to pay to. I don't think human beings can ever be made to think of the author they never saw in their life before people they have direct contact with, no matter what the law or morality says. Human mind wasn't made to cope with million-people communities.