The pirate ebook "economy" is a "gift economy" like the Potlatch cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Status comes from giving.
Even so, the crux of the copyright matter hasn't changed. People can argue it all they want but the only reason copyright exists is to give content creators an incentive to create new content. New derivative works are a benefit just as the original works were, but they cannot exist without access to the original. Copyright is like a patent, an artificial time-limited monopoly that exists to balance the needs of society against those of creators.
Yes it's good for a given individual to pirate lots of copyrighted data, and it may become part of the cost of doing business in future. One interesting thing I heard recently was how Stardock makes a distinction between their user base and customer base. All their games are released without copy protection and run well on mid-range systems. They don't do it because of any inherent dislike of DRM or any desire for information to be free. They do it because their customer base (the people who give them money) have told them they don't want DRM, and Stardock is listening to them.
Pirates aren't customers.
If you want what's already out there-- piracy benefits you as an individual. What it costs you is less new material in future. Yes distributing early novels for free can help an author, but only if there's a later novel that's not freely available that the person then buys.
In the long run we need to settle down with some solution that compensates creators because if we don't they won't create. Whether from frustration or from having to spend the time doing something else to pay the bills.
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Originally Posted by hidari
This point of there not being any good books out there because of pirating is a rather WEAK point. Most of the books published in the industry are rather poor in quality or crap. I would say less books published would be a good thing in general. Plus, the point of authors not having enough to live on is pathetic. Writing is a luxury not a right. Most writers and artists do have "regular" jobs as do most of the writers on this site.
There was plenty of "culture" in many countries before writers and artists were paid handsomely for their work.
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Before we started paying creators they tended to rely on patronage, where the wealthy would subsidize them. As a system it works, but there are a limited number of patrons, and the patronage system gives them a lock on the kind of content that gets produced.
Writing is a right in many countries, freedom of expression. What's not a right is the ability to read whatever you want for free. No one guarantees that.