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Originally Posted by mr ploppy
That would be commercial piracy, which would remain illegal. They're not saying everything should be free, they're saying that something that a large percentage of the population already engages in should be decriminalised.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gweeks
Google sells adds. That does not qualify as non-commercial.
Greg Weeks
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But Google is quite willing to do non-commercial things where it boosts overall web traffic. For example, I could see Google putting up a free and ad-free book database. You could go directly to the database and download a book for free. Of course, you can go to the Google search engine and lookup books that are in the free database. This is no different than the way that a google search turns up Wikipedia articles.
For that matter, someone could set up a nonprofit to do this. Nonprofits can't make money but they can take money into cover their costs of operation, as long as they don't take in more than they spend, they are a nonprofit. Interestingly enough, one of the costs of a nonprofit is it's employee salaries, including that of it's CEO. A CEO of a nonprofit is only entitled to reasonable compensation as compared to other CEOs. This means a nonprofit founder can make several hundred thousand per year even in small cities and considerably more in SF or NYC.
Lastly, my guess would be different. I think most people today get their books from legitimate sources. A small fraction of those break DRM for archive purposes and an even smaller fraction download pirated works and/or share pirated works. This is just a guess, as I don't have any facts. However, if sharing was completely legal there would be nothing to stop people from sharing books on Facebook. The file size of a book isn't much different from photos uploaded. Allowing for viral communication one copy of a book can be shared among thousands.