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Originally Posted by HansTWN
 For those that don't want to pay, just stay away from it. Arguing semantics over whether it is correct to call it theft or not and what your intent is? That does seem like trying to make up excuses. The point is, downloading without paying is wrong. |
If my daughter downloads an ebook from my Smashwords account, is that wrong? She can't buy it for herself--she can't legally *have* a Smashwords account. I can't buy two copies; Smashwords doesn't allow that. And somehow, I'm failing to see the immorality of sharing ebooks with people who live in the same house with me.
Downloading a copy of something where no version is likely to be offered for sale--like orphaned books with no legit e-version, or abandonware games--is hard to insist is "wrong," because it's not hurting anyone to spread the copies around, and the idea that we should abandon large swaths of our cultural history to reinforce Disney's claim on their products is a bit ridiculous.
In the Sony vs Tenenbaum case, the judge allowed that unauthorized downloads of content with no purchasable version might be allowable under fair use. And in Suntrust vs Houghton Mifflin (the "Wind Done Gone" case), it's pointed out that "The law grants copyright holders a powerful monopoly in their expressive works. It should not also afford them windfall damages for the publication of the sorts of works that they themselves would never publish, or worse, grant them a power of indirect censorship."
The copyright monopoly is not the same as "nobody can use my works in a way I don't want them to."
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And whatever word is being used to describe the act of illegally downloading copyrighted material, it must be a word that clearly implies wrongdoing.
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"Copyright infringement" specifies wrongdoing. If it doesn't have the same emotional impact as theft, that's because copyright was developed as a matter of corporate legalities and was never designed to apply to individual citizen activity... until corporations figured out that it was easier to chase down US college students than Chinese bootleg companies.
It doesn't help that "illegally downloading copyrighted material" can't be defined until one is taken to court. How much is legal to copy for a review? Nobody knows until the lawsuit is done. Is a particular copy for educational purposes legal? Again, no way to tell. Is it legal to share a video taped at a wedding with copyrighted music playing in the background? Is it legal to make a mix tape of songs with a specific theme? (When my husband was courting me, he made a mix tape for me. Should he have been fined a million dollars for it? If he'd uploaded it to dropbox, should he have been fined?)
There is no "well, everyone knows THAT ACTION is illegal." Even uploading a complete copyrighted work for public download has to be measured against the four factors--and if there's no authorized digital version, and no intention (or ability) to release one, it's hard to claim the unauthorized one is infringing--it's not cutting into profits or exploiting a market that the original could otherwise take advantage of. If the uploaded version is accessible to people with disabilities, and the authorized version is not, again, infringement is harder to claim.
OTOH, maybe I should be fighting for the stricter interpretations of copyright law, so I could make blog posts and then sue anyone who copies them to their computers without my permission.