Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
You are advocating sticking it to authors and just taking their stuff. All this has nothing to do with the "rights of the public".
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Well according to the Swiss laws we're discussing in this thread (and to which I am subject), it is actually the right of the public.
The Swiss government, in her infinite wisdom (grin) has decided that the damage for content creators on average will probably be negligible. It seems that even though the entertainment industry has tried to lobby the government, they have not done so successfully, or at least they have not been able to convince the Swiss officials that the astronomical losses they generally fling around can be substantiated.
From my personal perspective, I indeed don't see why it would hurt authors (who we care about most, here). I tend to spend around $1000 on books in an average year. That's shared between new paper, used paper books and electronic books. Since I work within a community that does not speak German natively, English books are being circulated among colleagues constantly. Generally, that's paper books, but since several of us have more than one eReader, electronic books circulate as well by simple exchange of eReaders. If instead of borrowing my eReader to a colleague, I refer him to a downloadable copy I do not quite see the big difference.
The only authors that will get hurt (and actually are being hurt due to the current exchange of paper books) are those authors that write books I do not enjoy. If I enjoy a book, I am likely to purchase other books written by that particular author. A recent example is Bill Bryson -- a collegue bought the hardback version of
A Short History of Nearly Everything. After a couple of people read and enjoyed it, we currently have two paper and one electronic version of
At Home.
So, for those trying to tell my that downloading a book is unlawful and unethical I can say that, 'No' it is not unlawful here and ethically I can live with it very well.