[Muckraker]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I used thousands of books in my youth that I didn't pay for. Is that immoral too? Was I "stealing" from the author by borrowing all those books from friends, or by buying fifty books for $5 at rummage sales? The author and publisher never got any payment for those, either.

The main issue with digital copyright infringement is that an infinite number of new copies are made available without the consent of the content creator. These new copies require minimal effort in their initial creation and zero effort for world-wide propagation. There is no way to compare this to any activity involving physical products.

All of the pbooks you have purchased were created and distributed by the parties legally entitled to. If the publisher does a print-run of 50,000 copies then there are that many copies in existence. A library can loan out a single copy a hundred times but availability is still limited by that single copy and borrowers are bound by the established rules and availability limitations. You have the ability to photocopy a pbook as many times as you want but that takes time and paper, both of which are inconvenient, limited, and result in an inferior product.

Illegal digital distribution creates a brand new copy whenever a new downloader wants one. There is no way to compare this to pbook copyright infringement.

Is the real issue "consuming entertainment without paying the creators"--in which case, libraries are immoral--or is it "creators have a moral right to demand limits to their readership?"

Libraries are a public service 100% limited by supply and demand. If the book you want to read is checked out it doesn't matter how much you want to legally read it for free. Legal ebooks are still "checked out." If the library has five licenses and all five are loaned out then you have to wait, get a friend with a legal copy to "loan" it to you, buy the ebook, or "steal" the ebook.

Saying, "but you COULD email an ebook to a thousand people, so you should be penalized just as much for emailing it once"

The problem of digital piracy is not individuals sending pirated content to their friends. It's about Joe Blow delegating himself as your distributor without your consent. If you want to read a book and not pay for it you are acquiring it from someone who is not your friend. You are acquiring it from a total stranger or, in the example of bit-torrent, 100,000 strangers.

I agree that the crime of "piracy" is overstated and incorrectly applied to individuals downloading something they want for free. DRM and punishing downloaders are lame attempts to address this perceived crime.

The prime benefits of digital content are also its Achilles' heel. The creators benefit from an infinite and zero-cost supply of their products and instant delivery to customers anywhere on the planet. These benefits come at a price, though.

The only way to truly hinder digital copyright theft is to not digitize your product. If publishers/creators decide to digitize then piracy is just a cost of doing business and should be factored in when creating the product, pricing it, and coming up with a marketing strategy.

We can decrease piracy of our content by providing value-add, making the content inherently better than the best the pirates can provide, reasonably pricing it, and making it easier to just buy it than it is to steal it.

Hollywood and publishers of records, books, and software would be much better off focusing their energies on decreasing piracy in those ways than slapping handcuffs on their customers or using archaic, consumer-unfriendly methods to lock down that which cannot be locked.