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Originally Posted by Harry_Y
You caught me before the edit, I was being a smart a _ _.
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Heh, caught you!
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The point I was trying to make is simple, When I sell something
I produce I have sold it and I no longer have control over it.
Now if I manufacture a hammer, and you buy one and use it,
and then loan it to your neighbor (or give it to him) there is no
problem since you no longer have it to use. Now if you make an
exact copy of that hammer and sell it there is an infringement.
So if I buy a book I can do as I please with it, read it , burn it, give
it away, or whatever I please, BUT if I copy it then give it away or
sell it. Then I am infringing.
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Yes you're right, but some authors have deliberately released their work onto torrent sites and have got improved sales out of it. So there's evidence that ebooks sales can be improved by them being available freely online. Whether by honesty or by getting people interested in your first few books and getting a following and then hopefully they'll buy more of your books.
An example of this is with myself. There's a tabletop Roleplaying game called "Eclipse phase" you can download the entire PDF for free from their site and ALL the supporting material for it for free.
I never would have bought the physical book as I don't know anyone who has it or played it to recommend it to me.
But having downloaded the PDF quite legally I checked out the game, liked it and since then I have bought the physical copy.
Had there been no physical copy available and I decided to use it in my gaming in purely a PDF format (unlikely as game books are not really ereader friendly) I would have donated some money to the makers of the game.. Now I appreciate that many WOULDN'T have done this, but I think more than you think would pay up. As gaming material for that game will just stop being made if it's not economically viable, so it's in the interests of fans of that book to support it.
The same goes for gaming licenses, my kids and I play Minecraft fairly regularly. Now Minecraft is trivially easy to pirate, but I have chosen to buy licenses for myself and my kids as I want to it be supported.
The guy who made minecraft is a VERY rich man atm, so that model of not packing lots of DRM into his game and not worrying about illegal copies seems to be doing well.