Quote:
Originally Posted by gollu
Where does the piracy becomes a major problem?
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I think you are hitting the head on a nail here.
The important question is always to your code of conduct, what would happen, if everybody would do it? (this boils down to Kants Imperative)
What would happen if nobody would buy any books, but all download it for free?
Well the publishing system would break down, there would be far less books, and far less good quality books. Still there might be people who still do it for the heck of it, but you couldn't life by it, and it sure would make a lot fewer people do books.
This questions gets altered by people who say, to the question "
What would happen when book downloading/sharing wouldn't be illegal? Well people would still buy paper books. And as the situation is still currently I'm inclined to agree, because books were always nicer to hold in hand than to read infront of a screen. But especially it are the eInk devices we adore here so much, who would change the answer to this question.
Same with the time-shifitng (cutting out of commercials)
What would happen if everybody gets himself a device to remove the commercials, Well you can expect free tv soon to be a goner. Maybe pay-tv and public tv gets rise but understadable free (commercial driven) TV would have no chance if so technology would be wide spread and not illegalized.
Now with that imperative there come the same problems as has been pointed out to kants imperative, What is the *maxime* of your own doing? To some degree this can be freely altered at will:
Now what has done by some people here is to change the first question to:
What would happen if everybody who has less than X dollars income per month, downloads his books for free?
The answer is here honestly: Nothing. Book market would run as usual, if everbody would stick to such a rule. But its 1) difficult to assess who has how much money. 2) I see the lobby of "poor people" especially week, so its not gonna go into any legalization.
However one can go as a hypocrite and make the maxime, "What is if everybody who was born in 1977 can download books for free?" ... well you see it gets strange
What I consider important is some rights we were used to since ever. And which are on the stake now. Like Can we still borrow our copy of anything we bought to our neighbour? We always could as a book. And it was also because the answer to question [i]What would happen if everybody could lend his books to his neighbours and friends[i] Was up until now, nothing much, people would still buy books. This is going to change due to the global online-ness. When you neighbour is suddendly everyone in the world, things start to get complicated, even when I swear I'm not goin borrowed g to look at the file I "borrowed" to my friend (who lives on another continent) while he is using it, until he "gives it back" (after which he doesn't use it)