Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
This is a little confusing. You said that "you don't need a bank loan to buy a book or two a week" but isn't that what your parents did? And book prices have increased since that time.
And how is your depending "for the most part on the kindness of strangers for my reading material" different from downloading from the point of view of the content creator?
In the Netherlands, like Katsunami said, there are taxes being paid for this purpose. I don't know if these money get to the content creator somehow (if not directly, then maybe indirectly through lower taxes) but the consumers are paying something.
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I didn't say they took out a bank loan to buy books, I know actually that they had a coffee can to save coins for things like that. I said they went into debt, ie. charging Christmas presents which were generally practical items such as socks and underwear, with maybe a nice t-shirt thrown in. We got one toy each at Christmas. I am pretty sure my parents could not have taken out a bank loan if they tried. We lived on the wrong side of the tracks, but we were kept clean and our cloths were always mended and we ate regularly and actually pretty well. I did not know were dirt poor until I got a job
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I understand what Katsunami said, in Canada we have much the same laws. When these laws were initially enacted it was for photocopy purposes, IIRC photocopies were about 50 cents a page and the tax was levied on commercial photocopy places and the paper. It wasn't geared to people wanting to copy whole books, but to those copying a few pages for school or research. To copy a 300 page book at that time would cost $150 well over the price of the book in most cases. From taxes the rights holder would maybe get $5.00 and come close to breaking even. Then it was for cassettes with the initial purpose of copying music from the radio. Consumer cassette recorders were very low quality and had no direct input, and most radios had no direct output so recordings did not come close to a purchased product.
My father made $40 a week until I was $14. A typical hard cover book, which is what they bought was $3-$5 IIRC. But some were more, and possibly some were less.
Today I can buy a 4 terabyte hard drive for under $200. I can store several million ebooks or songs on that one device or around 6, 000 - 12,000 hours of video. More with MKV. The tax levied on hard drives would have to be pretty high to compensate all the creators of the content I could download. What would your guess be? Can you see a situation where I downloaded only one book a day for 20 years and enough tax would have been collected on that hard drive to compensate the creators by as much as 5 cents each?
It may be legal, but claiming the compensation is fair might be stretching things a bit.
Katsunami does not as far as I know attain ebooks illegally, and in this thread and others seems to feel it is not quite right and stupid in many cases to boot. but justifying others doing it based on the fact that taxes levied on CD's which retail for around 15 to 30 cents and can store approximately 1000 ebook, well anyone with a lick of sense should know that the money to be distributed at say 10 cents a DVD would cost a whole lot more to distribute than the amount itself. Probably by a factor of 100 at least. And same goes for hard drives. Of course in Canada AFAIK the tax is only levied on CDs and not many use them anymore
Perhaps it is different in Europe.
As to depending on the kindness of strangers, you are totally right. The authors do not benefit. It was and still is such a common practice that I had not even thought about the ramifications at the time, and I still borrow library books. I won't argue right or wrong on the selling and lending of used books, or movie rentals etc. because it is pretty well entrenched in the culture and there have been efforts by many to stop it.
We have the fair use laws, the physical container stuff as evidence of that. The fact is that most physical containers can only be used as in played or read x times.
I often donate used clothing and appliances to thrift stores and buy things second hand. The original manufacturer gets nothing in this case either. Is your point that we should we stop reusing and the selling or passing down of things no longer used by the original owner and throw them all in the landfill?
I am sure it isn't but I doubt that it is dissimilar to downloading books in that you have to go somewhere to buy them, generally they are not the same as new, they may require storage space to keep, and while not benefitting authors, generally some money changes hands.
Helen