Quote:
Originally Posted by dsuden
If I live to be a thousand, I'll never understand the argument that piracy is somehow justified if someone disagrees about what's being charged for a product. We don't own a product until we have paid for it, whether it's a diamond ring, a shirt, a DVD, or a book. It doesn't belong to us and we don't have any right to it. Would we shoplift if we thought the price of an article of clothing was too high? Hopefully not.
Nor is it is not up to you or me to set the price of the products we wish to own. We either agree to buy something at a certain price, and then we own it, or we disagree about the price and don't buy it...and don't own it. That's real life. The alternative is, and should be, a fat fine or time in jail.
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May I put it to you, Dsuden, that those who could be interested in justifying piracy would suggest an examination of the definition of ownership and stealing? The product being acquired in the case of TextbookTorrents was the information content of the textbooks (assuming that they were not subsequently printed and sold, which I think is safe enough for me to do, here). The act of downloading in and of itself makes
no impact on the current stock of printed textbooks or the availability of those that have been printed for those who wish to buy them. They have not been physically stolen away; there has not been a discrete loss. There has been a digital duplication.
Assuming that the downloader is a student who would otherwise have purchased the book containing the information in question, the situation could be seen as follows: the authors' time and effort, and the publishers' time, effort, and production costs, would not have been rewarded by the downloading student. No money has been
actually taken away from the publisher or the author by this act of downloading; the bank accounts, like the physical stock of product, remain unchanged. Similarly, if a library has purchased a copy of the textbook, after the initial payment, no changes would occur to the bank accounts mentioned above regardless of how many times the information content of the product was accessed, or whether more than one person was using the book at the same time. This example compromises the direct connection between the price demanded by the publisher (ostensibly to offset the cost of production and build capital with which to finance future productions) and the access to the information content of the book (which, again, is the only thing that the downloaders are
actually doing).
The perception of wrong-doing to the textbook publishers is, I would hypothesize, a result of this duplication reducing the demand:supply ratio. Where a potential buyer discovers that a needed product can be acquired more cheaply, or entirely gratis, the selling power of the publisher is reduced appropriately, as is the financial safety/motivation of the publisher's dependents (the authors and contributors to the publication of the book). I think this ratio shift also occurs, however, whenever the publisher decides on the MSRP of a given book, whenever a book is discovered to be available for use in a library, whenever a review influences a professor's decision about which book to use for her course readings, among others (many arbitrary). In and of itself, I don't think one needs to ascribe a moral signature the fact that a potential buyer, rather than anyone else in particular, is causing the ratio to shift in his favour.
If your definition of stealing is simply "taking that which does not belong to you," to account for the complexity of this situation, you need to specify when the act of taking has occurred: is it when you gain access to the book, when you gain access to the information content of the book, when you've mastered the information content of the book, when the book has moved from its place on the shelves of the university bookstore onto your person and subsequently into your private book collection? I don't think that the reading of a book which you haven't paid for is universally censured yet (the fear of such a development motivates me to resist DRM). May I ask what your definition of stealing is, assuming that it's more refined than the straw-man example I've just used?
- Danny