Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
That's a flawed analogy. You're again confusing depriving someone of their property versus making a copy. Yes, in your example above it is obviously theft because even though you just threw it in the trash the store no longer has their book. But, that has nothing to do with downloading.
It's more like you walk into a book store, make a xerox copy of a book, put the original back on the shelf were you found it and take your xerox copy with you without paying for it. As soon as you walk out, you throw the xerox copy in the trash can.
In that case, nobody has been deprived of anything, neither physical object nor income.
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Ok,
I will grant this. But ultimately, I will grant that downloading works and immediately deleting them is probably not morally objectionable. That being said, we know that no one downloads works just to delete them. Because of torrents they might download 1000 books and throw away 999 of them; but they keep the 1000th; so that 1000th is in fact depriving the author of income.
Further, I have serious doubts that the other 999 are actually thrown away; they may not read them now, they may not ever read them, but I suspect many who download the 1000 books to get the one, probably keep the 999 thinking they might read one or more of them someday, thus even more of the books are depriving income from the authors.
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Bill