Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Absolutely. And I've never denied that.
You're not suggesting that only people who have never broken any rule in their entire lives are entitled to be opposed to ebook piracy, are you? Yes, I format-shift books and remove DRM, which is against the book store's TOS, but causes no harm to anybody. Yes, I am opposed to piracy, which DOES harm authors, and will continue to say so whenever the topic comes up.
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We're talking about the rules that apply to e-books, not the entire universe of rules and regulations. We are told not to format-shift. We are told not to share copies. But you blithely disregard the first, yet refuse to see any gray area whatsoever in the second. You think a pirate is a pirate is a pirate, whether a person shares one copy with Aunt Mary, or shares 50 copies with friends and relations, or uploads to a file-sharing site for the entire world.
I'm suggesting that you don't get to draw the distinctions and apply them to everyone when your hands aren't exactly clean. You say removing DRM causes no harm to anyone? Of course it does; it allows you to keep an unauthorized version of the book, it allows you to change the text of the book, it allows you to avoid buying another version of the book to read on a different device.
And even if you pooh-pooh the harm of removing DRM, I can argue that my sharing a copy with Aunt Mary causes no additional harm, even though it creates an additional copy, because as a practical matter it is equivalent to a loan of a physical book.