Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
F'in-A, Bubba! Hallelujah!
("One of us! One of us!")
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I fail to understand the relevance of wanting to establish a "baseline" that nearly everyone involved already understands. Of
course, by the letter of the law, making an unauthorized copy is copyright infringement. And if someone wants to narrowly define "piracy" as any violation of copyright whatsoever, then they're free to do so (and I'm free to find it ridiculous).
What's being currently discussed is the tendency for some to treat their own conscious decision to break rules as a Rosa Parks act of of civil disobedience, while treating someone else's conscious decision to break rules (by lending Aunt Mary a copy of an ebook) as treason on the high seas. All based on some subjective opinion of "harm" that they can neither guarantee their acts
can't cause, nor prove the other's actions
will.
The idea that someone can guarantee that their removal of DRM will never cause harm (in the form of copyright infringement or—dare I say it?—piracy) is ludicrous.
Is it within the realm of possibility that a device/drive that contains your "liberated" ebooks could be stolen? Would it be more or less likely for those ebooks to end up on a pirate site if their original DRM was still intact?
Have you ever plugged a device/drive that contains "liberated" ebooks into hardware that wasn't yours? Can you
guarantee that data wasn't cached? How useful would such potentially cached data be if the original DRM was still in place?
Have you ever stored your "liberated" ebooks on any hardware that wasn't under your direct control, such as cloud-based storage, or any other online host whose hardware wasn't under your direct control? How much more or less likely would the potential theft/hacking of such data result in pirated ebooks if they were still DRMed?
Ever emailed a liberated ebook to one of your devices? How much control do you have over the email servers it passed through along the way?
All I'm (and others) are saying is for certain people to stop claiming that they know their violations
can't "harm anyone" while simultaneously claiming that the other's violation
has to "harm someone".