Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Andurian, you analogy of reading a book in the book store only goes so far. It fails to parallel the situation in the e-book world for the following reasons.
1. Barnes and Nobles and Borders are built on a model that encourages people to spend considerable time there reading potential purchases. It is up to them to decide if they want to limit the amount of time you spend reading a particular book. Since most extended browsers will end up buying coffee and or food at the book store, they still profit from such activities.
2. While some small fraction of the population might read full books in a book store, it is safe to say that most people would prefer to bring the books home with them, and therefore will ultimately purchase the books they want to read all of. Further it is up to the book store, the current legal owner of the copy you are reading to limit your reading of said copy if they should choose (i.e. it falls under fair use).
3. You never have possession of the book in question. You are allowed to hold it, but the book remains on the physical property of the book store and therefore in the possession of the legal owner of that physical copy of the book. If you download a book illegally, then you are in fact taking possession of a book you have no legal right to.
Basically the big difference here is that when you are reading a book in a book store, whether you are reading a few pages or the whole thing, you are reading a copy of the book that is legally owned by the book store. Therefore the bookstore is engaging in fair use by letting you read the book. That is not the case with electronic books.
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Bill
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I think you misunderstood my point. Your reply is odd to me, given that in the rest of this thread you have consistently been arguing the ethical (hence your insistance on "theft" vs "copyright violation") rather than the legal. Here you seem to have ignored the ethical entirely.
My point is this: If it is not immoral to read books and magazines in B&N, then there is at least one instance where it is not immoral to deny authors payment for their works. Your position in this thread seems to have been that the *reason* piracy is immoral is that it deprives authors of income. If other examples of situations where readers deprive authors of their income are *not* immoral, then depriving authors of their income cannot be a sufficient cause for piracy's immorality.
So what is the difference, *ethically*, between the B&N case and the downloading case, in your opinion? Assuming the B&N case isn't theft (and if you say the B&N case *is* theft I'll take that as a reductio against your position rather than accepting your conclusion), why is the downloading case?