Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
And I don't think my suggestion implies that people are necessarily being dishonest.
Barcey's examples of "clear copyright infringement"--as described--take no more or less food off of a creator's table than the loaning of physical media (without a backup copy) would. Nor would the deletion of the backup before "legally" loaning the physical media make food magically appear on their table.
Copyright infringement RE digital media simply does not inherently imply the dishonesty and loss of income that you seem to want/need it to.
You break your country's DRM removal laws because you don't recognize the harm in doing so. You don't consider yourself "dishonest" because you trust yourself enough to uphold the "spirit" of the protection that DRM provides to rights-holders, if not the letter of it. Yet you deny the possibilty that others could (and do) do the same RE copyright and digital media. That's hipocrisy.
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I think that sometimes people conflate honesty with their version of morality.
I agree with you in your overall argument that the technical legalities matter very little here. Consumers are going to do what they want to do with no regard to the technical legalities. For the most part, the real world matches your argument. While loaning ebooks to friends, even if you have a copy, may be a technical violation of copyright law, no one is going to be prosecuted until they make lots of copies or try to make a buck doing so. The worse that's going to happen to you if you buy an ebook out of market is that the vendor may shutdown your account if they catch you at it. (I believe that Amazon for the most part, simply resets your location to where they think you actually live rather than shutdown your account). The record companies tried going after minor copyright violators and got so much bad press that they gave it up over time.
Ultimately, I suspect that the rule of thumb will be, as long as you don't try to make a profit on someone else's copyright material, or do something major that devalues the work, then you will be able to do what you like. Obviously, there will be a lot of quibbling in the courts over the devalues part of that, but I suspect that's the way it will shake out.