In another forum I had a thought the other day about piracy and I thought I'd float it here. Please understand that I'm not advocating this as a way to justify piracy. I buy my books and I pay for them because I think that's what I should do.
However I think it just might be true that pirates invented ebooks. My first exposure to them was about 1991 or '92, in the days before the internet was even available to the public. In those days Compuserve and private BBS systems were what people used. I was active in the HP forum because I had an HP95lx, a pocket size MS-Dos PC.
A few of us in the forum who had access to scanners and OCR software scanned a few of our favorite books, OCR'd them into plain text and shared them with each other. We did this openly and freely with no thought that anyone might care. Compuserve had strictly enforced policies against piracy and they didn't care. The HP forum's polices were even stricter and they provided storage for us to share these files. We were honest people sharing with our friends.
I have no way of knowing that these were the first ebooks. I doubt they were. Very likely other groups were doing the same thing. But I am pretty sure this is how ebooks got started.
A few years later when the Palm Pilot came along this sort of thing became common. The Palm was an ideal reading platform while the HP 95lx was only just usable as a reader. It got popular and companies saw what was going on and commercialized it.
So, if I'm right that the pirates invented ebooks maybe the pirates should sue the legitimate publishers for infringement.
And no, I don't mean that as a serious statement. It's a silly joke. But I do think that when considering the moral aspects of ebook piracy it's worth knowing about and worth considering.
I hope someone will comment on this idea that the pirates invented ebooks and that that gives them some rights. It's a new idea to me.
Barry