[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by barryem

I don't and never have advocated piracy. If you read my post you'll see that I stated that I buy nearly all my books. The ones I get from pirate places are the very few I want to read that I can't find on Amazon or other legal sources. That happens maybe once or twice a year, and not every year.

I also sometimes buy a book which is formatted badly enough to be distracting and I'll sometimes find a better pirate copy to read. In this case I've already bought the book. That happens a bit more often than being unable to find a book on Amazon but not much more.

As I said, your casual acceptance of downloading pirated ebooks at any inconvenience essentially glorifies their existence. If there were no pirated ebooks, then you would no doubt buy the pbook and have it scanned and OCRed -- there is a whole cottage industry in that area.

It's not that I'm actually against piracy. I'm not. What others do is their business and I'm glad those books are available for the few times I need them. But I do want authors to keep writing books for me and for that reason I think it's important that I pay for books.

As for the argument that getting a pirated book is stealing, that really depends on your definition of stealing. Most people think of stealing as a zero-sum game. I take it out of your pocket and now I have it and you don't. But it's reasonable to include other definitions and call it stealing. I think doing so is more about giving your statements an emotional impact than anything else. I doubt that downloading a pirated book would fit any legal definition of stealing but I'm not a lawyer and I can't really be sure of that.

stealing == acquiring something through illegal channels, i.e. you have no right to possess it.

Loss on the part of the original owner is a common consequence, and the main reason it is found to be reprehensible. It is not IMHO fundamental to the nature of stealing.

In this case, pirating a book is a fair equivalent to a zero-sum game. It is a common misconception that no one is hurt by piracy. And no doubt many pirates would never have paid money.
But piracy is a trend toward authors not getting paid, regardless of the lack of an exchange of goods.

I have my doubts about how damaging piracy is in a practical sense myself -- but I still cannot translate that to approval or condoning such behavior, since pirates don't deserve what they take.

I reject your weasel words.

If I advocate anything it's paying for the books you read. I hope you do. I do. For those who don't, I hope they at least read. A world full of well read people would be a better world.

That is such a messed up view of the world I am not entirely sure how to begin describing it, but I will endeavor to try.

Have you heard of public libraries?
Theft is not a prerequisite to being literate, in fact there are any number of huge cultural movements to bring literacy to the unwashed masses, even the poor ones. If nothing else, people can be well-read on public domain texts.
There is no good reason why society needs the reading of current fiction over any other type of literature... and piracy tends to be targeted at the books that aren't already free, which is mostly current fiction.

I was one of the very early ebook readers, long before you could buy ebooks or ebook reading devices. I've talked about this in this forum before but I'll mention it again. In the days before the internet became available to the public there were BBS systems and there was Compuserve. I was active in the HP forum on Compuserve because I had an HP 95lx (later a 200lx), a small pocket size MS-Dos computer that ran on 2 AA batteries. One of the guys in the Compuserve forum wrote a little app for reading books in plain text. I seriously doubt this was the first electronic ereader but it was the first one I saw.

I bought a copy, which came with a book that had been scanned by the author, I forget which book it was, and read it. Soon I scanned a few books, as did other members of that forum, and we were sharing them.

Compuserve had very strict rules about piracy, which, in those days, meant software, since there were no ebooks or music files, etc. Anyone caught posting copyrighted material (programs) was kicked off, and they monitored it pretty closely. But they didn't consider this piracy and they gave us room to share these books. I think we eventually had a couple hundred books in our little library.

Of course that was piracy by any legal definition but we didn't know it and neither did Compuserve. We were just sharing books, something avid readers usually do.

Anyway, this, and probably other similar groups, were the beginning of ebooks. Ebooks grew out of piracy. Without piracy we might have had ebooks anyway but there's no way to really know that.

That may very well be, but it could equally be argued that ebooks came out of freely-available public domain texts, cf. Project Gutenberg who were *very* active in the early ebook movement.
Ebooks were not born of pirated ebooks per se, and they doubtless would have arisen anyway, just from the efforts of Michael Hart and other public-spirited and honest individuals.

Regardless -- that benefit may come out of a bad thing is not valid grounds for reclassifying it as a good thing.

Years later when the Palm Pilot came available something like the same thing happened. I was an early Palm user and there were ebook readers for sale to use with easily downloadable books long before there were ebooks to buy. Then ebook sellers came along and soon they began talking about those other books being pirated, which, of course, they were, and the idea of piracy was born.

Barry

Okay, point???