Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Talking about how you scanned and converted your own physical copies of books to ebooks for your own personal use is perfectly acceptable. Always has been. It's talking about how you (rhet.) shared them online with friends that's taboo.
Personal scanning and converting may have been the "real history" of ebooks, but sharing copyrighted books online was the real history of ebook piracy. That it may have felt like a labor of love to you (rhet.) is immaterial to that fact. The golden - "Before We Were Called Pirates" - age of online ebook-sharing that some like to harken back to with a sense of nostalgia is a myth. You (rhet.) were always pirates if you made them available on (or downloaded them from) whatever they called your corner of the internet back in your glory years.
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That's not a myth at all. Compuserve had very strict rules against piracy which they enforced strenuously and they also provided space for sharing of scanned books. I was there. I saw it. It was real. In fact this was in the HP forum (owned by HP) which also did not allow piracy but encouraged sharing books.
In the early days of the Palm Pilot there were no commercial ways to get books so people scanned and shared and, I suspect, their popularity gave publishers the idea that there might be a real market there.
What about the monks who, for generations, copied the bible? Were they pirates? Is their guilt lessened by the fact that there were no copyright laws? I'm not sure the first ebook scanners were breaking any laws either.
This is how ebooks began. Ignoring history, pretending it didn't happen, isn't a morally superior position.
I am not advocating piracy. I buy my books and have since they've been available to buy. I think we shouldn't advocate piracy in forums like this or anywhere else. I just don't think we're right to pretend the past didn't happen. There was a Holocaust.
Barry