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Great post. I freely confess that I am strictly an amateur when it comes to publishing. And I am only human and therefore extremely fallible. I claim no mortgage on the truth.
So far as the law is concerned it is easy to lose sight that there are enormous differences between tangible and intangible property. Trying to draft copyright laws in a manner that pretends that they are would in my opinion simply produce a mess. As for moral equivalence? I tend to think not. I won't go further with this in this post. Certainly pirating intellectual property is still morally wrong in the vast majority of incidents, though I think usually to a lesser degree. Sometimes to a much greater degree. Large scale commercial piracy is I think much worse than an individual obtaining a pirate copy for their own use, though once again the latter is still morally wrong, at least in the vast majority of cases.
Believe it or not I only subscribe to the evil publisher meme so far as the Big 5 and some of the less scrupulous smaller houses. In the case of the Big 5 I base this largely on their contractual terms and their behaviour as reported. My attitude comes from personal experience growing up in Australia. I was a prolific reader and we were treated very poorly. Many books were not released until long after publication, or sometimes not at all. Prices were so high that when Amazon started operating I was able to purchase and import usually superior US editions, pay the postage and all charges and still come out significantly cheaper. I remember first doing this with an Alice Sheldon biography and some Science Fiction novels. Well before ebooks became prominent and widely available. Another reason I adore ebooks. But imagine what reading Joe Konrath's blog and KKR and the like did to my already jaundiced view of the Big 5. And of course many of the contractual terms in Big 5 contracts are in my view simply unconscionable so far as authors are concerned. Having said that, publishing is not, nor should it be, a charity. Publishers are businesses who are entitled to make a profit. However, I think the Big 5 realise that they would get scant public sympathy, and for this they have only themselves to blame.
Your comments on authors temperaments and attitudes and the merits of their books is about what I would have expected. Bringing a self-published work to market is very easy and cheap, but producing a professional quality work is not. The better self-published authors, and there are more and more of them as time goes by, are themselves paying for the necessary services, which are affordable to most, at least in the 1st world. And of course they are keeping control of their rights.
As for rationalisations, I think there is an element of the person deluding themselves, the need for the rationalisation indicating that they are aware on some level that what they are doing is wrong. This being the case, those who have a genuine belief that they, for instance, are acting for the greater good are not guilty of rationalising. Without this subjective element, consciousness of guilt on some level, I think a person may be mistaken but is not rationalising. Hypocrisy, of course, may well be involved.
If you get the chance have a look at the Elsevier situation with scientific journals.
One final point. It is easy to see how much our respective views have been influenced by our own experiences. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
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