Quote:
Originally Posted by Thasaidon
Nice point.
In fact I actually heard a shopkeeper complaining that a new shop which had opened up nearby was "'stealing' his trade and customers". I and other customers in the area did not agree with his description of the situation.
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Yes, but arguably,
that's free market competition, in a world in which, presumably, both parties are dealing from a similar--not identical--base. Each one pays rent, pays their suppliers, their employees, and they compete upon service and price. Right? It's the Tao of Capitalism
When the scanner-borrower took his actions, he borrowed (freely or cheaply) assets for which the Librarian had paid or contracted. He borrowed that asset
as a borrower, not a future competitor. He then turned around, used his own sweat equity to make copies of the books, and deploys those (illegally-made) copies
against the very business from which he "borrowed" them. He doesn't have the same set-up costs, nor the same ongoing costs, because he's now leasing digital copies. It isn't the same thing.
Everyone here is familiar with the concept of "damages" in law. If you drive drunk, or even sober, but for whatever reason, you are responsible for the demolition of someone else's car, and the physical injury to the driver, you've damaged that person.
This is probably, due to the endless arguments about copyright infringement NOT being theft, the best way to think about infringement. Sure--you didn't "steal" the physical book, no; but if you copied it sans payment, and enjoyed it, you got that without paying for it. You damaged the publisher and the author because
they were deprived of your payment therefor. And as I said previously, if you're going to smugly claim that you would
never have bought the book, fine, great--then, like everything else in the world that you can't afford, you don't get to own it or read it. Why is that hard to fathom?
If you can't afford a given object, you either save up until you can, or you just don't own it. That seems simple enough. Downloading the book for free is nothing more than having your cake and eating it, too. You don't pay for it, but you get to enjoy it anyway--whilst
damaging the people who invested the time and money to create it by not paying the relative pittance they charge for the privilege.
(I actually had one guy claim that he read "too much" to be able to afford his habit. When I asked him
why he couldn't use the library to feed his habit, of course, his response was it was too much like work to go
ALL the way to the library, check out books, etc. Natch, ripping off the authors and publishers while ranting about "stickin' it to the man" was his
much better solution. /sarcasm.)
So, fine--don't call it theft. Call it damages--but the bottom line is the same. You don't pay for something you're using, you're enjoying, and NOT paying the people who created it. Whilst a rose by any other name smells as sweet, a theft by any other name still doesn't pay the creators, and it stinks just as badly.
Hitch