Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
And it's also logically ridiculous to assume that someone reading for free is depriving an author of income. Should every loaned book by a friend now be considered a lost sale, theft? Every mixtape, TV show recorded, song listened to on the radio or played on your guitar is also depriving an artist of income.
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Radio stations pay for the right to broadcast music. TV stations buy the programmes that they broadcast. In both cases, the creator is being recompensed for their work. As we've discussed earlier in this thread, authors even get paid a small amount if you borrow their book from the library (and libraries are a major source of book sales in the first place).
What I don't "get" is the attitude that it is somehow "acceptable" to consume a service without paying for it merely because it's technically possible to do so. The excuse "but I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so nobody's lost anything" is morally bankrupt, IMHO. It's no different from travelling on a train without a ticket and saying that "it's OK because the train was making the journey anyway and there were empty seats".
Sorry, but I cannot and will never accept the argument that "piracy is OK if you wouldn't have bought the item". I
do accept, by the way, that it's morally (but not legally) OK to buy a book and then scan it for one's personal use, if a commercial eBook is not commercially available - in that scenario, the author is being correctly recompensed.