Quote:
Originally Posted by taosaur
...which kind of makes the rest of your post superfluous, as that's precisely the situation under discussion.
A great many people actively get a thrill out of "being bad," so long as they view the wrong to be of little consequence. It's commonly called a "guilty pleasure," not "antisocial personality disorder."
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Actually, that isn't quite what the discussion is about.
While it is true that some might do it just to spite society (like Augustine with his pears; although I doubt you should become christian over it), most don't, because they just live by a different moral rule set.
The question at hand here is
1. whether that set of personal rules to live by can be justified to any degree,
2. whether it counts for anything that a large part of society seems to more or less share our rule set, thus partly negating the "it's immoral" claim,
3. whether that rule set isn't too biased towards the interest of a single group (the consumer),
3a. if we that is the case, should we follow a different, [according to some]
more legal rule set (such as the one "supplied" to us
so kindly by the recording/publishing industries) or,
3b. is there another option that centers less on the personal gain of the majority [and sod the consequences for the producers, both the author and the publisher] but also not as centered on the corporate gain of a handful (as the actual authors get little to nothing of the total sum anyway), with individual citizen's rights biting the dust entirely in favor of the latter's.
The problem that faces the publishing industry doesn't really arise from the fact that people sometimes
guiltily download an album (in our society, guilty pleasures mostly seem to be about
buying food you shouldn't rather than
stealing cds, anyway), the problem comes from something systemic:
Either someone has created an expectation that we should have (as an example) music all around us all the time, but the prices have by now become so high that nobody can afford to get everything they('ve been taught to) want anymore, or
something happened (the internet) that made it possible for friends to share their music with each other, and it all sort of spiralled out of control from there: Oink, for example, was a very vibrant site based around people introducing others to each others tastes, as is Last.FM now, but without the possibility to download. (napster lacked the recommendation part)
Furthermore, it is the case that the music (and movie/publishing) industry has been
against every technical innovation starting from the cassette recorder (which would allow them to tape radio recordings, which would "kill them"), through the VHS tape (which allowed people to tape tv shows and movies, which "would kill them"), through the CD-R and later DVD-R (which, you guessed it, would kill them; which is why we pay "copyright fees" on them, and which they even wanted to put on Hard disks and mp3 players, as they were all "likely to contain copyrighted works that hadn't been obtained legally"), and now the internet as a whole; and we started becoming sort of suspicious of their Luddite whining. (all the while still posting billion dollar profits)
Meanwhile came Sony with their rootkit-cds, which were supposed to block your established
fair use right to make mp3s out of your cds to put on your mp3 players, the DMCA happened, DRM was invented and broken, lots of attempts to sue people who usually had shared only 5 or 10 tracks with others happened, there were reports of how little artists actually got, there is the currently being developed ACTA (and the denied FOIA requests), and last but not least, Music became ever more boring, unmemorable, and fleeting: we stopped caring about the recording industry's survival, as they had lost whatever sympathy we might've felt for them for recording "our music"
And now the book industry will soon be facing the same question, and the question is whether this resentment against copyright as a whole will affect the book market specifically. While some seem to have made up their minds already when it comes to the "moral criminality" (whatever that might be) of today's youth, there are at least as many others who are just sick of DRM, as it doesn't work and only keeps the people who actually bought the things from using their purchase in the way they were used to before the digital revolution came along (seeing how you're now buying a "license" to use a book rather than a physical copy that won't stop working once you change the device you read it on).
Meanwhile, questions remain: whether downloading really does (or will) negatively affect the bottom line, whether word of mouth counts, and whether there really aren't any publishing models that make use of the internet that can work (even if perhaps not with the same 'multiples of 10 of billion' dollars revenues a year) without destroying the industry.
More fundamentally, there is the question whether corporations have a "right to survive" that is more binding or overriding than the rights we have gained and come to realize as important in the wake of two world wars, as well as the entirety of the project of the Enlightenment.
Personally, I feel that if we can justify having oil companies destroy the Niger river delta for the gain of the people living in the west, we can also justify the killing of an industry for the gain of the people living here; while that analogy is admittedly is a bit heavy-handed, it does point to the fact that very little is held "sacred" in the world, unless we sufficiently believe it to be the case, and I'd rather see a few companies suffer than the things our "free & democratic" societies are based on.
That is not to say that I want the book publishing industry gone; while I pretty much despise the recording industry, both for their lobby and for the crap they produce, I still like books, and like the fact that people are publishing them. Although I tend to read more academically published books than normal ones, and even though I don't particularly care for the crap Springer et al. pull with their continuous incremental updates to textbooks, I would like to see most of them continue to exist, and even thrive, which leads me to my conclusion:
I don't know how publishers should adapt to the 'net, but until they come up with a model that is acceptable (WRT both availability and a pricing scheme that accurately reflects the new 'printing' costs) it isn't me who forces people to go 'underground' to get the titles you offer.
Do
something.