[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

It's partially a semantic argument, but only because words have meanings, and those meanings have implications.

In the case of BitTorrent (and Pirate Bay, specifically), there's nothing being put in a shared space. The file resides on the seeder's hard drive, and it's copied, bit for bit, to the recipients' hard drives. It's not being shared. It's being copied.

Indeed, words have meaning and meanings have implications. To claim, as you do, that sharing music is not sharing because it involves copying the bits of files is silly at best and disingenuous at worst. The meaning of sharing is to make something that you have available to someone else. It does not imply that by sharing you must reduce the availabilty of the resource to yourself. In fact, the vast majority of things that people share have the property that sharing does not reduce their availabilty to the sharer. Some examples: Ideas, gossip, information of all kinds, stories, music, software.

So TPB and other content sharing methods are just that, content sharing methods.

2) In regards to "damaging the market", there's nothing to "prove". Every time a person downloads a book that is under copyright and is being sold, that's another sale the author and publisher don't get. You can't even make the argument, like you can for music, that people can try a part and buy the rest if they like it, because ebooks are continuous works. (And in fact, selling by the chapter is the method that Stephen King tried for "The Plant").

Not it's not, in fact it is at best a fraction of a sale and indeed may even be negative. That is obvious, if you need me to spell out the reasons why, just ask.

3) Publishers have learned from the music industry. That's why you see them protecting their intellectual property now, before it's too late.

DRM doesn't protect intellectual property. It doesn't even pretend to protect intellectual property. The only thing it protects against is casual copying. There are however people that pretend it protects intellectual property, in order to score debating points. The two should not be confused.