Quote:
Originally Posted by netseeker
I disagree. If they know that downloading the free ebook might be illegal and the eBook is offered in a shop legally for a fair price, then most of the people would buy it. Imho most people don't want do illegal things.
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I think that most people don't want to do illegal things, but I also think that most people are not that sophisticated about the legal issues involved. Not only did some people just plain not
know that things like Napster were illegal when they started, but they also made rationalizations like, "Well, if I like the CD, then I'll buy it, so I'm actually helping the artist." (Of course, the user rarely followed up with buying the CD in such cases, partially because the quality of the MP3 they downloaded wasn't appreciably different from the sound a CD would make coming out of a crappy stereo system at home or a car stereo.)
I think what
does encourage people to do things legally is quality control. I have compared several Gutenberg texts to the equivalent texts on Amazon's site, and in most cases, the $1.99 versions of the books far surpass the free versions on Gutenberg, or the $0.99 versions of the Gutenberg texts on Amazon. That's the kind of value people get from professionally-produced media, as opposed to the pirated stuff. (Not that the Gutenberg e-texts are "pirated", of course, since they are out of copyright, but I think the analogy still holds, in terms of the value added.)