Quote:
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Originally Posted by Eric Flint
It is absolute nonsense to claim that "pirating" an electronic text means that you got it for "free." Uh, no, you didn't. You may have saved some money—but you did it at the expense of spending time and labor to circumvent the legal process. Your time and labor—not the victim's.
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This statement (which I don't see as related to the rest of the text) works only if the buying the text legally requires significantly less time and effort than downloading a pirated copy. I don't see that.
Legal case: You go to some web site, you search for an author or title. If the worj you want is available in legal ebook form, you click on the one you want, you fill in name and credit card info, you download it. A couple of minutes.
Other case: You go to a torrent or usenet search site, you enter some search terms, you get an nzb or torrent file. You feed that into a download program, you download the result. If the file was posted to a newsgroup within the last few months, it downloads in a minute. A torrent will generally take longer.
In both cases effort is minimal, and time is often about the same. Selection differs, as does cost, but it's not like going the p2p route is significantly more difficult.
The rest of the text makes sense, but this bit doesn't seem to.