Originally Posted by Tuna
Ah, yes of course, you're not a freeloader, you're sticking it to the man!
You used the 'theft causes deprivation' definition. Well, let's see - you could have bought a book. The money you spent supports the publisher, editor, proof reader, typesetter, cover artist, distributor and of course the author. You might object to the distribution of your money, but it remains a fact that all of these people played a part in getting the book to you.
Instead you chose to steal a book. To take it without paying. Your defence is that you wouldn't be buying that book anyway because of the regional restrictions. So by your logic, no-one has lost any money. Except you could have bought another book to read - a physical copy of the book you wanted, or another book on your 'to-read' list. So, someone has lost out, because you've chosen to take your entertainment for free. You've also done your best to support the mechanism by which you stole the book - so others reading this very public forum are more likely to choose not to pay either.
Most of the people who work to bring you a physical book also work to bring you an electronic book. The author, editor, proof reader, cover artist, publisher and so on all contribute to create that work. In the physical case, they can afford to do that because they can spread the cost of doing so between x-thousand books. The fact that it's physical makes it seem more 'natural' to pay for it.
When a book is sold electronically, there is still the need to spread the cost of it's production. The ones and zeros may cost nothing to reproduce, but their arrangement into something you want to read does. So it does actually make a lot of sense to spread that cost between the people who read the electronic copy. How can you claim that, just because the delivery mechanism is free, the costs of production magically vanish?
You suggest that expecting to pay and the concept of theft are old fashioned ideas. I suggest that you're being old fashioned by thinking that something has to be physical to have value or cost.
I've also come across the fallacy that just because a book can be reproduced ad-infinitum electronically, the value of a copy is vanishingly small anyway. The problem here is that just because you can reproduce it endlessly doesn't mean it's read endlessly - the audience doesn't necessarily grow (in fact, the audience for electronic books can be depressingly small). So again, we come up against the need to distribute the cost across a given audience for a book.
I agree entirely that regional restrictions are ridiculous, and fully support the right of people to shop elsewhere. The laws that built up to protect our rights in the physical world do get rather twisted in the virtual world. The history of world trade is complex and explains a lot of the oddities we see exposed by the internet. However, the spirit of the law still applies - if someone works to entertain you, they can choose to do so on the condition or expectation that you pay them. If their conditions upset you, shop elsewhere. It's still no excuse to steal.
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