I love how casually you toss off most fiction as 'poor entertainment'. Especially as so much tv programming is bastardized and mediocritized literature. I've yet to see a book that, once the tv writers get done hacking, pasting, modifying and dumbing-down, is of lower quality than the resulting script.
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Originally Posted by Mambo
I don't talk about fiction books. Most of them are pretty poor entertainment not better then soap operas in the TV. You don't have to criminalize people copying popular fiction books. Enough punishment for them is that they have wasted many hours reading them instead of earning money, taking care for their family, playing with their children.
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Hmmm... Not so sure I buy this argument either. Free access to knowledge? While I agree that people shouldn't be excluded from learning, for often the denial is arbitrary and not based upon valid reasons, there hasn't been 'free' access to knowledge for some time for the vast majority of the world. Or haven't you noticed that public schools and public libraries are taxpayer-funded? And even personal use of the internet costs the user or his/her family access fees? (Although, if one but wishes to hoist oneself out of a chair, one can always walk down to the nearest library and ask for an interlibrary loan of just about any work. So it's not as if - except in a truly repressive country - anyone is keeping others in 'mental slavery'.)
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Originally Posted by Mambo
However to prevent people from having free access at any time to scientific materials, experience and wisdom is sin. I rather break the law, but I feel we should not let anyone to keep others in mental slavery if they can not afford to buy books.
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Now here I agree 100%. For publishers to refuse to make it easy to own and use their products in ebook format and then whine that ebooks aren't a 'success' is, at best, disingenuous. And it's a stupid business practice. However, I believe that we're still in the 'innovator' stage of ebook/ebook-reader marketing and just now beginning to enter the 'early-adopter' stage. Which means, I hope, that as ebook readers become more readily available, we should see easier access to ebooks - including elimination of that pesky DRM.
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Originally Posted by Mambo
The point is however, that many people (and me too) believe and there are signs confirming these views, that DRM actually harmful to the publishers too and prevents the ebook market from growing and maturing.
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