Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Here we go again.... It IS stealing. It IS theft in an ethical and moral sense. If you insist on only allowing legal definitions you are simply avoiding the truth and attempting to justify the theft.
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In the last 3-4 months when people have asked me about my electronic book reader I've asked them questions on where they get their books today and how many they buy a year. I've been shocked at how few people admit to buying books.
- I get my books from the library
- I borrow most of my books from friends
- I use share libraries at the gym, work etc... take one drop one off
- I'm in a book sharing club with 40 people. We each buy a book and share them within the group
- I don't take books on vacation. I just grab books from the free libraries at the resorts where people leave books they don't want to take home.
This is ignoring the people that buy most of their books from used book stores.
These people are all taking something and consuming it without compensating the creator of the work. You can define it as stealing if you want and call them thieves or whatever label you want. The only moral or ethical difference I see between someone downloading an ebook and what these people are doing is copyright violation. Not theft.
I personally think of them as parasites rather then thieves but that's just another useless label. The larger parasites are the publishers and agents but that's another story.
We're all parasites at some point in our life.