Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Could you explain why it is morally corrupt. Are you using a consequence ethics as a model? Or what theory are you using as a foundation to come to the conclusion that it is morally corrupt and how did you arrive at that conclusion?
Your examples are not equivalent since the cause problems less enjoyment for paying customers.
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It's often considered immoral for one person to do something that would be problematic if everyone did it.
If *everyone* torrented ebooks instead of buying them (or if only one person purchased the book, and all other readers got free copies), obviously, that's bad for the author & the support staff that made the book possible to distribute.
The issue of, "is it moral to get something for free, that other people are required to pay for," is hard to separate from the other issue of "how will the author get paid enough to keep producing books?" If enough people buy it, the author will get paid enough. While the evidence supports the claim that enough people *will* buy it, if it's made cheap & convenient enough, that has nothing to do with the morality of acquiring a free version of what other people expect to pay for.
Obviously, some free versions are moral. The author's friends & family might get free ebooks. The publisher might release countless copies free for download for a few weeks. And nobody questions the morality of acquiring the Baen CD ebooks for free, even though Baen offers those for sale on their site, and many people pay for them.
The issue is, how immoral is it to get a free copy w/o consent of the copyright owner? That usually gets very tangled in the financial discussions.
I'm in the chaos-theory camp that believes that a certain amount of inefficiency and rules-breakage is necessary to any economic & social system; the only way to guarantee *no* unauthorized free copies is total draconian control of people's reading habits, and that's a cure worse than the disease. That doesn't make the free copies "moral" as much as "philosophically necessary," which is an entirely different direction of argument.