Quote:
Originally Posted by calvin-c
Good article. I definitely agree with 'pirate' that the 'loss due to piracy' figures are inflated, but believe that there is some loss (with exceptions such as out of print books). So, the question implied but not really discussed is, how much does a person have to lose before it's considered theft? (In the US there's generally a distinction between petty theft & grand larceny. IMO downloading a pirated ebook would definitely be petty theft-but the piracy itself, i.e. uploading a book to make it available for others to download, could well be grand larceny.)
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Sure, there may be a loss because a number of people who download a book would have otherwise bought it. But on the other hand, there is a gain because some of the people who download it end up buying it (or be the cause for one or more sale), which wouldn't have happened if they hadn't downloaded said book.
If you work from the assumption that the first is true, you then must accept the second is as well. As of now, no serious study has been done as to the impact of either in the book market. There are a few indicators that would tend to show the second is at least
somewhat stronger, among which the Baen free library that is mentioned in the article.