Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
Sorry but this is not an appropriate comparison. If you steal a paperback book from me then I no longer have it. However if you make an illegal ecopy of my book, I still have my ebook.
|
That is true... But what I am trying to focus in on is the acceptance of stolen goods, not the identity of the victim.
Suppose you set up a little printing press in your basement and churned out a few hundred copies of the paperback and just started giving them away. Clearly, you would be doing something illegal and immoral. How about the people who take them from you? Do we think that if the books are given out free, we are morally on solid ground to take them? I rather doubt it. We are complicit in ripping off the publisher and author. And owning the hardcover version already doesn't seem to change anything. So, with respect to ebooks, it doesn't seem to me that the lack of physical media turns the ethics inside out.
I'm mostly throwing out strawman arguments here because, frankly, I think all of this is pretty murky.