Quote:
Originally Posted by Billjr13
Uh, illegal copying is umm - ILLEGAL. If it were legal it wouldn't be Illegal copying. Some people are happy and willing to ignore rules/laws in society and some are not. It is just how some people are willing to justify doing something that has been deemed wrong by sociatal rules that bugs me. I'm not taking something that doesn't belong to me.
Just because you don't like a rule/law doesn't mean you can ignore it, and if you do and you get caught/punished you are getting what you deserve.
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You are not the first person to say that. But the problem is, you haven't really said anything, because nobody really agrees on what is meant when someone makes a comment about "illegal copying," other than that it means "copying that is illegal." The reason is that a lot of people think that any copying at all is illegal, while others know that some copying is actually legal, but disagree about exactly what copying that might be.
Even the survey starting this thread builds this ambiguity into it. For example:
"It's OK to copy a book if I own it in print (I own a paid-up copy)"
Well yeah, it is okay, mainly because it is not illegal to make such a copy. And yet, the question is prefaced by a framing phrase that assumes that this kind of copying actually IS illegal. Nope. It ain't, so long as you, the owner of the book, are copying it for your own use.
I'm not entirely sure whether the survey was trying to find out how much tolerance there is for truly illegal copying, or trying to find out how well the law "fits" the community reality about what or what not ought to be illegal copying. Or something else.
I suppose what might be helpful, in any event, for any survey thread like this one is to require each person who posts any comment to include his or her own personal response to the survey. Here's mine (all references to "legal" or "illegal" are to US law, and I assume that the book is still in copyright in the US):
It's OK to copy a book if I bought it new in print (I've paid the author)
It's OK to copy a book if I own it in print (I own a paid-up copy)
It's OK to copy a book that is not published electronically (I can't buy it)
It's OK to copy a book that is not published in my country (I can't buy it here)
The first two are easy - they are legal copying. And if I've paid an author once for the book, I don't think that there's any moral right he has to require me to pay again.
The third is kind of tough, because it assumes that I can buy the pbook. I guess that for me it comes down to simple economic force: publishers should make ebook versions of pbooks available. If they do, I'll buy them. If they don't, I won't be forced into buying the pbook, nor will I let the publisher bar me from reading an electronic version. I think that, given modern technology, the moral shoe is not on my foot - it is on the publisher's.
The fourth seems to assume that the book is not available for sale electronically. So see the third item. If it's available electronically, I buy it. If if's not "for sale" in my country, I buy it anyway - my country does not have the right to tell me what books I can own based on where they are published. Or based on too much else...