[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Alisa

The moral difference to me is that I feel the authors and publishers are entitled to set terms for making their work available just as I set the terms for mine.

They are entitled to avail themselves of the particular advantages granted to them under copyright law. But those advantages were conveyed with the understanding that what they produced is being made available to the rest of us. And remember, what we are talking about here is the morality of copying their books, not the legality.

In evaluating the morality of the copying, you have to take into account the morality of the withholding.

What publishers are doing is saying that they are going to prevent their books from going into the digital environment, even though that environment is at this point on the verge of being dominant. Whole generations of people have been raised in the digital environment, and these publishers are saying "tough, we aren't letting our product into that environment."

I say that they are reneging on the deal, and that if they don't make a digital form of their book available, they have no standing to complain about people doing it for them

This scarcity doesn't exist with the digital media. It's easy to instantaneously get my own copy of the book with little disincentive aside from my own feeling of violating the social contract by doing so.

This is an important point, both from a moral perspective and an economic one.

But the answer cannot be that some books don't become digital media until 70 years or even 70 months have passed.

Granted, I would not feel so badly about downloading a book I couldn't purchase in any format but that hasn't come up for me yet. I've always been able to at least find a used paper copy.

I think that a publisher has an obligation to publish, and to do it in a way that makes the book available to the general public. Were it not for the recalcitrance of publishers and their equivalents in other genres of creative work (I'm looking at you, music industry) we would be much further along the way to achieving the objectives of establishing copyright protection in the first place.

So my moral reaction is this: if a book is going to be made available to everyone in digital format, then everyone should be expected to acquire the book from the publisher. But if the publisher is going to hold back digital publication, it does so at the risk that someone else will make the product available in digital form.