Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The end result may be the same, but for me, yes, the origin of the material does matter.
It's the same as asking if there's any ethical difference between buying a bottle of Scotch in a supermarket, on which all the appropriate taxes have been paid, and buying the same brand at half the price from "a man in a pub", which has been smuggled from France, and on which UK taxes have not been paid. The end result is the same - you have a bottle of whisky - but one has been obtained legitimately and the other from an illicit source.
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Do you subscribe to a deontological ethical system, Harry?
Anyway, the situation you outline above is different because the consequences are different; in your case taxes remain unpaid and the public is deprived of a benefit which it is owed.
In my case, I do not owe the author anything for making an additional personal copy of a book I have legally obtained. Whether I myself make the copy or have a volunteer (say my wife or my brother or, in this case, a stranger) do it is irrelevant from an ethical view point. Why is the case different if this second party makes the copy from their own legally obtained book? Is there some mystical property present in my own personal book that is transmissible via my own labor to the copy, thereby conferring legitimacy?
I am not going to buy an ebook version of a work that I have already purchased in paper format. A decision to download a scan made by someone else as opposed to making one with my own scanner does not result in differing consequences for any of the parties involved. From a consequentialist (or utilitarian) conception of ethics, the action is ethically neutral.
Luqman