Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Anyone out there who pays $7.00 to download a copy from the original site is just being foolish when it is available for free at this site. If say 1,000 people download the e-book from darkwiiiingduckbooks.com the author has no legitimate cause for complaint as that $7,000 was only ever potential income.
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There's a difference between "no legitimate complaint" and "those downloads are theft."
Insisting that they are only potential income is accurate. Nobody (or not many people) is/are claiming that the author isn't hurt by the loss of potential income--only that it's *not theft* the way that hacking into his bank account would be.
He hasn't lost money he had. He hasn't lost ebooks he owned. He hasn't had anything taken away from him, other than possibilities.
And acknowledging the probable value of those possibilities doesn't require renaming them to "theft." If removing the possibility of a sale is theft, so are used books, bad reviews, and failure to list a book on the front page of an advertisement.
I keep hearing, "but used books can only be read by one person at a time! And they eventually fall apart, so they can't get unlimited use!" ... except that our legal definition of "theft" has nothing to do with obsolescence; it's not less theftful to steal a pack of napkins that can only be used once than to steal a washcloth that can work for years.
If the moral issue is "this use prevents the author from getting paid," there are dozens of legal uses that do that. What makes them "not theft?" (I'd offer, "the fact that they're legal," except that copyright infringement isn't legally *theft* any more than these other acts are. And a scathing review could potentially be libelous, and therefore illegal, without being "theft.")
Those who believe massive unauthorized downloads are a big problem for ebook publishing (I'm undecided, myself, but agree with at least the potential) will need to find ways to convince people who disagree with them, not ways to verify to themselves how much wrongness they think is involved.
They can try to just push through stricter legislation without convincing the people current torrenting & using file transfer sites. They can't succeed without crippling substantial legitimate uses of the internet. (It's possible they can't succeed at all; "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." All attempts to block info-exchange online, of any sort, have met with often-stunning levels of non-success.)
In order to enforce easily-breakable laws, you need to convince the general public that they *should* be followed. And the concept that "make a copy" means "stealing" is just not going to fly: stealing means there's *less* to go around, not more.
To encourage legal behavior, make it easier & more convenient than illegal behavior. Rants about how wrong the illegal behavior is, are irrelevant to that goal. Most people don't follow laws because they'd feel guilty for breaking them; they follow laws because they're convinced that the laws are useful and good.
A lot of people are not convinced that modern copyright laws and the DMCA are helpful to society as a whole, rather than the interests of mega-corporations and their affiliates.