Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What is "tricky" about it? It is WRONG (and illegal) to download or upload material that you have no legal right to. It's a completely clear-cut issue, IMHO. It's no better than stealing.
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That's not true; stealing a physical object deprives the owner of the use of an object; so you steal a book for Borders, no one can buy it; downloading a copy deprives the author/house of a POTENTIAL sale to the downloader ONLY; you download a copy, you may or may not buy the book, but you do not affect the action of others. Also let us not forget that as a downloader you may or may not have bought the book, or that in many cases you even own a copy anyway.
It's more of a clear cut issue that you need to pay state taxes on your online tax free purchases (like the Sony Reader), and how many do that? And here you talk about real money that your state can use on feeding the poor and so on
Not that 2 wrongs do a right, but I use this example just to show that to me and most likely to tens of millions of others things are not as clear cut at least in the downloading case. Personally I think that a balance is needed, where at an individual level you buy as much as you can afford and find the rest for free whether from libraries, downloading..., while at a business level you find a business model that accommodates the inevitable unauthorized downloading.