Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm afraid I honestly don't see anything ridiculous about either situation. Someone who illegally downloads copyrighted material is infringing copyright law ("thief" is the wrong word to use); someone who doesn't pay their use tax is a tax cheat. Neither should be condoned, IMHO.
What would you suggest as a solution to the problem (of illegal downloads, that is - we'll leave sorting out the tax problem for another day!)?
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Cheap or free with print book purchase e-books in open format; national digital libraries; licensing of content; coop projects that allow e-authors to sell directly or at least through retailers that do not take 50% of the cover price so allow lower prices, ad campaigns and so on (taking 50% of cover price for selling e-books is way out of bounds)
Similar stuff for music, movies...
There is a popular author/blogger who just recently described his experience of buying a WB dvd and getting a free portable version of the movie included for which he commended WB, though noting that anyway he needed the portable version so he would have headed for Pirate Bay if WB would not give him the portable version, being too busy to do the format shifting on his own...
Once you have affordable and easily accesible content many people at least here in the western world will limit their unauthorized downloads. Sure there will be downloaders, but most I believe would be people who would otherwise could not afford to buy the product.
For many years before I even knew what an e-book is and today for that matter, I still read tons of books for free by the simple expedient of getting them from the library, the difference being that for many years I could not afford to buy books so almost all my reading was done that way, today I can afford so I buy lots and lots of books, print, e, whatever, but I still use the library massively too...Once you have a similar system going for e-books I strongly believe that people will limit their unauthorized downloads a lot...