Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat Abe
It doesn't matter what the ethics of the matter happen to be. There is case law that allows a copyright holder or his representative to sue the owner of a hard copy of a work, if he/she also downloads a digital copy of the same work from a pirate site.
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Except that the querant was not
asking what the case law happens to be, he was asking what the
ethics happen to be. From that point of view, it does matter, since the ethicist answered the question he was asked.
I’ve taken a look at this issue on the TeleRead blog:
http://www.teleread.org/2010/04/06/p...y-of-scanning/
In short, courts have found that consumers do have the legal right to “space-shift” media they own into other forms for reading elsewhere (except if it’s protected by DRM, thanks to the DMCA).
As you point out, they do draw a legal distinction between consumers doing the work of space-shifting themselves (i.e. putting a CD into the computer to rip; running a book through a scanner, OCR’ing, and proofing it) and letting someone else do it for them (downloading the music or e-book from peer-to-peer).
What Cohen was addressing was whether there should be an
ethical distinction between the two acts as well.
I think that publishers have gotten used to there being an “analog barrier” between printed books and e-books—they get to sell the same book twice, in paper and electronically, because the time it would take to scan and OCR is worth more to the consumer than the money that the e-book costs.
But as scanning and OCRing technology improves, there may come a time when that is no longer true, and the publishing industry may find itself in the same place the music industry did after space-shifting legalized CD ripping.
Of course, out of that court decision came the iPod and the entire digital music economy…