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Originally Posted by Xenophon
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Actually, the author and publisher were paid. They got their money at the original sale of the HC -- and that's all the law says that they are entitled to. Most folks (IMHO) agree that neither author nor publisher has any claim on any part of subsequent re-sale of the HC. Law and ethics both satisfied in my opinion. As always, YMMV.
As with the previous example, the author and the publisher WERE PAID IN FULL when the original purchaser bought the HC. That's exactly why this is legal and ethical everywhere! Your analysis of the consequence is flawed.
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Good point you made!
That the author and publisher are not being paid is the first and most used argument against ebook piracy.
And that's the ethical difference between digital and analog world: you can sell the hardcopy you bought, and that's legal (*) and fair. But you can't sell the digital copy you bought. Not even if you made it from the paper copy you own in a destructive manner and manage to keep it unique.
Another example is bookcrossing: you can drop a book on a bench to be taken and you're doing nothing wrong. But, if you create a web site where ebooks can be uploaded and downloaded only once (**), you are, at the least, a pirate and a copyright infringer.
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Another topic, with its own threads in this forum, is when you said that author and publisher are paid "for that particular copy", which have completely no sense in digital: which copy do you actually refer to? The one in the server? The one created by the web app when you download it? The one in your ISP cache? The one mirrored in some remote router? The one you got in your RAM while downloading it? The one in your disk drive? The back up one? and so on....
While paper copies of a book can be precisely accounted for, it's a nonsense to try to do the same for a digital file...
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I know people who consider taping a 33rpm on a cassette and give it away an offence less serious than ripping a CD and give it away in a USB bar!
Personally I really don't know.
I've suspended my judgement on the matter, and I try to understand what's behind every opinion to make my own.
As for now, I've bought lots of books, sold or given away most of the paper copies, kept the digital ones for myself (after a DRM-stripping and format shifting process) and I feel good.
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(*) IMHO, the used book market is permitted only because it's impossible to enforce a strict prohibtion, even in a USSR-like state. In the digital world, DRM makes it possibile, and that's happening.
(**) That's hypotetical: imagine an ebook-crossing site, where the users ulpoad e-books deleting their original copy, and the server deletes every single file as soon as the first download is completed. Every book exists in a single "live" copy (misbehaving users do not exist by hypothesis). Guess what? It's not legal in my country, and I bet there are people who find it unethical...