Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The end result may be the same, but for me, yes, the origin of the material does matter.
It's the same as asking if there's any ethical difference between buying a bottle of Scotch in a supermarket, on which all the appropriate taxes have been paid, and buying the same brand at half the price from "a man in a pub", which has been smuggled from France, and on which UK taxes have not been paid. The end result is the same - you have a bottle of whisky - but one has been obtained legitimately and the other from an illicit source.
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This doesn't seem the same to me as the case where you have a copy of the pbook and download a scanned copy. In the case of the dodgy booze (was that a Sherlock Holmes case?), you've not bought the content legitimately before, whereas with the book, you have.
It seems to me to be analagous to the case where you have a record on vinyl and download a copy of the mp3.
I acknowledge that scanning a book yourself and snarfing a copy off the 'tubes are different, but it seems to me that they're more alike than snarfing and dodgy-booze-buying.
OTOH, it does smell of hypocrisy to say that uploading is bad while downloading is perfectly fine. Is it wrong to download something whose uploading you feel is wrong? It seems to me that it probably is, so I would agree with you that the source matters - while disagreeing with your analogy.