Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Kajti

pilotbob — I bet you feel differently about people coming into your house and taking your stuff.

If you wish to equate physical and nonphysical things, no one can prevent you. Many people have been known to find a difference between an act where something tangible is taken from a person, and one where copying means otherwise.

See there's the basis of your flawed thinking right there. Just because an eBook is easy to copy and doesn't seem "physical" to you means it isn't tangable property. Yet, those bits (1 and 0) arranged the way they were took effort, they were produced, just as the chair your sitting in was. They both have inherent value. Until you see that you will obviously continue to steal eBooks with a false justification.

I would assume that you also don't feel like you need to buy software since you can obtain it and it isn't tangble?

Ok, as far as burning in hell, that is between you and your "god" but at the least I think an admitted theif should be banned from mobileread.

BOb

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by tompe

For example if you think an utilitaristic moral system is the most reasonable then it might be optimal if a certain percentage people download books from darknet and then talks enthusiastically about the book to their friends who buy them since this could increase the total utility.

Next, you'll be asking for commissions...

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by tompe

Modify the example to borrow a book from a friend then so my point is kept. And the point was that things that on the surface sounds reasonable often is not correct when analyzed.

For example if you think an utilitaristic moral system is the most reasonable then it might be optimal if a certain percentage people download books from darknet and then talks enthusiastically about the book to their friends who buy them since this could increase the total utility.

But why wouldn't the ethusiastic evangelical downloader just give the files to their friends?

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

Those of you who, rightly, would never download a pirated book, ask yourselves what you're doing when you "View cached copy" on a Google search results page.

That one's easy. I work around crappy web design, site navigation, or file format decisions which make it unnecessarily hard for me to access the publicly available content I want to read. In other words, I use it for exactly the same things that people try to achieve when they remove the DRM from their e-books and/or format shift them to something more usable. I also avail myself of the color coding Google inserts for my search terms, which makes sifting through large documents much easier.

In other words, yes, they do add something of value when they cache other people's publicly available content on their servers.

[HarryT]

Sorry, I'm not sure I see the issue. Lots of companies and ISPs have "proxy" web servers which also cache content to reduce web traffic. Are these illegal too?

[tompe]

Originally Posted by bwaldron

But why wouldn't the ethusiastic evangelical downloader just give the files to their friends?

Because the friends prefer error free books or maybe books in paper format. I think that is the situation know. What will happen in 30 years is hard to predict.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

See there's the basis of your flawed thinking right there. Just because an eBook is easy to copy and doesn't seem "physical" to you means it isn't tangable property. Yet, those bits (1 and 0) arranged the way they were took effort, they were produced, just as the chair your sitting in was. They both have inherent value. Until you see that you will obviously continue to steal eBooks with a false justification.

Read for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

and realize that there are many ways to look at things. It is your thinking that is flawed if you believe your way to look at things is the only possible.

Ok, as far as burning in hell, that is between you and your "god" but at the least I think an admitted theif should be banned from mobileread.

Then you would ban a lot of people.

[sianon]

Originally Posted by tompe

I think you are right about this. And I guess that a lot of people here that do not download books illegally downloads TV series illegally since it seems to be extremely common to download current series that has not been broadcast were people live.

There is an interesting case running here in Melbourne (Australia) where the Supreme Court has ruled that a series made by a TV station cannot be shown in Victoria. This series is being shown in every other state. The issues with it being shown in Victoria is that the series may influence a jury in any trial in regard to Melbourne's notorious series of gangland murders. This series is widely available on DVD and many in Victoria have in fact seen it. This raises issues not just in regard to the copyright violations inherent in the series being available. It is also in direct violation of a Court Order which rightly or wrongly has stated that this series should not be shown. The decision in it's own right raises the question as to whether the court should be able to adopt the role of a censor as to what is broadcast.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Ok, as far as burning in hell, that is between you and your "god" but at the least I think an admitted theif should be banned from mobileread.

BOb

that seems a bit excessive don't you think ? what happened to freedom of expression ? you don't have to agree with everyone but they are not causing you any harm by the simple fact of having a different opinion than you, so how do you justify making the jump to that sort of totalitarian censorship ?

you know, if everyone thought exactly the same on this forum, that would be incredibly boring.

[HarryT]

There was a similar case here in the UK last year, where a court blocked the transmission of an "investigative reporting" type documentation about a series of gangland murders in Glasgow, because one of the men whose activities were "exposed" in the TV programme was about to go on trial, and the court ruled that there was a justfyable concern that the jury could be influenced by seeing the TV show.

This kind of thing seems reasonable to me; in cases where someone is about to go on trial, there strict rules governing newspaper reporting of the case, too.

[sianon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There was a similar case here in the UK last year, where a court blocked the transmission of an "investigative reporting" type documentation about a series of gangland murders in Glasgow, because one of the men whose activities were "exposed" in the TV programme was about to go on trial, and the court ruled that there was a justfyable concern that the jury could be influenced by seeing the TV show.
This kind of thing seems reasonable to me; in cases where someone is about to go on trial, there strict rules governing newspaper reporting of the case, too.

I can understand that kind of ruling and there have been a number of such rulings here which I would not dispute. In fact there was an issue I was involved with only last week where the department I work for suppressed media coverage of an incident. However this series is a drama series based loosely on the events. I am not convinced of the basis for banning the series. Having said that, this is not a series I would choose to view. It does raise issues however. Then again, I guess the whole issue of suppressing information and it's morality depends on which point of view you are kooking thorough. The media would have considered the matter I was dealing with to be of public interest, yet form our point of view there were issues of privacy for those involved.

Karen

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

[on the subject of banning "admitted theives" from mobileread]
that seems a bit excessive don't you think ? what happened to freedom of expression ? you don't have to agree with everyone but they are not causing you any harm by the simple fact of having a different opinion than you, so how do you justify making the jump to that sort of totalitarian censorship ?

you know, if everyone thought exactly the same on this forum, that would be incredibly boring.

What she said. If folks like Kajti went away, we'd never get to see how other folks think. That's valuable even when -- or maybe especially when -- I disagree with them.

That won't stop me from doing a certain (hopefully tasteful) amount of -ing and -ing, though.

Xenophon

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by tompe

Read for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

and realize that there are many ways to look at things. It is your thinking that is flawed if you believe your way to look at things is the only possible.

There are indeed lots of ways to view things. I tend towards the rather utilitarian view expressed in the U.S. Constitution: The reason for granting temporary monopolies is to give producers incentive to produce more and better intellectual output. But never lose track of the idea that the end goal is to enrich the public domain, for the benefit of all.

In the context of eBooks, I want happy (or at least, artistically productive) authors, producing more books, better books... "More MORE I'm STILL not satisfied..." (with apologies to Tom Lehrer)

Xenophon

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

There are valid reasons for wanting to have a site, and not wanting to have portions of that site monetized and served up out of a 3rd party's server.

Certainly. But I think the majority of people who post content don't object to their content being indexed, so it makes more sense for those who do object to use robots.txt.

I may be mistaken about this, but I think "pay for search" services were tried, back in the day, and failed. Most people are not willing to pay to search content. I know I'm not. And many people can't afford, or are unwilling, to pay for indexing. I don't like advertising, but I don't see another likely alternative.

Originally Posted by Kajti

I'm cheap, lazy, arrogant. I read some old classic or public domain stuff, some new Creative Commons stuff, but mostly OCR'd copywronged novels I download. Mostly science fiction, with some nonfiction, mystery, and fantasy as leavening. But if merely acknowledging the elephant in the room makes people uncomfortable, I'll let this nym die, and if I post again, it will be as a nicely-censored persona that says all the acceptable things, no matter how far from reality....

It is not the acknowledgment of the elephant in the room that is at issue. Bragging about how you feed the elephant does rub many people the wrong way.

Originally Posted by tompe

Modify the example to borrow a book from a friend then so my point is kept. And the point was that things that on the surface sounds reasonable often is not correct when analyzed.

For example if you think an utilitaristic moral system is the most reasonable then it might be optimal if a certain percentage people download books from darknet and then talks enthusiastically about the book to their friends who buy them since this could increase the total utility.

When you borrow a book from a friend, the friend has paid for the book. Quite possibly you are also paying for books and loaning them to your friend, as well, or providing some other compensatory value to your friend as part of your friendship. If I recall correctly, publishers estimate that each physical book gets read by 4-10 people. Presumably they take that into account in the price of the book and the compensation to the author, even if only tacitly. The problem with downloads is that circulation is several orders of magnitude higher than paper circulation is ever likely to be. This completely unbalances the model.

Saying "if something is worth reading, it's worth paying for" is an oversimplification, but I still think it is more true than not.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Saying "if something is worth reading, it's worth paying for" is an oversimplification, but I still think it is more true than not.

I am kind of oversensitive about oversimplifications