The loss of money due to electronic downloads is BS. The people that go and download a book on IRC or a torrent weren’t going to buy the book anyways in most cases. They are the ones that checked books out from the library or bought them at yard sales for a quarter anyways. OR in some cases they download a bunch of books they read through them and then they go buy the ones they like. Ones they would have NEVER bought before because they had never heard of the author.

“Pirated” books tend to serve the EXACT same purpose as books publishers give away at conventions, they are advertising to promote interest in a book. Except they don’t have the printing and distributation costs that the printed giveaways did.

If publishers don’t want book pirated then they have to get the price down and make them available for sale worldwide.

When cars got popular, the people in the horse and buggy industries HAD to adapt or go under. Same thing now. Adapt or die.

Stealing vs. Copying

I should think the difference between the two would be obvious. Someone attempted to compare file-sharing electronic content to stealing a golden bowl, which is a flawed analogy. A bowl is a physical object that only one person can possess at a time. A file is a non-physical object that many people can possess at one time. The comparison is untenable. The only way to make the analogy fit is to posit the existence of molecular replicators a la Star Trek.

To steal means to deprive someone of his property. When you copy electronic content, you are not depriving anyone of his property.

Some will object that money is property, and when you copy electronic content, you are depriving someone of his money, thus, his property. But that’s not at all clear. Where is this supposed money? If you were broke before you copied content, does money suddenly appear in your wallet? If you had money to start, does copying the content suddenly transfer ownership of that money? How much? The price of an ebook, a paperback, a hardcover? (Does it depend on which one you would have bought if you had bought it? We’re getting into quantum physics now.)

Piracy vs. Copyright Infringement

Concerning intellectual property, piracy is the selling of copyrighted content (without permission). Not sharing it for free. Most people here are conflating the two.

Illegal vs. Criminal

Violating a law is not the same as commiting a crime. This is for the person who seemed to think that the government (which government?) should be doing something to “fight piracy.” First, if you’re conflating piracy with copyright infringement, there’s your problem. Copyright infringement is not itself a crime. Second, as many have pointed out, piracy is not really an issue in places where the content is available legally. It’s only where the content is not available legally that piracy is rampant, and in those cases, the government doesn’t really have a vested interest in protecting foreign copyrights.

Legal vs. Ethical

It should go without saying that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it is ethical (e.g. slavery) and that just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it is unethical (e.g. gay marriage). It is sad to see that for some, the two are one and the same.

I am not going to argue that an author does not have the right to compensation for his labors. What I am going to argue is that there is no (ethical) justification for artificial scarcity in the face of infinite reproducibility. If you had a replicator that could produce an infinite supply of apples – enough for anyone who wanted one – but you only gave apples away to the people who paid some arbitrary amount for them, you would be a monster. Plain and simple. To deny someone a good that it costs absolutely nothing to give is surely monstrous and inhumane. (One might even say un-Christian, for those bemoaning the state of Christianity in modern America.)

We can quibble about details, but I rather think they’re irrelevant. Keep in mind that the replicator is analogous to the technology that enables content reproduction, not the content itself. Thus, in this example, the apple is analogous to the content. (With so many companies patenting seed strains nowadays, the example is strikingly apt.) So, does the creator of the apple deserve compensation for all the time and labor and resources that went into designing it? Sure. Does the creator have the right to arbitrarily deny apples to those he considers undeserving? No. Even if there are some, surely the determining factor as to their status as human beings deserving of apples isn’t the size of their disposable income.

To sum up, it isn’t really a question of whether authors/creators/inventors deserve compensation. They do. However, there are competing ethical considerations which trump the matter of compensation.

My personal opinion is that information and culture should be free to everyone because they are inextricably tied to education and, consequently, quality of life.

As a final note, I was amused to see the comparison of file-sharing to prostitution. Did you know that around 1900 reproducing sheet music was equated to slavery? I can only imagine what they would have thought of mix tapes.

Where I live (New Zealand), prostitution is legal, and they advertise in the entertainment section of the local newspaper, right beside the Dilbert and Garfield cartoons.

Whether or not something is legal does not change the moral connotations. As a Christian, I believe that prostitution is wrong for both the prostitute and the customer.

Piracy is also wrong. It is stealing. Whether it is legal or illegal, it is still theft, and still against God’s law.

However, I see piracy as quite different to a library where the book has been paid for, and where the author could (in theory at least) refuse to allow copies to be loaned (in the same way as many DVDs carry a warning that they are for home use only).

I was watching an American Football game a couple of nights ago, and there was a warning at the beginning to say that it could not be copied redistributed in any physical or electronic manner. So if you have watched Football highlights on YouTube, you have contributed to piracy too…