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An Ethical Question Regarding Ebooks
tytso writes "Suppose there is a book that you want to read on your ebook reader, but it is out of print (so even if you purchase the dead-tree version of the book used, the author won't receive any royalties) and the publisher has refused to make it available as an ebook. You can buy it from Amazon as a used book, but that isn't your preferred medium. It is available on the internet as a pirated etext, however. This blog post outlines a few possibilities, and then asks, 'What is the right thing to do? And why?' I'm also curious if the answers change depending on whether you are a Baby Boomer, or a Gen X, Gen Y, etc. — I've noticed that attitudes around copyright seem to change depending on whether someone is a college student or a recent college graduate, versus someone who can remember a time when the Internet did not exist."
you DO know that this violates copyright law, right ?
you have no right to reproduce a copyrighted work without reproduction rights from the author.
That is immoral. Our culture is made up of things do when they are not taking care of their basic needs, and is for everybody. This is the natural order of things. It is not right for a person to neglect the care of their basic needs, then frantically try to control what other people do with this particular piece of our culture because they have put themselves in a desperate situation.
If a person creates something of particular merit, it is a service to society to help that person spend less effort on their basic needs and allow them to enrich our culture further. Unless it is a commissioned work or performance, there is no debt that is owed to the creator.
Irregardless, it is not right for anyone to attempt to systematically reduce peoples access to works of knowledge and culture. It is an intellectual assault on all of humanity to do this. Aside from the dilemma of the man who for no good reason cannot read his book, it personally hurts every one of us to have stupider neighbors than we have to.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Please explain how sharing knowledge could be un-ethical. Piracy is the RIGHT thing to do, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Congratulations. You know nothing. Just know what it means to forget, and all will be forgiven in due course.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Now it's an ever-extending new property right
Calling it a property right is a (deliberate, in some cases) misnomer; monopoly right or private taxation right is more appropriate and more accurate in describing it.
As the laws governing such rights are inherently counterproductive and unethical (as they decrease the creation of intellectual variety and expression, as well as deliberately decrease the availability and wealth inherent in such (vast deadweight loss due to non-pareto efficiency)) it can never be unethical to violate those laws.
The ethical approach is to primarily avoid handing any money to any entity engaged in promoting such laws, as well as promoting the various non-damaging possible approaches (ie, not based on artificial scarcity or control, but solely on monetary transfer) to reimburse and promote creative endeavours.
Early GenX here.
It was semi-serious. The money supply is being devalued by significant margin on a daily basis, and as this economic system is about to fail utterly, so the whole idea of giving someone the money they deserve is rapidly becoming a moot point. It won't be long now before it's just so much worthless paper, and everyone who is properly informed about what's going on in the world knows it. Not really relevant to the discussion though.
As a computer programmer, I earn my living off commissioned work. Any time licensed software is involved, it damages my prospects. If a client has a budget and a goal, every dime that goes to paying taxes to a proprietary software company shrinks the budget that can be dedicated to getting actual work done. I'm very thankful for the LAMP stack. It allows me to help people who wouldn't even be able to afford to pay for, say, Windows Server and SQL Server, let alone actually pay me to do the work for them.
My partner makes her money selling original works on stretched canvas, and does web design, and does mural projects. She's also been making good money these days going out to live events and doing a painting of the event, then auctioning it at the end of the evening.
The digital copies of her work are released creative commons-attribution. If some business in China were to make a billion posters and sell them to a billion university students and not give her a dime, that would be great. 20 years from now, some of those students would covet an original work.
Oh, and all the music we record we release into the public domain. We do it for the joy of doing it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth