Austin Z. wrote:
On 5/16/06, Tim B. [email protected] wrote:
Pirating a pdf is not theft. Stealing something implies that the
owner is no
in possession of that object. I.e. I steal your car, you no longer
have a car.
Pirating is copyright infringement. There is a difference, even if
some people in this thread are implying copyright infringement is
tantamount to murder.
When you unlawfully deprive someone of something that is rightfully
theirs, that is theft. The act which leads to that theft may be
copyright infringement, but the end result is that something has
been stolen from the publisher and, in turn, the author.
Actually, nope. In Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) it was
ruled in a case dealing with bootleg records that “18 U.S.C. 2314
[transport of stolen property in interstate commerce] does not apply to
this case because the rights of a copyright holder are ‘different’ from
the rights of owners of other kinds of property.” It is still a
criminal offense under the Copyright Act, but it is not theft in the
same way that taking a physical object would be: primarily because you
are depriving someone of purely hypothetical gain, what they would have
made had you purchased the copyrighted work, rather than something they
already owned.
[— cut from other message —]
Life is not that black and white, and downloading a PDF to peruse,
or
to read in its entirety, is barely different from checking out a
book
from the library or borrowing from a friend.
No, you’re wrong. With the borrowed book, you must return it. With
the
illegally copied PDF, there’s no incentive for you to delete it – or
even do the right thing and buy the book. Consider Baen’s
successful
experiment of Webscriptions. There are books that I have read from
the
free site and not turned around and bought anything further from that
author, or have not bought the paperback or hardcover books. There
are
others, though, that I have done exactly that (David Weber’s books,
certainly).
First, I want to say that I understand and agree with you. The moral
thing is to purchase the book. What I want to get across is that the
value in a book is largely in the knowledge that it contains. That
knowledge can be ascertained just as well from a borrowed version as
from a digitally copied one, and the fact that the lender doesn’t have
access to it temporarily has no effect on the copyright holder. This is
not only a gray area morally, in my opinion at least, but it is still a
sticky point in common practice. Apple’s iTunes, for example, will only
stream songs over the network to other computers 5 times per day. That
was arbitrarily put in the software to appease the record labels, and it
is trying to come somewhere between music “piracy” and “sharing”.
(Well, I think in the EU you can copy an album up to 5 times total, or
something like that, but this is 5 times per day, which is just a
decision Apple made.)
This is definitely not black and white.
That being said, I don’t envy the position of an author today. DRM is
virtually guaranteed to fail no matter what hair-brain scheme is
created, and for the vast majority of consumers it is just a major pain
in the ass. This is why I think creators of copyrighted works that can
be digitally copied are going to need to find new ways to add value,
which compel people to purchase the work. Computers, the internet and
P2P are disruptive technologies to be sure, but the benefits far
outweigh the harm. (When farming became mechanized lots of people lost
their jobs… Should we have stopped it?) The thriving musicians are
touring and sell directly to their fans, for example. Oh wait, that’s
basically what Dave T. does too…
I’m currently teaching a course based on ruby and rails, and David’s
book looks like it could be a perfect fit for the next time it’s taught.
Know where I can download it to check it out before buying 30? 
-Jeff