Re: Re: What kind of pirate am I?

From: "Mary E Tyler" 
> On Oct 13, 2010, at 9:52 AM, Kirk McElhearn wrote:
>> On Oct 13, 2010, at 2:21 PM, Barry wrote:
>>
>>> If I buy a book in one electronic format and buy a new device and  
>>> figure out how to convert the book I paid for to another format you  
>>> call it stealing. I don't call it stealing.  In this case the law  
>>> would agree with me.  While the law might have things to say about  
>>> what I did the law would not call it stealing.
>>
>> The law would call it a copyright violation. That's a different case  
>> than obtaining a work in the first place. You're changing the subject.
> 
> Actually, I believe they'd call it fair use. 

Mary,

I ususally agree with you, but here I think you are factually wrong. Fair Use [in the US - Fair Dealing in the UK] is surrounded with rules and litigacious people. Irrespective of country and detail it involves the use of small parts of copyright material. Larger use is only if a serious critical study of a text is undertaken.

Format shifting is  
> allowed just as time shifting is allowed. 

Again I disagree, and would like to see the the facts about where the permission for it comes from. I should have asked Brenna the same thing.

Personal uses have far more  
> leeway than commercial, especially when they are truly personal. Yes,  
> I CAN rip my tapes/CDs to MP3s and OCR my books to ebook. 

I am not discussing non-book publishing, but please again what is the actual nature of the permission to OCR?

> I have to agree with Barry....it is my long experience that authors and  
> publishers get VERY emotional over copyright issues 

Now hold on. If I have something stolen I am going to get emotional; and so would you. Give me  a real proposal for an alternative, and I can talk about it. Just tell me you are going to take my things because you want them and I am going to get really, really annoyed. If people want a logical argument start it. Don't accuse others of a reaction without being clear about the specifics.

By the way in the piracy discussions I use stolen and stealing and theft because I see this as a moral matter, and I mean the basic morals. Details of law are another matter.

and the published  
> articles do nothing but feed into that, trying to make law that which  
> is not law.

That is too broad and sweeping to be an acceptable point. What articles? What law are they making? And who is writing those articles? Are they indies? Big publishers? Or the usual 'Make a million while you lie in bed' marketing?

And I get the "English is to German as ebooks are to DRM"  
> analogy 

The analogy doesn't work for me. Only a small percentage of ebooks are  DRM, and most of the latter are proprietary formats for big corporation devices. I am one of the biggest critics of corporations, but I won't break the law to go against them - not on DRM anyway. English contains many German words, but none of its grammar - I don't buy its definition as Germanic, however 'official' it is.

> 
> It's not theft, it's infringement. Not everything one would like to be  
> illegal is. And we need to stop talking about infringement with words  
> loaded to make the discussion obvious when it is not, or analogous to  
> real property when we're talking about intellectual property which is  
> not treated the same way in law or underlying philosophy.
> 
> dej

No Mary. There are too many elisions of thought here. It IS theft morally; that is the act of taking what does not belong to you without permission. Legally it is as you say, but it is rare for the matter to go to law. If we are not going to insist on moral behaviour there is no glue to society. 

Continued and appeased breach of any law leads to the breakdown of that law. It does not bring resolution in any way.

When you say it is not analogous to physical property, I think you are wrong. Physical property is as dependent on the laws of the society for the term and tules as is IP. Both are agreements between the amorphous bodies of owners and of society through its elected representatives. Both are decisions of the body politic. Bot h confer rights of control on that property.

Through laws of punishment, whether civil or criminal, those rights are protected and recognised. While the property itself may be physical, ownership is a concept. While IP may not be based on the physical the actual thing covered - the words, the patent etc - have physical representation, the ownership is again a concept. Even the idea of a building design is non-physical.

The idea of difference in concept and in effect is wrong. The ownership itself offers different posibilities, because the nature of the more static physical object and the more ephemeral copy that may be made from an idea. The fact that there are difficulties in defining how to prevent breaches of rights is merely a legal problem  that requires differing treatments.

The digital merely offers more definition problems. One of these is the need to define what is purchased in an ebook, which is no less a copy than a  hardback. The answer needs to be fair; but the risk of misunderstanding the challenge is destruction of the publishing industry in its entirety.

Joseph


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