Re: What kind of pirate am I?

I no longer believe anyone's statement of what "the law" is when it comes to copyright. I don't think anyone knows what the law is. I think a lot of it is hard to generalize and hasn't been tested in court. And, unfortunately, I think 99.44% of simple summaries of "what the law is" are spin by someone who is grinding an axe one way or another. That applies to _everyone,_ even the people who are telling me what I want to hear.
 
I _used_ to believe such statements, but publishers lost my trust through routinely dishonesty and customary and continual misstatement of the law. When I download facsimile page images of "The New York Times" from 1887, they claim to be copyrighted by ProQuest. Sorry, Proquest, I do not believe you have a valid copyright claim on an accurate facsimile reproduction of a work published in 1887. Sorry, Adobe I do not believe you when you tell me I have no legal right to play "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" through a text-to-speech converter, in private, for my personal use. Sorry, RIAA I do not believe you when you they tell me that I have no legal right to listen to my music on my iPod after I throw away the CD it came on.

I simply do not know of any neutral authority that I can trust to tell me accurately what my rights are in simple terms.

And, yes, there are also situations where the law _might_ be accurately stated, but a perfectly moral reaction is "Oh, gimme a break." For example, when I purchase something online, if the vendor takes the trouble to collect my state's sales tax, I pay it cheerfully. But if they do not bother to, then I don't lift a finger to do the necessary recordkeeping and pay the sales tax myself, nor do I lose a minute of sleep over it. 

And I would not take kindly to any busybody haranguing me about it.

So, to those who think I am contributing to the decline of civilization through my blatantly immoral act in having downloaded a copy of "Nineteen Eighty Four" from Project Gutenberg of Australia--YES, I own a print copy--I ask you: do you keep a record of all the uncollected sales tax from your online purchases and go to the effort of declaring it when you file your state income tax? 

And do you send royalties to Time-Warner every time you sing "Happy Birthday To You" around a table in a restaurant?


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