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The obvious response is that you stole the author's income, by obtaining a copy of their work without compensating them for it. So the obvious retort is that y

The obvious response is that you stole the author's income, by obtaining a copy of their work without compensating them for it. So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered to purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity to read it, thus the author did not lose their sale. The conversation will then turn to defending the existence of copyright as an incentivization to produce valuable works worth reading, and then to how the publishing industry eats those incentives anyway. In the end, no one will exit the conversation having gained any insight.

yucky 4y ago
> So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered to purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity to read it, thus the author did not lose their sale. I can't speak for all pirates, but I will pirate things I want to sample and then often buy it if it's what I was looking for. At least with books. I haven't bought music in 20 years.
DocTomoe 4y ago
> The obvious response is that you stole the author's income, by obtaining a copy of their work without compensating them for it. Given that I (as an European) pay extra fees for copyright management companies for each photography-enabled device, each memory device, each scanner and each printer, I should be enabled to make as many copies of any copyright-protected work as I want. Which is incidentally how it works over here. What gets you in trouble is making works accessible to copiers, not owning copies.
- lxgr 4y ago
  These fees are an even worse solution than the current maze of DRMs and walled gardens. Maybe they were an acceptable compromise in a time before e-books and e-readers, but they are neither fair to users, nor do they seem high enough to fairly compensate content creators without their normal revenue channels. If the intention behind it is a kind of public subsidy for content creation: Sure, there are much worse things to spend tax money on. But please do it properly then, i.e. something like a "public Spotify/Netflix" for books and films that correctly attributes view counts, rather than just handing money almost exclusively to already popular/financially stable creators as measured by past sales records.

yucky 4y ago

> So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered to purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity to read it, thus the author did not lose their sale. I can't speak for all pirates, but I will pirate things I want to sample and then often buy it if it's what I was looking for. At least with books. I haven't bought music in 20 years.

DocTomoe 4y ago

> The obvious response is that you stole the author's income, by obtaining a copy of their work without compensating them for it. Given that I (as an European) pay extra fees for copyright management companies for each photography-enabled device, each memory device, each scanner and each printer, I should be enabled to make as many copies of any copyright-protected work as I want. Which is incidentally how it works over here. What gets you in trouble is making works accessible to copiers, not owning copies.

lxgr 4y ago
These fees are an even worse solution than the current maze of DRMs and walled gardens. Maybe they were an acceptable compromise in a time before e-books and e-readers, but they are neither fair to users, nor do they seem high enough to fairly compensate content creators without their normal revenue channels. If the intention behind it is a kind of public subsidy for content creation: Sure, there are much worse things to spend tax money on. But please do it properly then, i.e. something like a "public Spotify/Netflix" for books and films that correctly attributes view counts, rather than just handing money almost exclusively to already popular/financially stable creators as measured by past sales records.