^ My bad for misunderstanding your point. While I grant you that the situation of which you speak does occur and can be a singular motivation to pirate, I also believe that more often than not, the people who do engage in piracy do so simply because they can, and because they do not wish to pay for what they steal.
And if you're right, well then the entire industry is screwed. Because the genie won't go back in the bottle. It's out there, it's happening, and it can't be stopped. Those people will never ever buy from you again. Which sucks, but you may as well stop worrying about it as there's nothing you can do.
On the other hand, there's a whole bunch of people in this thread giving what are being termed 'excuses' for piracy. Here's another one: someone might download an ebook of something they already have in paperback as they want the convenience of reading it on their Kindle. Should they have to pay twice for it. I dunno. Then there's the people that want back-ups, or the people annoyed at prices being marked up in their country and so on...
The problem is if you say "you're still stealing from me, you're a dirty filthy pirate, begone" then it really doesn't help matters. We have to find constructive ways to bring these people back on side and not push them in to the hands of the pirates. It is a slippery slope from "I bought this in paperback so I'll illegally download the ebook" to "ah, I might just pass on the 'buying the paperback' part today". And a lot of people seem to want to give them a kick right off that slope.
I don't think it is as bad as all that. Steam and iTunes have shown that if you make the process of buying stuff legitimately more convenient than pirating, people switch over in huge numbers. It surprised me as well, but it's there. It's an odd but honest truth that a lot of pirates aren't tight, they're just lazy. The stats are there to back that up.
And could we all maybe stop with the moral absolutism? There's a scale here, and each person's sense of right or wrong is at a different point on the scale, but absolutism does not help.
I can legally scan my own copy of a book and stick it on my Kindle just like I can rip my CDs and put them on my iPod. If I download a copy from a pirate website instead, the end result for me is the same (just with less work) except for the bit where I support that website. But maybe I ran an ad-blocker when I visited that site, so in actual fact all I'm doing is costing them money in bandwidth. (leaving aside torrent files for a moment, whole other kettle of fish as they're impossible to download without supporting the distribution.
Likewise I can lend a book to a friend, or sell it on secondhand. No-one has a problem with that, as the book has been paid for once. Guess what? Often the pirated copies come from one guy buying the book, stripping the DRM, then sharing it with 1000s of other people. Book was paid for once. Same thing, it's a matter of scale.
Couple of other points:
Stuff gets muddled when we call copyright infringement 'stealing' or 'theft' - it might feel that way to the victims but it's not what it is. "You wouldn't steal a car" - no, but if I had a magic wand I could wave at your car, and make an exact replica for myself, I might do. It's a different crime. Let's face it, if it was theft, the original poster would have called the police already. Kind of depressing to see a whole bunch of people who's stock in trade is words get behind this attempt to change the meaning of words just because it sounds scarier than 'copyright infringement'. It's been tried before, it's why we ended up with 'piracy'.
I'm at a loss as to why you still want to characterize any of my actions,
which got the right result, as foolish. It's like you're endeavoring to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Well maybe I'm just being horribly cynical, but it's worth remembering that this is a publicly viewable forum. I imagine the number of people that read it vastly outnumbers the amount of people that post. You've just advertised to a whole bunch of people with an interest in Trek Lit that your new book is available for free if they Google the right thing. A bunch of people posting in this thread have expressed surprise that such pirated books even exist. There's bound to at least have been a couple of lurkers who saw this then went off looking for it. Whether the net result leaves you up or down in terms of sales I wouldn't care to hazard a guess on.
