Really? You have got to be kidding me! Does that mean since I already own the PS3 version of LEGO Harry Potter I'm allowed to steal the PSP version just because I want to play away from home? This whole I got a physical copy so I can ILLEGALLY download a digital copy has got to be one of the biggest loads of crap I have ever heard in my life. Not matter how you justify it you're breaking the law. If you don't care enough to pay for another copy, then you probably don't really need to be getting another copy.
At the risk of repeating myself... I don't understand people getting up in arms about this thing like there's anything that can be done about it, or that these fine distinctions you are drawing have any applicable meaning to reality. It's like standing on a beach while a tsunami gathers itself before you, and someone's saying: "What about an umbrella? Maybe an umbrella will help when the tsunami hits?" and someone else is saying angrily: "Your umbrella propaganda is just ENABLING the tsunami! This tsunami is just so unfair, and what's more, it's illegal!" None of this alters the fact that the tsunami is coming and there is nothing that will stop it.
DRM is not going to stop ebooks from being instantly, freely downloadable the moment they are released. You are fooling yourself if you think there is some kind of DRM solution on the horizon to solve this problem. The force of law is not going to stop it either. They could assign the death penalty to downloaders tomorrow and the amount of people stealing ebooks would continue to increase. And yes, look, the moral argument works for now. It works on me. I don't want the creators of the books I consume to suddenly find it's not a financially viable proposition and stop publishing books, so I pay for the books I read. Of course I do, we all do.
We are the last people who are ever going to do this. Nobody born after 1995 will take even half a second to idly wonder if maybe they should pay for a book (or music, or films), they're just going to take them, for free. This is unfair, immoral, and illegal. And yet it's simply a fact, a thing that is going to inevitably happen, like getting hungry, or dying. There is absolutely no argument, or technology, or law that will change this fact, and before this decade is through we're all going to simply take it as read that as long as there is an internet, and ebook readers, people are going to download free copies of ebooks, and there's no magic price point above zero that is going to make them think twice about it. So arguing about what that price point might be, or musing that some DRM or law might 'solve the problem' is like wondering what experiments you'll run on your moonbase after all the astronauts have died from lack of oxygen. The question is NOT 'how do we stop people pirating?', the question is: 'What is going to happen now that people are not going to pay for books, music, or films anymore?'
I don't know the answer to that question. That it will be, and is, devastating for authors, film-makers and musicians is clear. But you will not be getting the pee out of the pool, and it's naive to talk about this as though it will be any other way.
I don't approve of piracy and I legally purchase all my music, games*, books and films. But what I as an individual does is utterly irrelevant to what the world as a collective will do- and they are going to file-share, and they are not going to stop.
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*Although games are an interesting case, which we've discussed before, in that Steam and XBoxLive both offer very attractive services that can't effectively be pirated, similar to the way you can't pirate apps on an unjailbroken iphone. This is basically where all the revenue that previously went into books and music is going to flow.