There sure is some interesting stuff on the good ole interweb. Yessir. Sure is. Like for instance I went over to one of my friends’ house to find him perched behind his computer reading a pirated copy of the latest Harry Potter novel. Someone had actually taken the book and OCRed the entire thing and distributed the digital copy. I prefer to believe that they didn’t OCR the book itself, because that would be just ridiculous (to do it right you’d probably have to de-bind it), but OCRed some mutant manuscript or maybe just poached JK Rowling’s own copy on a CDR or something.

It’s interesting how much pirated stuff it out there. A-maz-ing. And it brings out an ethical question that has nothing at all to do with the law itself: if I download and watch a movie that I never would have watched otherwise, have I stolen something? After all, if something exists in a digital format that facilitated copying it, how can copying be stealing? It’s a very good question. In fact, in the one I posed before, neither the author nor the producer actually lose any real potential profit, because I would never have seen the movie anyways, and my copying it cost them nothing all. Of course the law - and goodness knows how much the law is in the pockets of the “content producers” - defines copying a copyrighted work as stealing regardless of format.

But let’s try a third way: make your digital works available to me at a price that matches what I’m actually getting. A 750mb DivX or XviD movie isn’t worth the eight bucks I’d pay at the theatre. To me, the entry level price for such a thing would be about $3 or $4. You know what? I’d pay that much money for a movie. I’d probably watch more movies if I could get them for a price like that. It’s not like a movie has the replayability that a music file does.

Just some thoughts.

Dan (Doesn’t like the RIAA, MPAA, and well, screw them.)

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