[Leaplist] Cory Doctorow, to Microsoft, on "Why DRM is bad"

[Steve Litt]

On Thursday 01 November 2007 21:12, Damien McKenna wrote:

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>  Why is paying tuppence any less moral
> than twenty dollars?  

If the author wanted twenty dollars, the moral things to do are:

1) Give the author twenty dollars and get the Ebook or
2) Laugh in the author's face and say you don't need his ebook or
3) Bargain with the author til a price is agreed upon

What's not moral is to pay him a tuppance and take the book when the author 
wanted twenty dollars. This isn't moral even if the government decreed the 
author should get only a tuppance. It might be legal, but it's not moral.

> For a sale to be binding there must be an 
> agreement on both the item and the price, you don't just walk into a
> care dealership, give them $5 and drive home a car, likewise someone
> isn't going to pay $1000 for a newspaper (well, they shouldn't that'd
> be stupid).  The agreed upon price is based on both the buyer's and
> seller's perceived value of the item (and bartering, haggling, etc),
> so ultimately if you buy said piano roll for tuppence you've made a
> legal purchase.

As long as no *unauthorized* copying went on, and as long as no coersion was 
done (by the government most likely), it's not only legal but moral. 

>
> The second statement is about the ability to record something off your
> TV, a signal that you're paying for in one way or another (almost
> always via cable or satellite service), a far cry from your examples.
> There are IIRC laws in place that grant you the right to record the
> video signal to tape for your own personal wishes.

That's not what I objected to. If a purchaser wants to print my Ebook and take 
it to the beach, that's fine with me. If the purchaser wants to put it on two 
different computers for *his* use, that's fine with me.  

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> Also, what's your take on fair use?  Do you object to e.g. a professor
> photocopying a few pages from one of your books to hand out in class,

Depends on a lot of things. Is the professor getting paid? Are the students 
paying? If all this money is changing hands and my work is taken for free, 
I'm not sure that's a use I'd consider fair. Also, "a few pages" is well 
beyond typical fair use.

If the professor is training disabled veterans to help them get into the job 
market, I'd have a much different view.

But yes, I believe in the concept of fair use, although perhaps I define it 
more narrowly.

> or someone doing likewise for a friend of theirs?  

No. My Ebooks cost $12.95, $6.95 and $5.95 respectively. His friend can easily 
buy a copy. Now I'm probably not going to waste my time suing someone who 
provides part of a copy or even a whole copy to a friend, but is it moral -- 
heck no. My children need to eat just like everyone elses.

> How about someone 
> offering to translate it into another language for you for free?  

For their own use? For others use? For business use? It would depend.

> Or 
> how about they make a copy of it to read in the car while their
> original is happily sitting on their bookshelf at home (seriously,
> I've done that, though a few pages at a time)?

I have no problem with that. I even format my Ebooks so someone with a duplex 
printer can print them and staple bind from the side. In the "How to Use this 
Book" section of "Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting", I give instructions 
on how to print and bind it into a book. I have no problem with time and 
location shifting -- it's unauthorized distribution I have a problem with.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/