"To steal a book is an elegant offense" so goes an old Chinese saying. Is there any difference therefore, between downloading an MP3 of Lady Gaga and procuring a digital copy of an Economics textbook (16th edition, revised monthly)?
Well, I leave the ethical/moral discussions of such scenarios to those who have time (and of course, the money) but for me I began thinking about it a little further when I was browsing through Kakutani's top 10 books of 2010 and downloaded almost all the books listed within minutes. Such a thing is most interesting for e-books because only a few years ago (by that I mean pre-Kindle days, or the year 2006) such a feat would be impossible. E-book proliferation (and by extension, piracy) has indeed come a long way.
To be frank, I've downloaded my fair share of books (and movies and music, but mostly books). I realized such a collection would have cost an enormous amount of money had I legally purchased all of them (then again, I would not have purchased them in the first place). One thing's for sure - I got one heck of an education that most people who chose to go a "legal" route would've only dreamed about.*
Now here's another good question for the armchair ethicists (aren't we all!) out there - should such education be withheld from the common folk simply because of financial (and copyright and whatever) considerations? On one hand, I think content creators should be paid for their efforts. On another, the educational benefits of unleashing all that text and making them available to the masses for little to no cost may almost certainly outweigh all other considerations. Here's one to think about.
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* But of course, if you have a great library in your town (and could borrow most of their books there), then you could also have a similar education for free.**
**This does not apply if you live in Malaysia.
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