Domed Ethics

[robin_d_laws]

Comments

[pentane]

It's always interesting to watch greed and intellectual soundness collide.

[owen_stephens]

I think it's reasonable to both agree with your core premise, and to have a problem with the actions of the reader and the NYT ethics column. Would it be a good idea for a publisher to bundle an electronic copy of the book with the hardcover? Yeah, I think it would. Is it ethically wrong for the buyer to encourage piracy by downloading an illegally scanned version? Yes, I think it is, and I think the ethics column got that wrong in a huge way. Convenience, good business, and even reasonable compensation are not the core of ethics

[charlequin]

I think it's a stretch to suggest that the individual's actions described here "encourage piracy," and will prove quite difficult to build a serious and self-consistent ethics around the idea that things that "encourage piracy" in such an indirect fashion are ethically wrong above and beyond their direct impact. If the user gets his friend who bought the PDF version to copy it for him based on his (well-demonstrated) physical ownership of the book, is he guilty of this same nebulous sin?

Ultimately, if you're going to run full-bore with the idea that paying the price for a piece of content involves buying the content within, publishing entities are purveyors of far more manifest wrongs against this principle (like the use of legal force and intense lobbying to remove their own customers' fair-use rights) than a user following a slightly shady path to what ought to be a legitimate endpoint (a PDF version of the content he purchased).

[seankreynolds]

Owen

[owen_stephens]

Sean

[masque12]

If we're to inculcate the lesson that content has value above and beyond the physical product, and that folks should feel ethically bound to pay for that content when it comes in non-physical form, content purveyors must abandon their double standard.

Exactly.

[reverancepavane]

Perhaps we should adopt a bulk warehouse approach to print media. As in, explicitly charging $X for the content, and adding a surcharge of $A for the hardcover, $B for the softcover, $C for the PDF (where you actually have an actual tangible virtual product), and $D for the non-transferable license to read the content.
The problem with this, apart from being currently unimplementable, is that it reveals too much about the pricing models that publishers use, and opens the questions of why $A is so much higher than $B, or why $C exists, and why $D should be allowed to exist? And more importantly, why more of $X isn't going to the primary product creator.

[sim_james]

I think that there could be an ethical issue in obtaining content that you intend to use in an appropriate manner, from a vendor who is largely offering that content to people who intend to use it inappropriately.

There are many pharmaceuticals that have both legitimate and illegitimate uses. If I purchase a drug for legitimate use from a dealer who primarily sells it for illegitimate use, my ethics can be called into question. For the sake of my convenience I may be condoning or enabling something inethical.

I agree with your primary point, though, and it's great that RPG publishers are going about this the right way. I've already received and browsed through my PDF copy of Reign Enchiridion, and I'm very happy to continue supporting publishers who offer free PDFs to their hardcopy customers.

[selinker]

I am already on record as saying that copyrights are no longer sacred to me, so it would be hard for me to get high and mighty on this subject. if you agree with the Supreme Court's decision in the Betamax case-and you do, if you've ever made a mixtape, or a DVR from your TiVo, or photocopied a pack of character sheets-automatically you've lined up next to people who say that personal copying rights should be available to people who buy things

[robin_d_laws]

I know you're being rhetorical but can't stop myself from pointing out that the voices of the NYT's various columnists are not to be confused with the voice of the NYT as corporate entity.

[selinker]

Yes, but neither are they unaligned. If the Times was a bastion of creators'-rights defense, the author would have thought twice about taking this stance. They're not, so he didn't. (And I'm OK with all of that.)