|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Hyeon Een
Joined: 24 Jun 2005
|
 Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 10:40 am Post subject: Difference between downloading books and going to a library |
 |
|
So as a young person I'd go to the library a lot. A LOT. I read many books a week, for many years. For free.
I suppose not entirely for free, my parents were probably subsidising it through their local taxes. But I never paid any money. It was free to me. And it was free to all the people who never paid any taxes because they never got a job as well.
So. What's the difference between me then, reading books for free, and me now, downloading books from the internet and reading them on my ereader for free? Either way I'm not paying.
Well, to answer my own question, in the UK authors get a small 'royalty' every time a book is borrowed from a library which they don't get if it's stolen. But do they offer me, as an Englishman living in Korea, the opportunity to pay them this similar amount? No, they don't.
Do those idiot movie companies that don't show their movie here offer me a way to pay to watch their movie? No they don't.
Do those stupid American 'drama' makers offer me a way to give them money to watch their TV shows? No, they don't.
I think none of these people want my money. They don't offer me a way to give it to them, and I aint about to buy a bunch of stamps and send cash to them.
Until content distributors realise that the world is global, not JUST in the US or the UK, I will pirate their shit and steal their shit. Give me an opportunity and a method to buy goddamn you. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
derbot
Joined: 04 May 2010
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
nukeday
Joined: 13 May 2010
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 8:49 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| what about downloading music/movies/books by people who are dead but the material isn't public domain yet? I find it kind of ridiculous that I have to give money to their families. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 9:24 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Restrictions on what it is or is not legal to download are unreasonable. Intellectual property laws are totally out of control in the west, serving as nothing more than another example of how our society is completely slanted towards enriching the upper classes at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Laws restricting our right to profit by distributing another person's intellectual property are worth discussing. Laws restricting our right to download anything we wish are totally unreasonable. A person should never, ever face legal charges -- civil or criminal -- for opening a torrent file, for example, and because they don't profit off of it, they should face no charges for seeding that torrent either.
Downloading is not stealing. Anyone who says otherwise has been duped by corporate propaganda so thoroughly that they no longer understand what theft actually is. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NYC_Gal 2.0
Joined: 10 Dec 2010
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 10:48 pm Post subject: |
|
|
There are plenty of ways to buy books for your e-reader. I use Amazon for most of mine. As for the public domain ones, that's a sweet deal. I get those off of Amazon, for the most part. Still, if you like an author or musician, buy the work. You can pay for those American dramas or UK movies on itunes or plenty of other paid sites.
Plenty of people besides authors, musicians, and actors go into producing work. Editors, copy-editors, mixing engineers, sound technicians, and lighting specialists, to name a few. If the big companies don't make money, these people are out of work. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
chungbukdo
Joined: 22 Aug 2010
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 3:03 am Post subject: Re: Difference between downloading books and going to a libr |
|
|
| Hyeon Een wrote: |
| So. What's the difference between me then, reading books for free, and me now, downloading books from the internet and reading them on my ereader for free? Either way I'm not paying. |
The difference between stealing a book and borrowing it from a library is that it is immoral to do the first but not immoral to do the other. It is also an action that promotes a society you want to live in with the former but not with the latter.
"Downloading" a book is not the issue here. Because we can certainly all download books from the Kindle Store or Audible or something. "Stealing" is what you really mean, and what you really want to do.
Saying that there is no difference between the library and theft is like saying there is no difference between getting a free meal from the food bank or stealing it from the grocery store. Either way you're eating free, right?
| Quote: |
| Well, to answer my own question, in the UK authors get a small 'royalty' every time a book is borrowed from a library which they don't get if it's stolen. But do they offer me, as an Englishman living in Korea, the opportunity to pay them this similar amount? No, they don't. |
Do you believe you are entitled to whatever you want just because you feel that you want it? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
chungbukdo
Joined: 22 Aug 2010
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 3:08 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Fox wrote: |
| Restrictions on what it is or is not legal to download are unreasonable. Intellectual property laws are totally out of control in the west, serving as nothing more than another example of how our society is completely slanted towards enriching the upper classes at the expense of the middle and lower classes. |
Right, because people who work in fields producing intellectual property are all upper class.
A man is a janitor who does the cleaning for a lab that does patented research--is he upper class? Because he certainly benefits from intellectual property. Without the property to sell the lab wouldn't be open and he wouldn't have a job. Or what about the full time editor supporting his family on a $40,000 per year job editing technical documents?
| Quote: |
| Laws restricting our right to download anything we wish are totally unreasonable. |
I disagree. I think it is unreasonable to steal and I don't think someone else's work is my "right." If his work is my right, then he is my slave by right. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 3:45 am Post subject: |
|
|
| chungbukdo wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| Restrictions on what it is or is not legal to download are unreasonable. Intellectual property laws are totally out of control in the west, serving as nothing more than another example of how our society is completely slanted towards enriching the upper classes at the expense of the middle and lower classes. |
Right, because people who work in fields producing intellectual property are all upper class. |
The people who make the most money off of intellectual property -- and the ones who most strongly benefit from laws protecting it -- are members of the upper classes. By contrast, the ones who are harmed most by these laws are of the middle and lower classes, who are bullied, threatened, fleeced, and criminalized using them.
| chungbukdo wrote: |
| A man is a janitor who does the cleaning for a lab that does patented research--is he upper class? Because he certainly benefits from intellectual property. Without the property to sell the lab wouldn't be open and he wouldn't have a job. Or what about the full time editor supporting his family on a $40,000 per year job editing technical documents? |
Because God knows if we stopped enforcing intellectual property laws, suddenly there would be no buildings for janitors to clean or texts for editors to edit, right? And further, it's obviously true that if someone has a job right now at this point in time, they have some sort of inalienable right to that, even if it requires an unjust law for them to keep it, right?
| chungbukdo wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Laws restricting our right to download anything we wish are totally unreasonable. |
I disagree. I think it is unreasonable to steal ... |
This tells me you don't understand what stealing is, which in turn implies to me that you haven't given this any critical thought at all.
| chungbukdo wrote: |
| If his work is my right, then he is my slave by right. |
And this tells me you don't understand what a slave is. If you really believe me downloading a song from the internet turns someone into my slave, I don't know what to tell you.
If you want to have this conversation, then you need to stop hurling trite banalities and instead lay out a convincing case as to why society is actively improved by these laws criminalizing a huge percentage of our population and restricting the freedoms of the rest. "It helps editors and janitors occasionally get jobs and some people wrongly think it's theft," is not such a case. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NYC_Gal 2.0
Joined: 10 Dec 2010
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:55 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Yes, bigwigs do make the most money, but that doesn't negate the fact that other people lose out. People that actually feel the loss. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 3:13 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| NYC_Gal 2.0 wrote: |
| Yes, bigwigs do make the most money, but that doesn't negate the fact that other people lose out. People that actually feel the loss. |
Ending the unethical war on drugs would also result in people "feeling the loss" of their jobs. Ending the counterproductive and excessive airport safety measure implemented by the TSA would also result in people losing their jobs. My point is that if we have to choose between having an unjust set of laws and a few additional people being employed as a result of them, or abandoning those unjust laws and those few people having to find work in other fields, the latter is the obviously correct course of action. If there's a valid defense for our excessive and unjust intellectual property laws, it is assuredly not based on the tiny amount of middle class jobs they produce. The fact that, contrary to what those who have bought into corporate propaganda believe, most of those jobs would not vanish if we weakened our intellectual property laws is just icing on the cake. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NYC_Gal 2.0
Joined: 10 Dec 2010
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 3:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Owning art isn't unethical. The drug war? Sure. Art? Absolutely not. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 4:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| NYC_Gal 2.0 wrote: |
| Owning art isn't unethical. The drug war? Sure. Art? Absolutely not. |
Owning the exclusive right to profit off of the distribution intellectual property for a very limited period of time isn't unethical. Punishing someone for downloading a file from the internet that in no way detracts anything the owner of said intellectual property previously possessed, on the other hand, is very unethical. No one had ethics in mind when these laws were being created. They're pure corporate handout, helping the all ready wealthy continue to profit while taking the burden of creating an innovative, effective, customer-satisfaction-focused business model off of their shoulders, at the expense of the common citizen. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NYC_Gal 2.0
Joined: 10 Dec 2010
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 5:30 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| So is plagiarism is okay as well? How about knockoff bags? I mean, the kind of person who would buy a fake handbag isn't the same kind that would buy the real deal, so the original designer isn't actually losing money. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:04 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| NYC_Gal 2.0 wrote: |
| So is plagiarism is okay as well? |
Plaigiarism should certainly be legal. Academia is more than capable of monitoring and censuring those who try to make a name for themselves by plaigarizing their intellectual betters without involving the law.
| NYC_Gal 2.0 wrote: |
| How about knockoff bags? |
Of course they should be legal. They should be legal even if it ends up costing the original designer money. Society does not benefit from giving excessive legal rights to "bag designers." People are going to design attractive bags even if such legal protections don't exist. The only question is whether the most attractive bags will be widely available, or whether they will cost ridiculous amounts due to excessive and unjust legal protections. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
NYC_Gal 2.0
Joined: 10 Dec 2010
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:23 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Fox wrote: |
| NYC_Gal 2.0 wrote: |
| So is plagiarism is okay as well? |
Plaigiarism should certainly be legal. Academia is more than capable of monitoring and censuring those who try to make a name for themselves by plaigarizing their intellectual betters without involving the law. |
But it should be okay? Answer the question.
| NYC_Gal 2.0 wrote: |
| How about knockoff bags? |
| Fox wrote: |
| Of course they should be legal. They should be legal even if it ends up costing the original designer money. Society does not benefit from giving excessive legal rights to "bag designers." People are going to design attractive bags even if such legal protections don't exist. The only question is whether the most attractive bags will be widely available, or whether they will cost ridiculous amounts due to excessive and unjust legal protections. |
So the logos that are copied should be legal? I'm not saying that similar copies should be illegal, but knockoffs with logos and hardware should most certainly be. You've got some rather lax ethics when it comes to intellectual property. Before, you said that as long as nobody is losing money it was okay. Now, you say that it is okay even if original designers lose money. Which is it? Pretty soon, will you be saying that it's okay to "liberate" art from museums to decorate your home? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
