Theft by Ted
Angered by the thought of “having to haul dead-tree versions of my favorite novels around,” as well as by the fact that those books were “were published by a Neanderthal Publishing company who hasn’t made any of the books available in ebook format” even though some of them are out of print, the proprietor of the website Thoughts by Ted wonders in this posting whether copyright really matters and pirated downloads are so bad if “the Neanderthal attitudes and business practices of the publisher involved has made it impossible for me to legitimiately follow the law?” He goes on to ask his readers: “Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, and lug it around, inconveniencing me, causing more CO2 emissions by shipping the book to me, and in the airplane because of its added weight…. What if I just download the pirated e-text, justifying my actions that no one is actually getting hurt my downloading the text and reading it; after all, since it is long out of print and not available from any booksellers as a new book, the author isn’t going to be getting any more royalties anyway.” Like many book industry critics on the web, “Ted” does not take full authorship of his writing here —does not identify himself any further than the Stuart Smalley-like title of his blog, and a warning that his postings “don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.” (Hmm, note to Ted: The manufacture and powering of those computers have a bit of a carbon impact, too, you know.) So it’s impossible to evaluate his comments fully and guage any relevant conflicts or expertise. But one thing is certainly clear: the hundreds of young people who responded (he asks people their age) overwhelmingly agree that what he proposes is a “victimless crime.”
I’ve modified my blog to include a pointer to my full page. Sorry about that; my newest blog theme dropped the explicit link to home page, and previous to the rather vast interest that was attracted to my recent blog posting, most of the people who frequented my site knew who I was — the problem I normally have is that people come up to me at conferences and say “Hey Ted, how’s it going?” and I have no idea who they are. But just because you are a celebrity in the Open Source and Linux world certainly doesn’t mean that people in, say, the publishing world, would have any idea who “tytso” might be. It’s now fixed, and my apologies if you were truly offended about the fact that you couldn’t identify my real-world identity. Feel free to read through my web page, resume, etc. if you feel the need to satisfy your curiosity.
By the way, if you look starting at comment #248 or so the blog entry, or the blog entry and comments of my first follow-up post, you’ll find some more intelligent discussions about the nature of copyright. That was about the time that the blog post got picked up by various blogs in the publishing world. However, I encourage you not to ignore comments before that point; those folks are your customers, and for some of them, especially the Gen X’ers and the Millenials, they are our future. Participating in the discussion is better than pretending they don’t or shouldn’t exist, or trying to sic the lawyers on them like the RIAA and MPAA tried to do…