ASK HN: Illegal Book/Mp3/* Downloads.
noonespecial: He refers to it as Borrowing a book from a library. But my point is that libraries have certain restrictions which an illegally downloaded e-book does not give us.Not to pick a side or even make a moral argument but here's a fun thought experiment:What if you had special mental abilities that allowed you to circumvent these restrictions. Some people have nearly perfect photographic memory when it comes to printed words. Is it theft every time someone like this enters a library?If not, could we just call my kindle and bittorrent a prosthesis for my mind so that I have equal ability?The point is that these arguments are a lot like matter. It looks discrete and easy to quantify from a distance, but the closer you look, the more you find that deep down, its made of nearly nothing at all. We (society) just picked something out of our asses, nearly at random, and went with it. It only got the force of morality attached to it later in the game when people had lived with it for a while. Kind of like running a stop sign on an empty street makes some people feel guilty for no apparent reason.