Yesterday I was musing to myself over an idea that I’ve been mulling over ever since I bought my Apple iPad. My thoughts centered around the concepts of content, specifically content itself, the price, cost, and format of the content and what ethical or moral obligations are present on content. There is so much content to speak about, but yesterday it was centered on books, but it could also arguably also be about any sort of content, music, photography, sculpture, anything created by people for other people to consume and/or enjoy.
It came to the question of books. In our world we have books and they cost money to write, print, publish, distribute, catalog, and manage. We also have public libraries, where these books are purchased and then shared amongst the people for ‘free’. Technically it’s tax money that pays for the books, but the libraries lend those books to people for no money charge and since there are so many people the burden of the cost of the libraries isn’t readily visible. I imagined what a regular person who doesn’t pay taxes (say a young person or someone who is unemployed) who also happens to be a voracious reader could do, value-wise. They could chew through the libraries collection of books and without having to spend one single dime of their own money consume the content without actually paying for it. This person effectively is cheating all the previous people out of money by the fact that we have libraries that lend for ‘free’. So instead of this person paying their fair share for the book, giving the bookseller, the distributor, the printer, the author and all the others money for the consumption/enjoyment of the content, they essentially steal it right from under the nose of all these people. In our society using a library is not a moral or ethical problem for anyone, we all accept that it’s perfectly fine for anyone at all to do when the library is running and open and lending. What is the limit of a library? Contention for content, libraries don’t have an endless supply of books either in-author or even in-title, so while someone has Widget Book A, another person can’t have Widget Book A.
When I started thinking about all of this, I wanted to concentrate on the ethical and moral ramifications of downloading books from the Internet. Specifically books that I could obtain from the library (KPL or Waldo or LoC) or books that were already present in my house. To me, it really wasn’t a matter of money, because the content creators were paid by (the platonic form of) “The Library” or they were paid by my household, in that the physical paper book was in my actual house and I can grab it and show it to people that I own it. What I wanted to explore was what was really at the core of things, what did people really care about. I discovered that my actual question was, what do people covet? I also distilled this argument down to the core question of content format. If I have a physical book, or I can freely acquire a physical book, is it ethically or morally wrong for me to download the book from the Internet and upload it to my eBook reading device because reading it in that format is more convenient and pleasurable than any other format? After discussing it at length with Scott, I have learned that content creators hold a kind of format tyranny over their content. They sell a book, they sell a paper book that weighs five pounds and THAT and ONLY THAT is how they have licensed you to enjoy their content…
It isn’t about money, it isn’t about ethics or morality, it is all about the preservation of a certain constant of inconvenience. Library supply contention is an inconvenience, format tyranny is an inconvenience, and even while arguing the idea that I could buy my own scanner and disassemble a book in the privacy of my own home to make my own e-book files, this is in itself also an inconvenience. So what in the end is the moral and ethical implications of downloading an e-book from the Internet when you either own a physical representation of the book in your home or can arguably acquire it for ‘free’ at any (platonic form of) “The Library”? It is apparently ethically and/or morally reprehensible to break the law of the preservation of constant inconvenience. That inconvenience must be paid, must be respected, that everyone in the supply chain must be satisfied that you are somehow inconveniently thwarted. You pay for books by suffering inconvenience.
As I wrote above, this is expandable to other kinds of content, such as Music. Oddly enough the realm of Music apparently has abandoned the fighting arena that books enjoy, that being format tyranny. But the existence of Library also plays out here; I could walk down to the KPL and borrow a CD and rip it onto my device? If I own a CD, Music isn’t really concerned anymore that I rip it to my iPod, so if I borrow a CD from the library and rip that, it is wrong because there is a late-binding violation of the law of preservation of inconvenience? I sense some erosion.
What about Comic Books? Now this is an interesting field. If I own longboxes of comic books and I happen to have their digital representations as well, this is wrong, because I have broken the format tyranny and violated the law of the preservation of inconvenience.
What is the future for this law of inconvenience? Since Music has given up their domain of format tyranny, does that mean that one failure in content can eventually expand to other kinds of content? Does Music’s failure to remain vigilant mean that books and comics will eventually face the same erosion of ethics when it comes to the contention of format tyranny? I think that time will tell, that people when faced with technology will change their definitions and concepts of what is ethical and/or moral. Just as the ethical violation of the existence of Libraries has dwindled to nothing, may format freedom eventually attain this same dwindling? Again, time will have to pass and when everyone no longer really cares, then I think the definition of ethical and/or moral upset will fade away.