Problem with this is it means you are giving money to providers that sell with DRM, that restricts the rights of those not technical enough to circumvent it.
Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media.
Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media.
Indeed. And also do not underestimate the cost of adding DRM to media. Don't know about ebooks, but for streaming media I would estimate about half the engineering time spent designing, building and maintaining video work flows is somehow related to CENC, CBCS, Widevine, Playready, Fairplay and the whole ecosystem of third party consultancy around this.
For larger platforms these investments are worthwhile, but I don't think it's a coincidence that smaller audio shops and podcasts generally avoid DRM for streaming audio (where margins are smaller than Live/On demand video streaming).
I know at least one author that refuses “out-of-band payments” for that reason.
And this is to say nothing about advance payments where the publisher is taking the risk of a book not selling, and the author gets paid regardless, which can be a big thing for small authors too.
Using piracy from the beginning ensures nobody gets paid.
A library can only lend as many copies as it purchases. Someone selling their copy can only sell the copy they purchased. These secondaries are constrained by the primary.
Your talking about one person buying a single copy and then distributing it for free in perpetuity. This secondary is not constrained by the primary.
Not buying it nor downloading it illegally would be the ethical stance.
That's the crucial difference between choosing what you think is right and using an external source, you have access to your thoughts while they don't.
Some bands have been scolded and threatened by their publishers for said public voice, and instead choose silence as they could be sued by their producers/publishers.
Creators I have contacted about DRM almost never reply. Likely for similar contractual reasons. They can only legally respond with scolding or silence.
I did have one artist I contacted reply once. They were Christian and all but said I would go to hell for sharing copies of someone elses work.
I asked how they felt about Jesus replicating and freely sharing someone else's bread and fish. They never replied again.
In my country, you have a legal right to share copies to close friends. I think that’s ethical, but I don’t think it’s ethical when people mass download someone’s work without paying them when they were charging for it.
We have been living millenia without DRM protection of books so I would wager the justification of their necessity is dubious at best.
I 100% always pay for books available without DRM such as from No Starch Press. I encourage any authors reading to consider similarly ethical publishers.
Only if you sent $$ to the author/s.
And don't forget to send a larger chunk money to other new prospective authors that you don't know and that haven't even sold a single copy of their book (or maybe not even finished it yet)!