Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?
Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?

                      
                      
          A question of ethics: say you want a new novel bad—really bad—but you want the digital version for your Kindle/iPad/Sony Reader. The publisher, hoping to goose sales of the book in hardcover for $28, isn't about to offer a $10 e-book version until the novel comes out in paperback. So you buy the hardcover and then pirate a homebrew e-book, which someone has helpfully made available in one of the darker corners of the Internet. Should you be fitted for an eye patch and peg leg?
As a matter of law, you probably are a pirate (or, to be accurate, an infringer). But the interesting question isn't one of law, it's one of ethics, and New York Times syndicated columnist Randy Cohen tackled the conundrum in last week's "The Ethicist" column.
His answer might surprise you, appearing as it does in the pages and on the websites of newspapers, which are so concerned about piracy that many are lobbying for a new federal "hot news" law.
"An illegal download is—to use an ugly word—illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical," writes Cohen. "Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod. 
"Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability."
Shifting gears

The question is one about the limits of format shifting. Is it the case that purchasing any piece of intellectual property entitles you, as a matter of morality if not quite of law, to shift those words or sounds or images to computers, iPods, smartphones, and e-book readers? To put it another way: once you purchase a song or a book or a movie, do you have perpetual rights to that content, digitally shifting it from one device to another, never needing to rebuy all your stuff in order to have it in some new format? 

          
                      
                  