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?

Publishers are aghast at the idea as extended to books, though to consumers, it sounds pretty wonderful. Imagine that you had some way of verifying that you owned each item in your personal library, and that you could then download a digital copy of all those books for free through Google Books. Wonderful—and certainly a spur to the hardware vendors like Apple and Amazon and Sony. But not so terrific for publishers.

The site Mediabistro collected a few complaints about Cohen's column from its book-business readers. "So, if you own the hardcover you should get the paperback for free? Different platform, right?" said one. A moment's thought makes clear the confusion underlying this rejoinder; paperbacks cost the publisher money to design and print and store and ship. Homemade e-books do not.

Another complained that audiobooks were a different thing from the printed word (the original column doesn't mention audiobooks at all, but e-books).

Another argued that the pirating was fine, so long as the reader eventually paid for the legal e-book once it was available. "[Cohen] is basically stating, 'Hey, you paid for the words, period, no matter their packaging.' I can't agree with that."

We actually think that giving away a free e-book version of hardcover books is a superb idea. Many of us at Ars are wedded to our dead tree book collection and leery of having only an e-book, what with the DRM, the limitations on resale, and the like. But the convenience can't be beat. Offering both for the same price would spur hardcover sales (which make more than paperbacks) while still providing the convenience readers want.

But publishers don't want to devalue the e-book, and both our suggestion and Cohen's casuistry can be seen as committing this cardinal sin. The worry is that the public comes to see e-books as being worth nothing; they are an add-on, a freebie offered with something else. As books migrate increasingly to digital formats, this is a dangerous feeling to encourage.

Still, we can't help wondering if Cohen has a point here. If transferring content from a CD to a computer is acceptable, then would it not be acceptable to spend two weeks typing a newly acquired book into your word processor? And if so, why not just cut out all the work and download the e-book? This is the same as asking: if I paid for a CD, can I just grab those songs from a P2P network instead of ripping them to my machine?

If this were about buying a DVD of Finding Nemo and then grabbing a Blu-ray P2P rip a couple years later, that would be one thing; the two really are different versions of the same film, and buying the DVD would not seem to entitle you to the Blu-ray. Likewise, paying for a movie ticket in the theater doesn't make it ethically allowable to go home and grab a camcorder rip from P2P networks.

But this example is different: identical textual copies in electronic form, both designed to offer the same private reading experience. Are these not, in essence, identical in all the ways that matter? Given the industry's worries about actual piracy, the kind where people don't pay the publishers a cent, such format-shifting probably isn't high on the list of worries that keep publishing execs up at night.

It's a complicated debate. Say that the e-book version you download is not one that some poor sap with a scanner cooked up on his own, but is in fact the official version from the author or publisher. Yes, you have the same words, but you've only paid for the one object (the book), while the e-book took time and resources to prepare, even if distribution is dirt cheap. Assuming that the Ars Hive Mind had the chance to instruct the world in the digital ethics around format shifting, what would it say?