Actualy reidtheweed01, the library and thier books are not exactly free. Yes they are open to the public and the public can use them as much as they wish, but their also paid for by the public.
Most of the books, music, movies, and other materials in your local library are purtched with tax dollars. Soo everyone that works and buys items ends up paying for a part of a public library through thier taxes.
Also in the library the materials are restricted, for instance
you can only copy so much. If a book is popular or if the book is required in more locations, then the library must buy more copies if they want to cover the demand.
As to the the idea of piracy, it's a torny subject. To a point there will allways be people that aquire materials illegaly. If it's rampant then it stagnates development, since it doen't pay to reasearch. On the flip side of the coin, the sharing of a enjoied item is excelent publisicty.
In the end, I don't think that piracy would be nearly the "issue" it is today if the orginal copyrite laws were kept. Having a maximum of 28 years(14 and 14 more with extention), allowed for great strides in advancements.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." -Isaac Newton
Many of the most amazing advancements were from coping existing works and modding them to suit your needs. Last I heard the current length of a copyrite is 120 years(I could be wrong). But this doen't realy deal with the entertainment items I belive your probly thinking of.
The big complaint is potential the loss of capital, you have to look at that from the side of the marketing/sales teams.
Lets say there is a mediocre title is reliced. Now yes, the rental stores buy thier copies and the super early adopters, but if you were not able to rent it
(saying the local rental places were not intrested) there is a chance you might buy it.
We have all bought a cruddy or mediocre game, but some modders that do pirate titles would rather try and in many cases keep the lesser games as a long as it's not inconvient. Now before that there was a one in lets say a five thousand chance of only thouse that mod to steal. Even if it's only one person that would have bought it, thats still one less sale.
On the otherside of the coin, pirated software can help spread the word of it. Without piracy, windows would not be as popular as it is today and has been known to spread intrest in some of the more amazing games that are not well publicised.
The thing that has brough piracy to be a highly debated topic though realy is the use of the internet. The reason is the ease and far reach of the traffic of the materials. There has been entertainment piracy since the advent of recordable mediums. Back in thouse days you realy needed to be close to an orginal source to get a clean copy of the material(often a friend bought/attended it). Even when sofware was being illegaly traded on BBSes, you were limited by your calling areas.
With the internet, materials were no longer limited to your local area because the globe becomes your local area. So now if one person bought it, they could share the item with anyone in the world connected to the internet. So rather than one copy for each area, it became a few copies through out the globe. Then it was still not a easy thing to search to find your materials.
Things realy became heated as it became no harder to find and download illegal material than it is to look up your favorite websight. The peer to peer clients were so easy to use, setup and download materials that piracy became rampant for a bit. Just like any technically illegal activity being extremely heavily abused that has a second party complaing about it, goverment began to poke it's nose into the matter.
In short, I don't agree with the current copyrite laws but that doen't mean I endorece or agree with infringing on the copyrights.
