We must distinguish legality and legitimacy...

It is impossible to say to ourselves if we are knowledge driven : ok this month i will not bought the 4 science and philosophical books whose price is 400 bucks in toto because i dont have the budget...

I will not download them illegally...No...

I will stay ignorant but in the legal path...

Only rich people and rich country can afford books , damn the poor...

Long life to the law...

The law was designed by an unknown genius : Bernard Mandeville in 1720...

A genius so great that Hayek in a special adress wrote about him : "he is our master to us all".

He did not say that for Adam Smith, nor Marx not Freud who all of them borrow to the master after his death.

Nobody know him today guess why ?

No i did not discovered this in an illegally acquired book but it is another story.

In Huxley as in Orwell hive ignorance is the only legal direction ...

«The eggs of the laws rarely birth the legitimate chicken»---Groucho Marx

Blake said it better than me using an imaginary Groucho though :

I apologize for my observation  slightly off-track but useful for further reading by those interested by the link between these thinkers... To understand we must often look off-track anyway...

We lost any physical products for an always increasing dematerialisation of not only our products but ourselves. We went from the Greek soma/psyche-Noûs/pneuma to be only the Bill Gates computing body.

We lost books and vinyl for digitalization and control... We are already under control.

I'm thinking with the age of most of the responders here, that the end of physical media will not be much of an issue...especially with LP and CD sales not only stabilizing but actually growing slightly in 2024...

Another Carrington event will give this discussion a whole new complexion.

jsalerno277

@cleeds “blissfully simple” was @devinplombier  post, not mine.

Oops! You're correct of course and I'm sorry, @jsalerno277. That's exactly the type of mistake I try to avoid here!

A conversation we should be having as a society is the nature of ownership in a changing world. For decades, it was blissfully simple: you purchased a LP or a CD, you owned it, you could play the music on it at will, sell it, give it, whatever. In reality, when we paid $14.95 for a CD that cost less than $1 to manufacture, the value was always in the music, not in the physical support. With streaming, we pay for music untethered from any physical support. That’s fine, but we no longer have full control over the music we paid for. Conceivably, a copyright owner could win a lawsuit and have music you own ordered removed from your library by a court.

@devinplombier You absolutely do have control over it. If you buy a song from, say, Qobuz you can download it to your computer, NAS, etc. and it’s yours and nobody can take it away from you. Moreover, you can just buy the songs you want and aren’t forced to buy the whole CD, which is way more cost effective and efficient. It’s a wonderful new world.