Diego Rossi wrote:
This product don't exist in a printed format.
After purchasing it I have printed a copy of the PDF and given it to the player so that he could create his character. At this point I am a digital pirate?
If I am one, how I should have proceeded to keep it legal? As the product don't exist in a physical format I couldn't purchase it and loan it to the player.
I should have show it to the player, said "look how interesting it is, if you want to use it go to the producer site and buy it"?
I say this as someone who has produced over two-hundred pages of original content available for free on d20pfsrd.com, as well as a smaller amount of content which I hope people will purchase to help me make ends meet while striving to produce more content:
If someone already has access to a legally-purchased copy of a non-software product (at, say, a library or a friend's house), I would have a hard time arguing that it is unethical for them to then acquire a digital copy of that same product without paying for it. (The law disagrees with me, so I don't encourage this behavior.)
The logic I use to arrive at this conclusion is as follows:
If a person with access to a legally-purchased copy of a non-software product has a photographic memory, that person already gains the full benefits of a digital copy of the product without ever having to download a digital copy of that product. Their photographic memory already stores a perfect copy of the product, and does so without requiring any unethical actions on their part. There is no way one can argue that merely memorizing something is immoral.
Now let us suppose there exists a device that can be implanted in a person's brain to give that person a photographic memory. If such a device existed, anyone making use of the device would gain the full benefits of a digital copy of any non-software product they consume without having to actually download that digital copy. As a group, they could purchase one copy of a non-software product, pass that product around, and legally gain the full benefits of one digital copy per person, all without performing an unethical action.
Now let us suppose that this photographic memory device isn't directly implanted in the brain. Now let us say the device is external, and is merely wired into the brain. The above argument still holds. Persons with the memory-enhancing device, internal or external, still gain the benefits of digital copies of non-software products without actually acquiring digital copies and without doing anything unethical. They are just committing something they read or heard to memory.
But what if the memory-enhancing device is wireless instead of being wired directly into the brain? What if it requires the user to activate it using a keyboard instead of operating continuously? What if it interacts with the electrochemical memories in the user's brain by transmitting remotely-stored memories via the user's optic nerves?
From a purely ethical standpoint, I find it difficult to make a distinction between a person who memorizes a non-software product using a naturally-occurring photographic memory, a person who memorizes a non-software product using a medically-induced photographic memory, and a person who memorizes a non-software product using a prosthetic device that simulates a photographic memory.
And, of course, a prosthetic device that simulates a photographic memory is just an ordinary computer. The interface between the computer and the user's brain involves fingers on a keyboard and responses sent to the user's sensory nerves, but the end result is no different than it would be if the interface were a direct electrode-to-neuron connection: the computer allows the user to review things the user once experienced in the past in perfect detail.
Thus, I find the use of a computer to create a digital copy of a non-software product the user has already viewed in any capacity to fall into the same ethical category as the use of a naturally-occurring photographic memory to picture the exact details of that same product, provided the user is creating a copy for personal use.
(I am unsure at this time if this argument can be effectively extended to software, because software does something that no human brain has ever been able to do naturally. That makes it difficult to establish a baseline set of ethics for that activity.)
All of that being said, while I don't necessarily find it unethical to acquire digital copies of things without paying for them, per se, I do consider empathy for other human beings to be an even higher moral imperative than the above argument. I would consider freeloaders who regularly benefit from the efforts of others to be non-empathetic, and therefore unethical, unless they also strive to benefit others to the best of their ability.
(And no, I would not consider simply re-sharing something one didn't produce in the first place to qualify as making an effort to benefit others, because little or no actual effort was involved.)
