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Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:00 AM

The full, final "Harry Potter" -- leaked online!

Photographs of each page of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" make it to file-sharing sites on the Web.

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  • Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:33 PM

    It's certainly newsworthy

    Good heavens! That filesharing has spread in popularity and variety as rapidly as it has, such that days before the last Harry Potter book is available in stores it's already to be found on torrent sites: this is, in fact, newsworthy. Maybe not front-page news, but as part of tech blog? Certainly.

    Filesharing isn't going to go away if people shut their ears and stop talking about it. Reporting the existence of a "Deathly Hallows" torrent isn't spoiling or ruining anything, unless you imagine that Rowling or Scholastic are going to cancel all orders and burn every copy of the book in a fit of pique. It'll still be for sale in stores in a few days.

    The report does have an irreverent, possibly even pro-filesharing slant to it, but that's no cause for a blanket condemnation or speculation of criminal liability. Drawing moral equivalence between discussing the existence of filesharing and filesharing itself is absurd. If I write a report about a murder, am I giving up my right to be murdered? That seems to be the tenor of some arguments.

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