I've been known to get a little handsy with copyrighted material sometimes, I admit it, and I think it makes me a bad person.
Owning ideas is always problematic for me, because I consider myself a creator of sorts. It's weird for me to come up with an idea and find out someone already had a similar idea, because it automatically forces me to defend my creative output, even if my idea was completely independent of the idea I might be criticized for stealing. I'm still a newb, an amateur, too, so I value people using my ideas as long as I get to see them externalized. I want people to take my ideas, frequently because I have more ideas than I have the talent, ambition, or interest to execute. Just the other day I had an idea for an mp3 player shaped like a wristwatch, which I feel could be tremendously well received with the right demographic. Take my idea, please!
Of course, I'm examining this from the weirdest position, and the wrong viewpoint--that of an owner of an idea, rather than a lessee, or whatever the technical term would be that describes a librarian's relationship to information in his collection. Working in document delivery you'd think issues with copyright would be obvious to me, but our policies make things murkier. We're not allowed to copy whole books for patrons but we don't keep a comprehensive list of patron requests and our services are mostly free, so it isn't impossible for patrons to request and keep PDFs of whole journals if they wanted.
They'd be abusing the system, but that seems like fairly obvious (if slightly convoluted) abuse and I don't know how it works out.
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