That's not a valid comparison. Approaching everything under the sun with the same copyright approach is untenable, even the greedy music industry and others (e.

That's not a valid comparison. Approaching everything under the sun with the same copyright approach is untenable, even the greedy music industry and others (e.g., see Hulu) are no longer totally following this approach. A lot of these companies have found that the strong "I won't give you a single bit of my digital goods if you don't pay" idea, is unpractical and not good for business. In fact, new web apps do distribute shared logins, on reddit or elsewhere, to get traction, e.g. see this story from just a couple of days ago http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ckcbr/mizage_a_small_development_company_that_made/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ckcbr/mizage_a_.... That point aside, your comparison is still invalid. Money earned from a webapp goes directly to the developer. However, authors, especially of academic books, which is the kind that is mostly on this site, make very little money from each book sold, just ask a professor who wrote such a book. The books are mostly for academic prestige. Publishers, who still live in a world of their own, try to sell these books for unbelievable amounts, generally $50-$75 a pop. My company buys me (almost) any book I want, but when I was a student in a different country I suffered a lot because of this; we used to Xerox books for almost all our courses. This is not an endorsement to steal any intellectual work. Just a thought that things are not so simple. P.S. For an additional exercise to see why the simplistic approach fails, look into the intellectual battle between poor countries like Brazil and US pharma companies on AIDS IP. Would you say it's stealing in that case, too? Now, work backwards.