I'll take the last line first, because my response flows better if I tackle it reverse-chronologically. Why do you feel entitled to the product of that work fo

I'll take the last line first, because my response flows better if I tackle it reverse-chronologically. Why do you feel entitled to the product of that work for free? I buy physical copies of all of my books; I used to be in a vastly different situation. When I was growing up, my town's library didn't have a non-fiction section worth its salt, and had a fiction section that rarely had every book in a series, and that was including ILL programs. My household couldn't always afford food, let alone non-essentials like books. Copying bits isn't stealing, and it'd have to be snowing in Hell if some of the people in this thread are right: if impoverished kids are stealing from the mouth of authors every single time they copy a book on the Internet, and it's somehow unethical for them to do so, who has a chance in the world of being moral? But now, let me tackle the first line: Authors sometimes spend years of their lives and plenty of their own money to write a book. They often have no idea if it will even sell, so it can be a huge risk. So there are two ways to approach this. First, we can go the capitalist route, which you're advocating for: "Risk. Keyword risk. You are not guaranteed a return on your investment for anything. Someone steals your physical copies of your book, sure, that's stealing. Someone copies your book, you lose literally nothing. Free market. Economics. Woo!" "That line is completely and utterly ridiculous if you substitute 'Authors' and 'book' with any other occupation." Alternatively, here's a more realistic, less hyper-capitalistic, less dystopian view: Instead of getting mad at the people participating in the system, get mad at the system and the people orchestrating it. Try as much as you like, blaming people trying to better their lives in a way that's objectively not harmful, which is always what you're doing if you're reading a book and didn't rip the copy from someone's hands, and you'll always come off as the villain. You'll lose in the long run, and you'll be looked at as the villain in all of the history books when you do. Drew DeVault (a person who both publishes software under free licenses & who has written a book and licensed it under the CC) has written a bunch of great stuff on this.