I'm sort of hesitant to opine on "legitimacy"; while I believe in the abstract concept of copyright as a tool to protect the interest of creators, the actual re

I'm sort of hesitant to opine on "legitimacy"; while I believe in the abstract concept of copyright as a tool to protect the interest of creators, the actual real world implementation of copyright seems to often be a cascade of shit sandwiches. If copyright law is making it effectively impossible for you to give a creator money even if you want to, like the One Hundred Years of Solitude example, it's hard to see how it's helping anyone. (And that's without getting into the question of whether a 50-year-old work should really still be under copyright.) While I'm sure the current US publishers would disagree with me, it doesn't seem unreasonable to "pirate" the book in that case. As for protesting perceived price gouging, uh... [shrug emoji] I really don't know what to tell you. In the case of the Moorcock book, there are two different publishers there -- the US publisher is the independent Titan Books, while the UK publisher is Gollancz's "SF Gateway" line of low-priced reprint ebooks, which notes on their web site, "we have English language rights on all titles everywhere in the world except for the USA, its dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines." The problem child in this case isn't Gollancz; it may be Titan, but it might also be Moorcock or his agent. At any rate, "this price is obviously too high so I'm just gonna pirate it" is a road I'm not entirely comfortable going down, even when it seems that, well, yeah, the price is too high. (That's stopped me from buying any of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels in ebook; they're barely longer than novellas -- about the same length as the Elric books, if I'm remembering them right! -- and should really be priced at $2.99 or $3.99 a pop.)