This comment is completely absurd, emotionally manipulative, and a highly distorted picture of reality. > Always saddens me Typical emotional manipulation pre

This comment is completely absurd, emotionally manipulative, and a highly distorted picture of reality. > Always saddens me Typical emotional manipulation prevalent on here and other forums - "oh, the humanity!" "wouldn't someone think of the children?" > under threat of persecution Absurd hyperbole. The worst that can happen to you for the crime of theft in modern-day America is fines and jail time. No cutting off of hands or execution, like in the past. > people who take the >2000 year old concept of a library into the digital age People are taking the ancient concept of a library into the digital age - it just doesn't look like a normal library, because technology changes it. Saying "ok, now this book can be lent out an infinite number of times simultaneously" - that's nothing close to the translation of the concept of a library into the digital age. And this kind of piracy is, uh, more than that. > Why can't everybody legally share and spread knowledge as they please? You're perfectly free to do that! With some edge cases like classified information, you are perfectly free to share any knowledge that you wish. You are not free to share specific literary works as you wish, because those literary works are products of the time and effort of individuals, which you have no right to. But knowledge itself? Go for it. You want to communicate the fact that the area of a circle grows proportionally to the square of its radius? Nobody is stopping you. (paywalled journal articles are an entirely different issue, but only because most paywalled articles were written using taxpayer funding)