4 ms·

The mental gymnastics happening in this thread to justify pirating books is pretty disappointing. Especially on HN, where I think a lot of our livelihoods depe

• dislikedtom2 4y ago
  nothing wins the mental gymnastics when people justify how they own something that has no shape or form, namely information and ideas
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tarunmuvvala 4y ago
  Similar is the case from people who can't afford. They are not asking you to give it for free. What they want is that the information accessible at affordable prices. The current situation is an ABC book either cost $10-$20-$30 or they can get it pirated. there is no middle ground. People move to piracy due to lack of affordability and options.
  • szundi 4y ago
    In eastern europe sometimes it is the lack of legal options to actually access content. Example: star wars shows were unaccessible in any way other, academia papers, lots of books are not translated and published etc. Not making a moral judgement, just adding color.
  • 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    Ah, the downvotes from the extremely privileged (most of whom do not even realize this). I am from one of those countries where we pretty much cannot afford "legal" content. In my shitty town the median salary is something like $300, at least half of which goes towards paying rent if you don't have your own house, while we're being asked to pay prices that were established for developed countries with median salaries at 10× of ours or above. Steam is one of very few exceptions and it's really popular here even among students and such (just like everywhere else). Basically, if you want to charge me $50 for the book, you're not losing anything, simply because I cannot afford it anyway. Imagine if you had to pay $500 for books, $600 for movies, etc.
    • anhner 4y ago
      Completely agree, and most people in developed countries don't even realise or think about this.
    • _thisdot 4y ago
      Interesting. I don’t know where you’re from. But in India, usually publishers publish an Exclusive to South Asian market version of the book which costs around $4-$20. For example, The Pragmatic Programmer costs $10 in Indian stores, while it costs $50 in US.
    • __rito__ 4y ago
      The median price of a programming book in India is what I could buy lunch and dinner with for a month while in college. For one book.
• books-r-free 4y ago
  > How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy I would, as, in most cases, code alone doesn't really make money.
  • czhu12 4y ago
    I don't think thats true. Obvious example would be offline desktop apps like photoshop, any single player game, etc. Less obvious but just as relevant would be Snowflake, Clickup, etc letting me just deploy and host their software in our data center instead of relying on their cloud.
• bigbacaloa 4y ago
  A lot of our livelihoods depend on access to books and journal articles that are sold at exorbitant prices by scientific publishers for whom we do all the work of editing, copyediting, reviewing, and writing ... Not all of os work in the well funded USA ... I have to go through a paywall to read my own old articles ...
  • czhu12 4y ago
    Would you be in favor of purging all non academic books from piracy sites?
    • bigbacaloa 4y ago
      What is a non academic book? This is typical strawman stuff.
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  Using Amazon as a way to donate to authors when it takes 70% of the cut (authors get less for physical books) and delivers an inferior service to zlibrary is absurd. That’s not morality, that’s servitude. At least PayPal only takes a few percent. If you feel bad about privacy, pay a random author half the Amazon price of your library and you’ll be a better person than somebody who meekishly shovels Bezos a ton of money in misguided morality. One that makes reading an exclusive right of the wealthy.
• qwezxcrty 4y ago
  In academic books' case, there is a parasite in between the author and reader: the publisher. Which we know they tends to charge exorbitant price for copyediting or digitizing by low-cost labor. The authors receive only a tiny fraction of the sale if not nothing. I will do whatever I can to help the parasites die. For non-academic books, I don't know how things works, maybe there is a mechanism where the author can gain revenue from selling books. So I always pay for them and the priated copy I downloaded is just for archival.
• sireat 4y ago
  Copyright should be 5-10 years tops if that at all. I work at a large national library and teach at a university, so have to deal with copyright issues every day. Everyone agrees copyright is broken. I release all my personal code under MIT license, and if someone does want to violate that license by not attributing me I am completely fine with that.
• Emma_Goldman 4y ago
  I really disagree. I work in academia in Europe, where we are in the ludicrous position of writing articles and books with public funding, which are gifted to publishing companies who then sell it back to the public at extortionate prices. Articles are just pdfs, and copyrighting them and charging subscriptions only big-budget libraries can afford, is as inane as it is anti-democratic.
• throwaway74829 4y ago
  I don't see why it needs justification. I want a book; I don't want to pay for it; so I pirate it. And then I go about my day without ever thinking about it again.