I just talked to other kids and we pooled money to buy the book and then photocopy it. It was rampant piracy. I think we might have then either sold the book (likely) or returned it (unlikely) after photocopying it.
It taught me that there are limits to my ethics. Knowing full well that I am violating a social contract that many others are abiding by, I still did it. If I can act on this particular line, then it's just a matter of degree between me and those who more egregiously violate our shared rules.
After all, we had a massive advantage against kids who worked hard to afford the books. Even if they made $15/hr (outrageous), they would still have spent 10 hours on that book alone.
I've noticed a lot of college aged kids in particular becoming much more anti-piracy. About textbooks even. I've heard reports of people being kicked off of private discord servers for sharing a link to the course textbook.
Somehow the PR campaign has gained some traction. I hope it's not a foothold.
You really think that the country that passed the DMCA and strongly pressures all its trading partners to enforce IP protection, is ever going to scan every book and upload it straight to a project that has already been associated with “piracy”?
In any event, the prospect that in some enlightened future states are going to scan their library holdings, is little comfort for people in the present who rely on libraries to get all that wealth of knowledge unavailable in digital form.
I wonder if those 72% of no-banners really want pirated photocopies of copyright books in their school library, along with color picture books of violent child pornography. Surely the questions were misleading or open to different interpretations by different respondents.
I don't doubt people will get pirated copies instead of using the paper versions, but the existence of the paper versions allows them to pretend they read the paper in a legit way. I'm not taking sides for that sort of behaviour or against it, just that I expect that will be the workflow.
The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).
Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.
If you did publish that book, then it was widely received, touched people’s lives, and changed them, then theoretically had every copy taken away from them, would you agree then that it might be robbing those people?
I am not surprise there will be concerted movement to pirate these woke original non-censored books to hit the publishers pocket very hard. Used to see parents in my area strongly encourage buying books even if e-version. Now they actively recommend pirated way....down to which sites and how to best display with best format. They are the tech boom generations and they even actively teaching older boomers to do so. Publishers have no idea what hits them for going woke.
Blaming the children in impoverished towns in places like Louisiana for "stealing" information over blaming the politicians who refuse after all this time to make authoring works sustainable or the system that enforces the same is ridiculous. I'm totally sure that twelve year old "stealing" bytes from LibGen over the wire in their rural town without a library worth its salt is just ripping that sandwich away from the author.
Tell me, though, how someone who can't afford books would be able to buy them in the first place? How are they taking food from the author's mouth? Complete and utter hogwash.
It seems unlikely to me that piracy is a major factor, as headline-grabbing as it often tends to be. It's hard for me to even hazard a guess how the IA's "emergency library" would really affect things; it's not piracy in any conventional understanding of the term, but maybe that makes it more likely to cost authors potential sales, because it's so easy to read the book for free. But I want to triple underline that maybe and surround it with question marks.
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