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Too good to miss?
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Rhiannon
5290 posts

Re: Too good to miss?
Feb 23, 2012, 11:31
Yeah I bet he is.

This is causing me much pause for thought this morning. It's a bit complicated isn't it. Though I suppose one way it's pretty straightforward, that if you take something that's not yours without the permission of the person that produced it (or owns it) then that's stealing isn't it. Stealing being generally considered Bad behaviour. I think your ebay person is particularly galling because they're making money out of the authors' sweat. It seems worse than uploading those books illegally in the first place. Though that's not exactly honest in itself. But he's even parasitising those people, he hasn't even done all the hard (though illegal) work of scanning those books in. (I wonder what the quality of the scans is, I mean turning a book into an ebook is a massive job surely)

And I was thinking, are books a slightly different case from music. Downloading music for free off the internet, that's dishonest obviously because the musicians who created it are getting nothing and you're getting the benefit. But you get the benefit so easily, you jsut have to listen. With textbooks, you can't get the knowledge out of them so easily, you'd actually have to concentrate properly. So there's hundreds of books on that torrent, is anyone actually ever going to read them all, it's doubtful. Knowledge, that's something that shouldn't be squirrelled away and deliberately hidden from people. But if people want to really properly read a book, that's a big investment of their time and energy. So unless it's unobtainable any other way (possible I admit) then is it so much trouble to head to the library / order it from a bookshop and do it properly, if you really want to read it. (this is all a bit vague I realise). Er so maybe not much damage will be done to 690 of those 700 authors because you'll not read those books and you'd never have bought them anyway. But I suppose the trouble comes that for every person downloading them, they'll want a different 10 of those 700. So all the authors lose out in the grand scheme.

no this is getting too tangled isn't it.

This isn't supposed to be a personal stab honestly, it's just musing on the topic in general. Just because something's easy to do and nobody sees you doing it doesn't make it right. Suppose it's just down to personal choice in the end, like any cultural rules, and you have to risk any comeback from the law / unscrupulous people nicking your credit card details etc.
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Re: Too good to miss? (Sanctuary)		 Replies:
Re: Too good to miss? (Sanctuary)
Re: Too good to miss? (Howburn Digger)
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