Quote from: Liam W on February 28, 2014, 09:47:47 PM

Huh, I just noticed the piracy part. Why are you paying them for stealing...?

I would say don't post.

Liam

What the hell is wrong with you? It's literally pennies on the dollar, in fact they recently reduced the minimum price of books from 5 cents to one cent. Why are we paying them for stealing? They're trying to build a high quality archive. With free file sharing, you have to rely on what people have just so happened to upload...

Quote from: RichG on February 28, 2014, 04:51:19 PM

Quote from: PA992 on February 28, 2014, 01:44:02 AM

I found an amazing ebook piracy site where all ebooks are about 95% off. Very large selection. It takes Bitcoin. Would it be OK to share it?

It's not okay to illegally download stuff, no matter how obscure the product is. Please don't, or I'll add you to my ignore list.

Piracy of books is justified in my view, as paradoxical as that may sound. My reasoning is that the world would benefit greatly if everyone had a wealth of information at their fingertips. That's not currently possible outside of piracy, as the cost of a multitude of books is prohibitively expensive for most people. I actually find it very odd that authors charge money for their books: it's not going to get read! I understand the concept of receiving money for hard work, but it would seem to me that 2,000 people reading your book instead of 50 people outweighs everything. Another thing is that these days books are more and more plentiful, and therefore people are less willing to make commitments. Someone may find it prudent to keep 100 books as reference material, never reading a single one from cover-to-cover. Making a book absolutely free enables it to go viral. I would imagine that that's highly desirable in most cases; putting any kind of copyright restriction on it inhibits that process.

I'm against the piracy of movies and things like that. I don't think people are entitled to get movies for free. I believe the stunt people should receive royalties for their work. But information? The world would greatly benefit if everyone could simply have access to any book they wanted. google pushed the copyright envelope with Google Books. They were taken to court and a judge ruled in favor of Google, declaring that truly everyone benefited from Google's project. It follows that everyone would benefit even more if they could get permanent copies completely for free. Most of the people who download a pirated copy wouldn't have paid for it ever in their life even if they weren't able to get a pirated copy. At the very most, they would simply access it via a library, wherein they would probably violate copyright by scanning more then is allowable by law and the fact that they couldn't simply download a full copy is just an example of wasting peoples' time by putting up unnecessary road blocks.