Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
You aren't borrowing or buying eBooks. Are you planing on stealing them?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Deskisamess
From where are you getting your books? The only alternatives are downloading from piracy sites.
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If you don't believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
The words “piracy,” “theft” and “stealing” are not legally recognized words and amount to propaganda. Propaganda that has billions of dollars worth of industries supporting it.
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-banned...-trial-131129/
No one on the other side (supporters of free sharing) has any financial incentive to fight this propaganda so these words are now in common use.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Mostly I hope your principles extend to supporting authors whose work you read. You aren't going to borrow books and you aren't going to buy them, so either you read only public domain work or your principles don't amount to much.
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Again you are making a very reasonable, logical point. Respect for consistent thinking.
This is not an easy question to answer and has many aspects to it and is hard to paint white or black (and should not be painted as either so I hope you guys can accept the discussion positively).
Firstly, thank you MR for allowing this discussion - I read the rules and did not find anything prohibiting discussions of content sharing (legal or not) as long as means to break the law are not provided (they are not). So this discussion is allowed (unless deemed OT).
To answer your question - yes my principles do extend to supporting the authors of the content that I like. For this I am supporting several authors directly (albeit not by much and certainly not all authors that I'd like to support, after all not all of them accept donations in any form).
As I said this is a complex topic but let me try and share my opinion:
Not all money you pay for books go to authors. In fact, firstly at least in the things I read, in MORE than 90% the money would NOT go to the author. More than 50% of what I read is free anyway (mostly read ancient or technical stuff, and things people want to get out into the open for free). For the remaining ~40%
most of the authors are already dead, etc. (don't care who "owns" or rererepublishes it much). The money would go to someone else. For the less than 10%:
There are authors that I like and that I dislike.
The ones I like are sometimes very rich sometimes dirt poor. I don't care about supporting the rich ones so
I disproportionally try to support the dirt poor authors that I like. I believe that is the moral, not to mention intelligent thing to do for me. This way my money has a way bigger impact on production of good literature (so benefits all) not to mention helps the author to be more motivated and just to pay their bills.
For rich authors I don't care about throwing another few bucks their way just because that's the common thing to do. I have better uses for my money than to stack it on someone's pile (even if I like them). It's just economical thinking really. You invest money where it counts.
For the authors I dislike, -rich or not- I do not see the need to support their writing endevours. I want less, not more of that literature and
not going to pay them just because I had the displeasure of getting to know their works.
It may not be legal but
being prohibited doesn't make it morally wrong. In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice.
I have the abiltiy to circumvent the law and do the morally correct thing so I do it.
My method is not without flaw, especially since it is a rare method so doesn't have the infrastructure for it, but I don't let it stop me.
As i mentioned before,
my way has a flaw of many authors not supporting 'donations', and it is a big problem for me, I wish that changed faster. Though I'm happy more and more authors reach out to the community and accept support in any way. Truly times are changing.
But another problem is:
Some books are released without a living author but let's say with a new translation. Translating books costs a little money and some translations are important work and I would like to support them, too. However, I had never supported a translating person for their work. So this is another flaw in my method - such people go unsupported. I wish that changed but I try to compensate by supporting wonderful authors instead, since I have that ability.
Lastly: Libraries.
http://publiclibrariesonline.org/201...library-books/
There is no difference between an ebook torrent site and a library. Both buy a copy and share it with others. Libraries pay no additional money for the authors by the number of books read or anything like that. Just like torrent sites.
The only difference is libraries are government approved. Library readers are NOT supporting anyone. I know there are quite a few library-only readers here on this forum as well.
Again: Something being legal or not does not make it right or wrong. Although people have a dangerous habbit of feeling right when following the path of least resistance so there's that.