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Comment by piraze | Hacker News Reader

At least "Python for Data Analysis" is a pirate copy. Wonder how many others are too. But as long as you make money from affiliate links you don't care, right?

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Lists of "curated" free books/resources etc. are a very active spam format these days. It's a simple and effective way of publishing without having any original content of your own. People love clicking on these things because they love the idea of learning.

What makes it seem like Python for Data Analysis is a pirated copy? I figured since it was hosted from Canisius College it would be legally distributed.

I don't want to host pirated content, so if it is I will remove it.

The book is not listed at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/

Also the PDF has a link to a notorious ebook pirate platform on every page. If you really believe content on college pages is legal, you must be very naive. I've never seen a naive webmaster that uses domain privacy though.

Personally I wasn't surprised to see (possibly) pirated content on an .edu site with a ~username URL, as the ~ suggested a student's page, where unauthorised content might pop up to share with classmates and stay up undetected by the college.

What surprised me is that the owner of the Canisius page appears to be teaching staff rather than a student. The other books hosted there seem to be legitimately freely available, however, so I'm guessing that was also a naive mistake.

Thanks for that link, I actually didn't know O'Reilly had such a page.

I'm not very familiar with ebook pirating platforms. So the link didn't seem suspicious to me.

Anyway, the book was removed. Thanks again for pointing it out.

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