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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Another way of phrasing that: The book costs as much as work that took dozens of people years to make.

Also if you were to somehow poll everyone reading this and ask "Did you buy this book?" you'd get some number, x. But if the book were priced at $5, then $5y would be much greater than $40x.

I bought a bamboo fineline pencil for $50 the other day. It's a tool that will serve me for at least a year. It's unclear whether this book would.

I want work like this to exist, and for the author to be rewarded for it. But ultimately, in an era when words are infinitely and instantaneously copyable, the economic value of words seems to drop.

Given the choice between stealing knowledge and not stealing knowledge, when you wouldn't have paid for it anyway, where's the harm?

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The harm is less people writing books like this in the future. Every dollar this book gets in revenue not only goes partly to the author, but goes into the record as profits for that "genre" of books. Every dollar of revenue for this book increases the value of the advance the author receives for the next book, increases the probability that another author writing the same kind of material will get accepted for publication. The harm you create by stealing this book is that the market for that knowledge is destroyed.

Technology destroyed the market, not users of it.

I think you could've made the same sort of argument against movies or music before netflix and napster, but here we are, and the markets still seem thirsty for new content.

Content is stolen if and only if a user tries to steal it, so I don't understand how you are absolving them of responsibility. People pay for Netflix and I guarantee you that if people stopped paying for it, Netflix originals would stop being made.

> I think you could've made the same sort of argument against movies or music before netflix and napster, but here we are, and the markets still seem thirsty for new content.

Because reasonable adults are paying for content which they want, directly via movie tickets, indirectly via e.g. Netflix and Spotify.

Libraries, the same arguments apply to libraries. Which by your logic are not morally justified.

> Given the choice between stealing knowledge and not stealing knowledge, when you wouldn't have paid for it anyway, where's the harm?

As a working adult, time spent reading a book is both more limited and more valuable than $40. If you wouldn't have bought it anyways, why is it worth your time stealing and reading it?

Although it was an unpopular opinion at the time, I agree with Metallica's outspoken moral opposition to Napster circa 2000.

The arguments you make could equally well be applied to libraries.

Libraries “steal” money from authors by making books more freely available, in largely the same way that piracy does.

They also make books available to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

Reductio ad absurdum.

“If you wouldn't have bought it anyways, why is it worth your time stealing and reading it?”

This is literally the same thing as getting a book from a library. The exact same argument applies.

Throwing Latin around doesn’t progress a discussion.

Pirate away bro, it’s just like a library, you’re correct. The word “library” is derived from the Latin word “liber”, meaning book.

You repeatedly call me “dude” and “bro”. You assume many people can afford a $40 book.

To me you pretty much typify what’s wrong with modern tech culture, a total lack of empathy or understanding that there is a world outside of that which you live.

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