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Comment by ccine | Hacker News Reader

I have tried my best to skim through all the discussions and no one seems to have noticed the demand for zlibrary in third world countries. In a country like China, it is the only avenue for most researchers and students at the bottom to gain expertise. When you talk about classism, you should not ignore such groups.

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In my experience, people in the USA don’t extend their moral virtues to foreign countries, and when they do it’s common for this to be done in an unequal fashion. Often, people will respond telling you that you’re guilty of “what-about-ism” despite you merely universalizing a value that they themselves claim to have. I’ve ceased trying to converse about moral virtues with my fellow Americans as a result. It’s every bit as unwelcome as talking money in the USA.

That's a new trend, to dismiss hypocrisy by calling it whataboutism.

IMHO the latter only legitimately applies where the comparison is tangential/apples to oranges, or if "two wrongs don't make a right" is being argued.

"Appeal to hypocrisy" was recognized as a logical fallacy long before it was called "whataboutism".

The trouble is that while it's a logical fallacy, it's not so clearly a moral fallacy.

This is one of the strongest arguments for 'piracy' and it should be discussed more.

In the 'western' world piracy is a dubiously moral way to save money, and employed people can access the work by saving or doing a little more work like visiting a library.

But the copyright system prohibits much of the world from gaining knowledge and participating in culture. Over 1.9 billion people, or 26.2 percent of the world’s population, were living on less than $3.20 per day in 2015. This is not a particularly moral situation, and piracy directly addresses it at the expense of the western world's property rights.

This is such a good point. Many of us may be able to afford a couple hundred dollars for a textbook but people in poorer countries don't. Without services like Libgen and Z-lib, we are effectively restricting access to information and only making it available to an affluent class who can afford it. In my opinion, the information should flow freely... Aaron Schwartz pretty much gave his life for this principle.

I find it interesting how the domain of things people think they're entitled to is constantly expanding. As usual, at someone else's expense and backed by all sorts of rationalization.

The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Article 19:

"freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"

Universal library access over the internet seems to qualify.

Article 17:

"Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property."

Says nothing about "intellectual property".

Article 23:

"Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection."

Doesn't ban libraries, but says that authors have a right to fair pay.

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