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Comment by RomanPushkin | Hacker News Reader

> "Access Duration: 84 Months"...

> Despite all the warning signs, I went ahead and bought the ebook...

> ...allow me to retire from having to write the tools that bypass your restrictions.

You either agree to the rules, or you're breaking them. If you're breaking the rules, authors won't get compensated and we won't see other Human Kenetics books. This should be illegal.

Personally, I would love to pay hundreds for a limited access to books I would like to read. But folks aren't inspired too much about writing books today that can make them a living, since there are pirates everywhere. They want free content, because "information should be free". No, it shouldn't. Pay for it.

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This is a ridiculous take.

There were no such restrictions on books after you legitimately purchased them for hundreds of years now.

If you buy the hardcopy of the very same book, no such restriction would apply.

Rip-off schemes, where the publishers uses DRM to cripple the reading experience by providing the content via a proprietary reader with bad UX, is one of the very reasons people resort to pirating in the first place.

What is ridiculous take? Authors want to sell access to information they've collected, improved, filtered, and so on. They invested tremendous amount of effort into making this available to you for a very low price (less than $1/month). The sharing is implemented the certain way, super inconvenient - but you have been informed multiple times in advance, and accepted that.

> There were no such restrictions on books after you legitimately purchased them for hundreds of years now.

For hundreds of years there were no book pirates, and computers. Even libraries buy books so they can share to a limited audience.

> For hundreds of years there were no book pirates

What did monks do if not copy books?

I fear an old sci-fi scene I imagined many moons ago could come true one day in the distant future: our civilization is gone and the only information left is stored in what remains of the Internet, so alien explorers tap into it to gather all information they could about us, but save for a few free books, everything else is locked behind tight DRM, and they finally are forced to leave failing to preserve any knowledge about us.

I can't but think what would have happened to our knowledge of some ancient languages had the Rosetta Stone scribes applied DRM to their texts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

Book piracy is as old as copyright. There were presses putting out editions unauthorised by the Stationers' Company when they held a legal monopoly in England, and the US was a famous hotbed of book piracy throughout the 19th Century. Dickens, amongst others, was not happy.

You seem to have missed the part where he paid for the book. He did pay for it, he just wanted to be able to use it in a more convenience way.

> Personally, I would love to pay hundreds for a limited access to books I would like to read.

… Why? I'd assume that this was sarcastic, except that the sarcastic reading seems to support the post with which you seem to be arguing, and the rest of the paragraph:

> But folks aren't inspired too much about writing books today that can make them a living, since there are pirates everywhere. They want free content, because "information should be free". No, it shouldn't. Pay for it.

seems to be sincere.

>If you're breaking the rules, authors won't get compensated and we won't see other Human Kenetics books. This should be illegal.

so second-hand bookshops should be illegal too?

I'm sad this was downvoted. I think it would make a more interesting discussion for unpopular opinions to be present and engaged with rather than downvoted into invisibility.

I think you make a fair point, if you don't want to agree to the terms of a transaction, don't participate in the transaction with the intent of breaking the terms. This is the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing in any contract.

If the seller had good faith, they wouldn't use DRM. Since they operate in bad faith, there's nothing wrong with pirating their stuff.

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