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Comment by tucosan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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

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