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Comment by fractallyte | Hacker News Reader

The sense of entitlement in some of this discussion is quite alarming.

If I'm a writer of fiction, you are not automatically entitled to my novel, into which I expended an enormous amount of effort and time. You're expected to pay a fair price for it. If you demand "free" entertainment, write it yourself!

If I'm a textbook author, "information" does not "want to be free". There's a huge distinction between knowledge and information. Knowledge is "out there"; you're free to collect it by yourself. Information is my interpretation of that knowledge, structured and packaged into a book. Information is not free. You are not entitled to the product of my labor - pay fairly for it, please!

Note this this post is not about publishers, but authors: the originators of creative thought and structured information. You do not have a right to that work without a fair exchange.

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In a free market for books, the publisher sets a price and then the buyer compares that price with other options and makes a choice. They can choose to buy it new, buy it used, buy a substitute, or even not to buy any book at all. In this situation, piracy is absolutely unethical.

Textbooks are not a free market. The person making the decision in the textbook market is not the person whose finances are at stake. The student is often left with only two choices: buy it new or buy it used.

Knowing that they are very close to having a completely captive customer base, textbook publishers do everything they can to make "buy it used" no longer an option either. As soon the used price drops low enough that people stop buying it new, rather than lowering prices they shuffle the problems and trot out a new edition. No extra work was done by the author to merit this perpetual $200 price tag.

In this situation, I can hardly begrudge college students who try to find an affordable option to get out of this scam, even if it's illegal. The textbook industry broke the social contract, so our ethical obligations to them are nullified.

I agree!

I'm disgusted with authors who sign up to this.

There are alternatives (such as self-publishing) that would hugely benefit the creators.

But, even more important is integrity. New editions only when necessary. Fairly priced. The software industry introduced the concept of 'upgrades' - that's equally possible in publishing now; no excuses.

There is a deep irony that most technology is built on achievements by Newton, Babbage, ect, ect. Many scientists and authors who depended on universities, authorship and royalties for their bread and butter.

And now that they've sowed the seed of computing, we want to turn around and destroy the very methods and media they used to create it.

Isaac Newton alive today, couldn't make a penny for his discovery of calculus through 15yrs of work. All the money and women would go to ChatGPT or Wikipedia or whatever research instituition technically owns his work.

It's obvious that there are few new ideas, real revolutions and conceptual improvements happening. It's because we killed off the incentive to work on a problem for a really long time. Piracy destroys, that's all it does.

The internet could have been a tool for emancipation, but it became a tool for mass thievery. And people have the gall to defend it, as if Google and Netfix or ChatGPT make up for the death of studying as a universal kind of progress.

Put me back to sleep. We wasted our computing revolution relacing the old media with faster, more ambigious versions of the old ones.

Information has been freely accessible and infinitely copiable for some decades now, and that has done far more social good than 'authors'. Authors should get with the times instead of shacking up with cartels who absurdly overprice books whilst paying them a pittance.

No, the ability for an author to self-publish is the greater social good.

You're belittling the work an author (without quote marks) must do to make knowledge accessible. You are not entitled to that effort, regardless of how easy it is to copy the end product.

This is the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution is simple: pay for it, or lose it.

I'm belittling it because it's obviously wrong. Every other field has survived digital piracy just fine, and the benefits of book piracy go weeeeeeeeeelll beyond short term entertainment. Like being able to educate yourself on any topic irrespective of your wealth.

Beyond that, thirty years of digital piracy have had a negligible effect on the industry as a whole, as with all other industries.

It is definitely not "small authors" pushing to close off what might be some of the greatest public sources of human knowledge in history, it's overwhelmingly the publishers, as they have catastrophized in every other field too.

Musicians have emphatically not survived digital piracy. But at least they have another avenue for possibly generating income: live performance.

Authors? Who goes to a live reading?

Lastly, you will not benefit from book piracy if you destroy an author's ability to survive by writing books. That's why I wrote: Tragedy of the Commons. I was careful to write about authors, not publishers. Pirating a self-published author is ethically wrong.

If LibGen only shares public-funded research papers maybe it deserves the praise (still illegal, obviously). But that's not how LibGen works. Not at all.

HN just really hates copyright.

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