To understand how hackers see piracy, I suggest reading Eric Raymond's open letter to Chris Dodd:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155

Money quote:

    We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry,
    but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any
    nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and
    thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting
    with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to
    devise an honest way to make money.

    I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how
    widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims
    about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough
    that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having
    laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we
    consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse.

    Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us
    don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this:
    if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the
    content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as
    the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast
    scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple
    our computers.

    We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess
    are with the artists being ripped off by both sides.

Note that the Rails Tutorial is neither part of Hollywood nor part of the music industry. It is distributed as DRM-free files that don't restrict your freedom in any way. When you make a purchase at railstutorial.org, the proceeds go directly to the "artist" (which in this case happens to be me).

As the author of the tutorial, I would of course rather you obtain the files legally. But if you do find an illegal copy, end up learning Rails, and get a high-paying job as a Rails developer, please tell your employer how you learned it. :-)

Funny how the attitude of HN users change their mind about content piracy when it's closer to something like what they work on.

It might be in the spirit of HN but not in the spirit of being decent considering the hardwork that must of gone into this great resource.