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Comment by internetter | Hacker News Reader

I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve used shadow libraries before.

1. More often or not, I am in search of a single piece of information. Buying hundreds of pages of writing is not economical for this goal

2. Sometimes, I own the physical copy and want to search it. Buying a digital copy is a waste when I already own the physical one

3. Occasionally, the content is available to me via my library, but in the case of point 1, traveling all the ways is a waste of time. Some people don’t have access to a library.

4. Sometimes, I want to decide between two books, or see if the book has what I want before I purchase it.

5. A few times, the content I want disappeared, but there it is at the shadow library.

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If you're not ashamed to admit it, perhaps that's because you recognize that it's not stealing, and that you don't actually believe in the concept of Intellectual Property, the legal fiction (invented relatively recently to prop up industries) that all of this is based on.

There are lots of us, so don't be afraid to say it loud. Intellectual Property doesn't exist and copyright as currently implemented is unjust, antisocial, and harmful.

Count me among those who don't believe in intellectual property. There are so many of us. Every time I express this, I find that I'm not alone.

Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on information, on bits, on numbers. And everybody intuitively understands the absurdity of it. Infringement happens every day at massive scales, people do not even realize they are infringing, it is natural to them.

Here in Brazil shadow libraries essentially make research possible. Paying for ebooks in US dollar is prohibitive to most academics.

In Iran it’s the only option. Sanctions basically make it impossible to buy books.

Being able to access computing books from late 80s and early 90s is great: DOS AutoCAD tutorial books (Laying out PCBs, tutorials) to see how it's changed. I also like being able to access books about programming the Amiga, I find that great. A lot of those authors have made the books available publicly for non-commercial use.

Being able to read old magazines of Byte magazine and the tutorials in Amiga Format and Cu Amiga are great as well. But those articles in early Byte magazine were of an amazing quality.

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