[ SECRET POST #3979 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3979 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 51 secrets from Secret Submission Post #570.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

We are talking about e books. You can often get them for free in many legitimate ways, as many people upthread have suggested. Otherwise, they are frequently $.99 or even cheaper. Don't bullshit me that you're choosing between an ebook costing literal cents and starvation. I simply don't believe you. You're probably writing this from your parents' house. Grow up.

[(Anonymous)]

I am talking about ebooks - which yep, DO often cost around $10 on Amazon, and often are NOT available from my local library.

Also no, I am not LITERALLY chosen between buying dinner and books on an every day basis. But I have this past month skipped meals to save my family money and I'm fully aware that a $5 or $10 novel COULD pay for food or gas or some other bill instead.

[(Anonymous)]

Surprise: when you are an adult you have to make these choices. Do I technically have the funds to buy myself a new book, go to the cinema or replace my gunky tube of mascara every month? Technically, yes. But that would mean I couldn't buy my kids healthy fresh fruit and veg; I'd have to offer them cheaper junkier alternatives. I had to make the choice to sacrifice my own luxuries because I couldn't afford them as well as my other responsibilities. That doesn't mean I think I'm OWED those books or movies or makeup (which would indeed make me very happy to own). If I walked into the store and stole them, I would be arrested, and that's absolutely 100% right.

[(Anonymous)]

If you walked into a store and took the physical copy of a movie or a mascara, you'd be preventing another customer form buying the object. That's stealing. But if you walked to a store, looked at mascara, and then came back home and created an exact copy of it for your personal use, nobody would arrest you, and nobody would claim that you "stole" the mascara from them.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the only way your scenario is equivalent is if you took and used a formula a specific person work hard to create in order to reproduce that mascara you like so much - created in the hope of being able to make a living by it. Haven't you just robbed them of their livelihood? And if you're ok about making a copy of someone else's intellectual property in that fashion, do you also feel that plagiarism is morally acceptable?

[(Anonymous)]

You've ever been to a DIY website?

[(Anonymous)]

Why should the fact that some people can afford to make if for free preclude others from selling theirs, though? I'm interested in you answering my original question. Do you think freely distributing someone else's hard work that they are trying to make a living from - without their knowledge or consent - is morally permissable, or not?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh no, you're misunderstanding my point. If you can find buyers, then that's great. My point is that if someone doesn't think your work is worth their money, or cannot provide the money due to their financial situation, then you're losing literally nothing if they make an exact copy of your work for their personal use. Especially if there's a million of completely legal places which offer the kind of services/products you provide for free anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

sa

tl;dr my point is that whether OP gets your book from a library or a torrent site makes zero difference to your financial situation, so it's unreasonable to approve of one source, but not the other.

[(Anonymous)]

Many libraries buy in their books. Authors get royalties from them.

[(Anonymous)]

How common is that?

[(Anonymous)]

Perfectly common. How else do you think they get them? Public Lending Right also exist. And libraries feed stats back to publishers, who may use that data when deciding whether to extend an author's contract.

[(Anonymous)]

da

Libraries buy books, and the circulation numbers of those books are one of the factors looked at by the publishing companies determining whether or not they're going to publish that next book. So no, it's not unreasonable to approve of the method that actually has some benefit for the author, and disapprove of stealing.

[(Anonymous)]

Pirates buy books too, and there's no reason why the publisher couldn't get the number of downloads and feature it in their calculations.

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of publishers are surprisingly old fashioned. They are not going to trawl multiple dodgy download sites looking for numbers. If they want stats of circulation not directly affected by them, they will look to libraries, not a load of (by their very nature) hard to find and navigate free download pages.

[(Anonymous)]

But when you're talking writing, there aren't going to be "a million of completely legal places which offer the kind of services/products you provide for free". That's your work. Your writing. No one just happened to come up with the exact same novel with the exact same wording and offer it for free by chance. They took your work and used it without your consent.

And if you're talking other kinds of goods and services, how do you feel about patents? Are they useless too? Is design in the same box as writing?

[(Anonymous)]

I meant libraries.

[(Anonymous)]

Then people like OP can take advantage of those millions of completely legal places that offer stuff for free instead of pirating things.

[(Anonymous)]

If those legal places are available 2h drive from them, why should they bother?

[(Anonymous)]

Why should they BOTHER? Because it's what's right! You sound like such an asshole wording stuff like that. Do you actually care about anyone other the yourself?

[(Anonymous)]

I fail to see how it's anyone else's problem that they live in the middle of nowhere that's two hours from a public library.

[(Anonymous)]

Wtf? What if they don't live there by choice? What if they have to spend all of their free time looking after another family member, instead of running off to the library whenever they feel like it?

But sure, screw their family. Following the law to a tee is surely more important.

[(Anonymous)]

da I am talking about ebooks - which yep, DO often cost around $10 on Amazon, and often are NOT available from my local library.

Then... read some of the books that your library does have? Or use Project Gutenberg (and maybe donate to them too) or read one of the millions of stories that are available for free on the internet? There is no shortage of reading matter in this world, if you won't buy.

Second hand bookshops and charity shops are good places to get very cheap books as well - often just a few pence. (Agreed that's not supporting the author directly but it's been a built-in part of the book retailing system for a long time and it's not a matter of "one person puts it up, umpteen people read it for free.) It's also supporting the s-h bookshop owner, therefore helping a high street somewhere, and/or the charity.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, I'll just "read something else." Not like I might specifically want to read a specific book or anything.

Look, if I can find a book I want for a reasonable price, or from a library, I'll usually do that first. But that's just NOT always the case.

[(Anonymous)]

Then you don't get to read it. There are plenty of things I want really badly that I wouldn't dream of stealing. You people sound like a bunch of children having tantrum over a sweetie.