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Originally Posted by ProfCrash
Unless a book is offered for free by the author or publisher, downloading a book from an unauthorized site is illegal.
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That's actually not as clear-cut as you make it out to be. It will depend on your jurisdiction and a few other factors. But lets put it this way: re-selling such downloaded material is illegal, and rightly so.
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It is the same thing as walking into a bookstore and walking out of the bookstore without paying for the hardback you stuck in your backpack.
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Again, not quite. In your example you actually steal a tangible object (the owner no longer has it), in the first example you download a file (violating copyright, perhaps, but the owner still has it.)
I have to disagree. One is theft, the other (possibly/probably) a copyright violation. Equally objectionable, it might be argued, but not the same thing at all.