Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
@Ankh: What does calibre have to do with anything? If you insist on using calibre as an example, the correct example would be if someone renamed calibre to sat halibre and then setup a website that sells downloads of halibre for $10.
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As a matter of fact, I did pay $10 for calibre, even though I knew it was available for free. Was this wrong of me? I rather like paying things I value.
It's unfortunate that someone would use PG books to make money from them, but the PG volunteers know they cannot prevent people from redistributing their work because it doesn't belong to them. Is it ethical to profit from someone else's work that they made freely available? I don't think it's
ethical. So there's your agreement. But I also see no way to prevent it from happening. I'm not sure why you insist on trying to remove all legal arguments. Once you believe something is "wrong", the natural next step in thought process is "how do I stop it from happening?"
All that said, I find that the PG books are horrendously formatted with line breaks and missing italics, etc. I will gladly pay someone a couple bucks to either 1. sell me a collection so I can conveniently download it all at once, or 2. format the text better so that it fits my definition of "readable".