Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
The Darknet is like a lending library *except that the books are stolen.*
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And readers who steal from authors are scum.
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So, I'm a scum.And I have no shame in admitting that. Living in an eastern country I grew up with downloading music and movies for free off the infamous dark net. Back then, when a good salary was around $200 /month, paying $15 for any entertainment-type file was... well, stupid. I was a student with practically no money. There were no laws about copyright then in these backwaters.
Of course, now I grew up, we're more modern, downloading now IS stealing but I still have no problem going to my favorite torrent site when in need. I do sympathize with the writers, I really do. But it's still all about the money, in the end (my money).
What I do to ease my conscience is that I donate money to make up for my immoral ways. A $50 donation to one of those book-offering dark net sites for giving me 100 or maybe 200 books I like. Beats the hell of buying them at $18 apiece.
And I don't give a fig that the pirated books are low quality, spelling errors and bad formatted OCR versions. As long as I am able to read them and there are no missing pages, I am happy. I don't look the gift horse in the mouth. If I could help fix them and make them more readable, I would.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanthe
All thanks to the OP for starting this thread, but if you couldn't find the books you wanted, then you weren't on the top sites. Most of them aren't open registration and you have to be invited to join them.
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Being an old acquaintance of the dark net, I must say it is considerably harder to get ebooks that movies or music. I only found a couple of sites with free registration, and for the life of me cannot get invitations to any non-free ones. And I have been trying for weeks now. So there, you can take solace in the fact that even old sharks can't get into those bountiful waters.
My point is that piracy will forever be there. We want to sugar coat it with nice principles behind it, but at the end of the day it's about time and money. Since time=money, it's all about money.
Disclaimer:
That is the post I would write if I were indeed doing such nasty things as going to the dark net for books, but that is not me, of course. It is all hypothetical or is true of a friend of a friend of my cousin.