Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
Most of those are established authors. And that was about 30 seconds of Googling. Maybe you would want to have a conversation on the precise definition of "many", but it's certainly not "ludicrous in the extreme" that some authors are very publicly pro-piracy as regards their works. I would say "many" if you can find this many on a single Google search with no search tweaks whatsoever. And these are just the authors who write about being pro-piracy.
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I must, with the greatest respect, disagree with you.
Piracy, by definition, is
unauthorised copying. If you, as an author, say "it's perfectly OK to take a copy of my book without paying for it", as you have an absolute right to choose to do, then copying the book is no longer piracy, because you've given your permission for the copying to occur.
That's very different to an author saying "it's OK to copy ANY book you want without paying for it", and (thank goodness) I don't see any of these authors doing that. I'd be pretty disgusted if any author were to say something like that. It's one thing for you to give away your own work for free; it's quite another to tell people that it's OK for them to take away the livelyhood of other authors.
But one thing slightly puzzles me. If these authors want to give away their books for free, why don't they simply do that, rather than taking the somewhat hypocritical stance of nominally "selling" them, but then saying "but it's OK to get it without paying for it"? Isn't that rather unfair to those people who have paid for the book?