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Originally Posted by peaceridge
Another said that when trying new authors, she downloaded pirated copies, read part of them to assure herself it was enjoyable, trashed those she didn’t like and bought those she did like. So is this piracy?
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At least in the case of Kindle books it's easier to download a sample to try it out. I do that all the time. I probably buy about half the books I sample.
A long time ago, when programs were expensive and I found myself wasting a lot of money buying programs that turned out not to be useful for me, I started getting pirate copies of programs to try them out. If I found the program useful I bought it. No exceptions. If I didn't find it useful I deleted it. It rarely took more than a couple of hours to decide and often just a few minutes.
I began doing this after a year of carefully counting my software purchases. That year I spent about $2,000 on programs, having bought a new, more powerful computer. I actually used less than half of those. So I decided to do something about it.
Immoral? Maybe. Very, very practical. And another benefit was that I ended up with useful programs I might not have taken a chance on due to their high prices. I was making pretty good money. I was a programmer with a better than average job. I could afford the $2,000. But why waste money!
By the way, one of those programs I tried was Truespace, a rather expensive 3D animation program (although not as expensive as it's competitors) that I never would have bought without trying first. I had a lot of fun with that program and I bought every version starting with 1.1 all the way through the final version years later when Microsoft bought the company and shut it down. I probably spent a couple of thousand just on that program. It was probably the program that I enjoyed more than any program I've ever owned. Once, in their forum I mentioned how I got started with the program. I made some people in that forum pretty unhappy.
Am I justifying my theft? I paid for it. Even if piracy was theft I don't feel the least bit bad about it. The only losers were the guys making software I couldn't use.
Anyone who thinks this was evil might make a good protagonist in a novel. Or maybe not the protagonist.
Barry