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Originally Posted by Tar
To answer your question - yes my principles do extend to supporting the authors of the content that I like. For this I am supporting several authors directly (albeit not by much and certainly not all authors that I'd like to support, after all not all of them accept donations in any form).
As I said this is a complex topic but let me try and share my opinion:
Not all money you pay for books go to authors. In fact, firstly at least in the things I read, in MORE than 90% the money would NOT go to the author. More than 50% of what I read is free anyway (mostly read ancient or technical stuff, and things people want to get out into the open for free). For the remaining ~40% most of the authors are already dead, etc. (don't care who "owns" or rererepublishes it much). The money would go to someone else. For the less than 10%:
There are authors that I like and that I dislike.
The ones I like are sometimes very rich sometimes dirt poor. I don't care about supporting the rich ones so I disproportionally try to support the dirt poor authors that I like. I believe that is the moral, not to mention intelligent thing to do for me. This way my money has a way bigger impact on production of good literature (so benefits all) not to mention helps the author to be more motivated and just to pay their bills.
For rich authors I don't care about throwing another few bucks their way just because that's the common thing to do. I have better uses for my money than to stack it on someone's pile (even if I like them). It's just economical thinking really. You invest money where it counts.
For the authors I dislike, -rich or not- I do not see the need to support their writing endevours. I want less, not more of that literature and not going to pay them just because I had the displeasure of getting to know their works.
It may not be legal but being prohibited doesn't make it morally wrong. In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice.
I have the abiltiy to circumvent the law and do the morally correct thing so I do it.
My method is not without flaw, especially since it is a rare method so doesn't have the infrastructure for it, but I don't let it stop me.
As i mentioned before, my way has a flaw of many authors not supporting 'donations', and it is a big problem for me, I wish that changed faster. Though I'm happy more and more authors reach out to the community and accept support in any way. Truly times are changing.
But another problem is:
Some books are released without a living author but let's say with a new translation. Translating books costs a little money and some translations are important work and I would like to support them, too. However, I had never supported a translating person for their work. So this is another flaw in my method - such people go unsupported. I wish that changed but I try to compensate by supporting wonderful authors instead, since I have that ability.
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Denial's more than just a river in Egypt. Your entire argument is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
You can try to pretty it up and justify it however you want: "I'm not stealing! Taking a free copy is not the same as walking out of a store with a book in my pocket..."
Ultimately, you are receiving a product/work for which you have not paid.
Do you use some spreadsheet to determine when an author has benefited enough from their writing that you no longer have to worry about stealing their work? What is the cutoff, in exact dollars? Do you somehow track their finances to know who makes enough for you to steal from guilt free versus who you steal from but feel really bad for it?
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Lastly: Libraries.
http://publiclibrariesonline.org/201...library-books/
There is no difference between an ebook torrent site and a library. Both buy a copy and share it with others. Libraries pay no additional money for the authors by the number of books read or anything like that. Just like torrent sites.
The only difference is libraries are government approved. Library readers are NOT supporting anyone. I know there are quite a few library-only readers here on this forum as well.
Again: Something being legal or not does not make it right or wrong. Although people have a dangerous habbit of feeling right when following the path of least resistance so there's that.
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You don't know the first thing about how public libraries work.
A library doesn't purchase a copy of a recent Stephen King bestseller for cover price and loan it endlessly for 'free'.