Quote:
Originally Posted by BillSmithBooks
My royalty on a printed book is less than a dollar.
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Authors do need to be paid.
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Most textbooks cost upwards of 70-100$
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Sure
authors need
(or more accurately should) be paid
, but there is a rather large gap between 50c and a RRP.Ergo, "stealing" a book by downloading it somewhere else than from a "store" means "robbing"
you of 50c. It's pretty hard to call that activity "criminal". (And no, the fact that others do it too doesn't make my act more criminal).
As far as I can tell, however, people hardly ever argue that
authors don't deserve any money; they generally argue either that an author's offspring doesn't deserve to freeload off mom/dad's work (other than through direct inheritance of money), that authors shouldn't really have to stop working for the rest of their lives after writing only one book (although that argument is made more often in the music than in the writing industry), or most often that (textbook) publishers (worst of all) tend to charge extraordinary (read: extortionate) prices for those books, which students (who are
forced to buy those books by their teachers) then have to cough up.
The nepotism (profs forcing people to buy their own books, or to buy books of people they have "agreements" with) and cartel-like behavior (I can't for the life of me imagine that textbooks really are that costly to produce, especially when I see the profits those publishers make) is what encourages people not to "respect" copyright legislation; not the fact that they begrudge the author his/her measly 50c-5$ per book sold.