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Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
Whether unauthorised copying is wrong, when the author has not been compensated (and it would have been practical to do so) is a further, different question (I would say that this is wrong).
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The bolded bit is important. I used to buy a lot of paper books (I'm trying to quit the habit - so far I've been clean for almost a year). As a general rule, I bought my books new, but if the book wasn't in print, I bought it used, knowing perfectly well the author wasn't getting a penny of the sale price. If there'd been a practical means to compensate the author(s) I certainly would have done so.
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What would upset me would be someone else trying to profit by selling my work on (but that hasn't happened).
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Doesn't happen much, at least on a retail level, in the Industrial North-West, but is not uncommon in other parts of the world. I used to live in Chile, and one year the year's top selling book wasn't available for legal sale - it got slapped with an injunction about a day after it was published and pulled from all the bookstores (life lesson: if you're going to accuse lawyers, by name, of corruption, make sure they aren't best friends with high court judges), so the 'pirate publishers' began cranking out massive unauthorized print runs, and within a day the book was for sale in every market and every other street-corner. Same thing happened to other best-sellers, which were sometimes available on the street months before they were for sale in the stores (generally somebody would import a copy from Spain and use that to create new copies).