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Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
Just to be a pedant, what I actually asked in this poll was about the moral question - not what was legal or what people actually do - so I was surprised that people didn't think it OK, in a moral sense, to make a copy when the author was dead.
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Fair enough, and I'm hardly one to point the finger at others' pedantry
I find it less surprising than you do that people don't find it okay in a moral sense. My gut feeling is that most people approach this as a binary issue - either copying is morally okay, or it's not - and whether or not the author is differently-alive doesn't factor into it any more than the author's perceived wealth does. If copying is stealing, it's still stealing if the person being stolen from is rich as Croesus (unless you have a Robin Hood complex) or dead (unless they've been dead long enough for stealing from them to be archeology or in the US public domain, which is starting to look fairly similar in terms of elapsed time).
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It's an interesting reason to pay for such content to encourage the current copyright holders to publish more of their back catalogue. I'm a bit skeptical about the extent to which that works, but if it did work, it strikes me as a good reason.
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Well, I reckon it can't possibly hurt, and may help, right? And my preference has always been to buy new if possible, whether paper or electronic.
Going to the darknet is a lot like going to one of Those used bookstores - the ones that smell like mould and cat pee, and have teetering piles of rotting cardboard boxes full of books stacked to the ceiling - there's no particular guarantee you'll be able to find what you're looking for, and even if you can it's liable to be in pretty terrible shape, but if the book's out of print or otherwise unavailable for sale, it's the only game in town.