Demonoid back online

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by NatCh

I don't recall making such a post ... certainly not any time recently. Perhaps you're thinking of someone else.

I took it to refer to your comment about some of us being 'silly' for taking an earlier post at face value - not that I found it annoying or anything .

[tompe]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Agreed. But at the same time, I don't really see any ethically sound reasons for someone else to pretend to be me.

Okay: Halloween, maybe, but I'm not that scary lookin'

Well, I do not care ethically what people are doing in the privacy of their homes for example.

I might care if my reputation is affected but it is still not a theft I care about.

[pieter]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

I took it to refer to your comment about some of us being 'silly' for taking an earlier post at face value - not that I found it annoying or anything .

hehe, I was starting to get worried I had to explain my own joke. Having somebody else explain it for me, is dampening my embarressement just that tiny little bit.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

I took it to refer to your comment about some of us being 'silly' for taking an earlier post at face value

Originally Posted by NatCh

Making something of the fact that cmbs phrased her position in stronger terms than she probably meant is pretty silly, in my opinion

That wasn't directed at taking things out of context, but rather at dissecting comments to an extreme degree in search of inconsistencies, and then raising a fuss about those minuscule inconsistencies. I do regard that as a silly thing to do. It's also not particularly helpful, nor contributory to the discussion. In fact that sort of thing can really only serve to stir up trouble.

I also note that everyone does silly things from time to time, and further that I made and make no comment about the actor, only the action, and that I did not direct it at any specific person. Doing so would also have been silly, because there were several folks joining in.

If you found it annoying that I commented that something several folks were doing was a silly thing to do, well, I'm sorry that you choose to be annoyed.

If you're annoyed because you think I was saying that you were silly, well, that's a good example of the sort of extreme comment dissection that I was talking about in the first place.

If you meant that as a joke as well, and you're not really annoyed, well then I guess I'm the one being silly now!

Originally Posted by pieter

hehe, I was starting to get worried I had to explain my own joke. Having somebody else explain it for me, is dampening my embarressement just that tiny little bit.

I see what you were saying now. I don't get the joke, but I see what you were referring to, at least.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by NatCh

That wasn't directed at taking things out of context, but rather at dissecting comments to an extreme degree in search of inconsistencies, ...

Which post did that happen in?

[NatCh]

It was the general attempt to equate excerpting a work for review purposes with simply taking a full copy of the whole book for reading purposes. Basically giving cmbs a hard time because she'd said that it was wrong to take a someone's work without permission, which she meant in the "take the whole thing" sense, but stated strongly to make a point.

[hidari]

Well, If you hate that Demonoid, Pirate Bay and other sites are discussed and "advertised" at Mobile Read, then Leave the Site. Do not log on here and enjoy your bliss. The fact is that many people can find out about the darknet without looking at Mobile Read. In fact many newspapers have articles discussing piracy and other issues on the net. They often site websites such as Pirate Bay.

Originally Posted by cmbs

It's not a question of forcing people to stop downloading illegal books, it's a question of saying "we don't discuss that here" or "you can do it but we're not going to help you in any way, we strongly disapprove of that activity". You can't control the behavior of people, but you can control what you allow in your own place.

People do a lot of things you're not letting them discuss here, things that whether I think they're right or wrong, whether they're illegal or not, they have the freedom to do. Mobile read is making a choice of what they're allowing. That's pretty much what you're saying, I just think if mobile read were more serious about not helping people in their piracy activities, you'd draw the line somewhere else. This whole "freedom of discussion" is a convenient cover. You going to allow them to discuss assassinating the president? Blowing up Dallas? I doubt it.

The fact is that this community does give pretty clear instructions on how to remove drm in several places, and this thread is an advertisement for a site which illegally provides ebooks.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by NatCh

It was the general attempt to equate excerpting a work for review purposes with simply taking a full copy of the whole book for reading purposes. Basically giving cmbs a hard time because she'd said that it was wrong to take a someone's work without permission, which she meant in the "take the whole thing" sense, but stated strongly to make a point.

I don't see anything unreasonable in the posts . I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this one.

[m-reader]

I think a chill-pill is in order for the do-not-mention-the-web-site poster.
Mate, it's the internet. There's lots of illegal stuff there. Should we not talk about it?

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

I don't see anything unreasonable in the posts . I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this one.

I can live with that. My main concern was keeping the discussion on a civil level in the first place.



I think this thread has about outlived its usefulness, so I'm closing it.

[nekokami]

I'd like to keep things civil, too. So I will discuss my own behavior and motives, rather than making assumptions about anyone else.

Regarding uploading content, this is something I'm still thinking through, but I'm not convinced (yet) of the black-and-white immorality of it. (Sorry, HarryT.) I accept that it's illegal in many jurisdictions, and for some people, that's enough. But to equate it bluntly with "theft" assumes a lot about how the content will be used that I'm not sure really holds up among book readers. I know there are people out there who just take without paying, and perhaps I'm being far too optimistic here, but I honestly think that most people who read (as opposed to people who watch TV or listen to pop music) know enough and care enough about where books come from to make sure they're paying back in some form, no matter how they get the book. And there are an awful lot of books out there that simply aren't available as ebooks in any other way, not because the author doesn't want them to be available as ebooks, but because the books are older and out of print, and no publishers are acting to make them available. (In some cases, the publishers themselves are out of business.) I base this theory on the observation that most books on the darknet are scanned and OCR'd, not cracked DRM books.

I honestly don't think this is sophistry or "making excuses" on my part. I could be wrong about how others behave, but I know how I behave, I know my own motivations, and I know my own morals. I would not download to steal; I might download because I own a book in paper and it's a lot of work to scan and OCR (which would likely be considered "fair use" in my jurisdiction). I would not upload to steal or to encourage others to steal; I might upload because I'd done a lot of work to scan and OCR, or clean up an existing scan/OCR, and wanted to spare someone else in my situation that work, and to share in the effort of preserving older works.

Those of you who insist on condemning the behavior of others when it doesn't match your own will doubtless castigate me regardless of my explanations. But I stand by my statements of my own behavior and motives.

[Amalthia]

But downloading ebooks through torrents just doesn't work as well in practice as you may assume. (at least that was my experience)

I'd like to think that most people will pay if they can get a good quality version of a book. personally I'm tired of OCR errors but for some books I can't find them for sell anywhere and if they are for sell they are at the 20-30 dollar price range, which I'm not paying for a book that's been out for over 2 decades.

the bottom line is there are much better places to find books than torrent websites.

Torrent websites seem to work best for sharing large files such as movies, music, and programs.

And demonoid doesn't just share copyrighted files, last time I checked before it went down last year I could find a lot of freeware programs there. So while yes people do abuse the system it's still a great system for sharing hard to find files.

[Razi]

As long as the publishers keep on trying to rip people off by charging them logistics, storage, distribution and production costs that ebooks do not incur (or are negligible compared to paper books), people would find some sort of moral justification for piracy. I checked Demonoid.com after reading this heated discussion. Their selection of ebooks is narrow (mostly IT-related books). Thankfully I read classics and Feedbooks have most of what I want. I read literary theory as well which simply does not exist in ebook format. I tried scanning Alain Badiou's Being and Event using Abbey Finereader 9.0 (Professional) and a HP all in one flatbed type scanner at a friend's house but the pages contained so many mistakes and typos that I just gave up after scanning two or three of them.