Day 350: Piracy

I'm terribly sad. It's been almost a week but my books haven't been delivered yet. Worse, I have nothing to read! I was planning on writing down some first impressions for 'The Chinese Groove' by today but seeing as I haven't even held it in my hands, I guess that's not in the cards. Usually everything I order from thrift books arrives within a few days. I hope they're still on their way. Every once in a while I've had one get lost and show up a week or two later than the rest in the batch, but never a whole book haul at once! If this isn't resolved soon I may have to resort to using abilities that some would consider to be ... unnatural.

In one of my college courses, my professor (who shall go unnamed of course) showed us the price of the textbook we'd need in order to pass the class. It was pretty bad. The whole class cringed at the number, and when we did, the professor immediately perked up. He told us that, yes, the price was pretty bad, but as honest university students, we shouldn't let ourselves be tempted to 'acquire' the book in any other way, and that in fact there was an insidious website we were explicitly forbidden from using where the book could be found for free. He made sure to give us the exact address of the site, that way we could be sure to never go there and download the textbook by mistake. Of course none of us ever went to the site ... on public wifi, anyway.

This led to a bit of an ethical conundrum though. Should this kind of website be illegal? On the one hand, it absolutely enables people to get books for free that they otherwise would have paid for. It's essentially theft with extra steps, similar to watching a bootleg movie, only you aren't paying anyone. Then again, most of the people who ended up using the site probably wouldn't have bought the book at all, and instead muddled through the course without it. The authors and the university wouldn't have gotten paid anyway, so it doesn't actually impact the bottom line if those students get their hands on the text some other way. Plus, the site serves a useful function. I actually paid for 'The Chinese Groove' secondhand (money that won't end up in the author's bank account either), but my book is currently in transit. Pirating the book is more of a convenience than anything in this case. If I were to download a free copy, then I would be in a strange situation where I both paid for the book, and pirated it. Personally I hate reading on my computer screen, so I'm always going to buy a physical copy, but the question intrigues me. How wrong is it to pirate something you can't get otherwise, or worse, have already paid for?

There are some old videogames that fall into a similar problem. They're impossible to actually buy anymore because the companies that made them don't sell new copies, but these companies also come down hard on websites that let you download the code for free. Imagine if there was a book you loved, but the person who wrote it decided that they wanted every copy of it burned and no new copies ever sold again. If you really love the book, and want all your friends to read it, you'd have to make copies of it yourself. If you charge for it like a bootlegger, well you'd be breaking copyright law, but if you don't charge for it at all, and simply print the copies because you really believe the book deserves to be read, then it falls into a very grey area. Now the question is, is this wrong? Should it be illegal to freely distribute copies of something you paid for, if you aren't making any money off of it, and nobody can acquire otherwise? I'll leave the reader to determine this for themselves.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley