Well, this is part of the problem. Sometimes "the author's labor" amounts to reordering questions at the back to mark it as new revision and charge 150+ usd for a book that should have been $20 brand new, and is only purchased because it's a required title in a required class to get a piece of paper required for employment.

In that case... Fuck yes. Screw the author's "labor". Arguably, screw the whole damn system.

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Copyright rarely helps small authors who actually need it.

It usually gets employed by conglomerates that own distribution and are already screwing authors as hard as they think they can get away with.

It's genuinely a pretty terrible system in its current form.

We can do better.

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Ru.... - "sweat of the brow" does not confer copyright, only creativity does.

More to the point: the reason you find so many people advocating for pirating textbooks specifically, is because textbooks have often been used by authors/institutions/publishers to fleece students:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbook#New_editions_and_the_...

> Some textbook companies have countered [the second hand market] by encouraging teachers to assign homework that must be done on the publisher's website. Students with a new textbook can use the pass code in the book to register on the site; otherwise they must pay the publisher to access the website and complete assigned homework.

> Harvard economics chair James K. Stock has stated that new editions are often not about significant improvements to the content. "New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices."

Students can tell when they're being scammed, and are more than happy to go to war with scammers such as these.

Who's labor wad exploited by said publisher?

I would personally love and do support ethical publishers /companies and authors themselves but I refuse to engage with the exploiting kind, since there is effectively little difference between them and pirates.