alt Hacker NewsSo you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?!
I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all
Replies
john-titor • today at 12:31 AM
> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all
Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?
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abrookewood • today at 2:18 AM
This is such a ridiculous statement. The people who spent their time building up this body of work deserve to be compensated. Take whatever job you do and imagine people confidently stating that you should work for free.
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tryagainian • today at 2:11 AM
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> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum.
This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.
Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".