I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.
Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.
An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.
These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.
Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job.
I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.
But piracy means you were in spirit and partly in reality stealing the work product of those who learned a few years before you.
Would you want your work value to be diluted by piracy?
Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved.
This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell.
If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).
Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed.
Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff.
> Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.
No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.
You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.
People should be allowed to violate copyright all they want, but if they create something comercial the "inspiring work" as derived from the consumption history should get a kickback.
What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth.
No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.
I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it.
Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.
The question here isn't that adobe would have seem more money, it's that a 12 year old would have not made some image macros.
IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.
It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.
Enough with the false equivalence.
I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it.
Enough with the false dichotomy.
This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles.
In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.
I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?
I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.
If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.)
I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.)
And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)
It's a disgrace that universities are willing to use books that have been turned into consumable goods by single-use software or usurious saas rental messes.
That really can't be it because the question isn't about whether it is moral, legal or good for publishers.
I really think this is just elitism and gatekeeping at its worst.
I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.
I’d also be inclined to discard theoretical “in the long run it’ll be unhelpful” concerns, since that opens up an infinitely-deep can of hypothetical contrived scenarios of arbitrary complexity that can’t be disproven. I’m sure there are very real concerns, but it’s impossible to reason about which concerns specifically people would care about.
IMO that leaves the purely practical concerns:
- Students in poverty might not have reliable internet, devices or digital literacy. If zlib isn’t available to them, it isn’t helpful
- Books available might not cater to the local language/culture, or the real world curriculum needs of those students. If zlib doesn’t help them succeed, it isn’t helpful
- The interface sucks and is confusing, which makes students struggle to find what‘s useful. If zlib isn’t useable for them, it isn’t helpful
I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library.
I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"
Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts.
Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.
Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself, and it also keeps answers from circulating amongst students, and saves time for the professor who won't have to do the above every single week, they can just pick however many problems they like out of the book for the relevant section.
Who gives a damn about publishers?
They introduce artificial distribution costs; They are not capable of or refuse to fact-check; the copy-editing they provide is well within the capabilities of ai; at best they introduce asset-providers (eg illustrators) to writers.
> Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself
Who cares? The western academic system is already laughably bad at weeding out the incapable. Just let people cheat. It's not like people aren't cheating already.
They changed the problem sets once a year. So at minimum you were basically obligated to buy the book twice, if not 3 times.