> If you ask a human questions about a book, thereby avoiding having to buy the book for class, did you rob the author?
If someone makes a commercial activity of "answering any question about book contents at any time 24/7", hires tons of people to read those books and reply to billions of such questions daily thereby helping everyone not buy any books, is that robbing book authors?
is a sale forced or coerced, also comes to mind. Tales of college undergrads forced to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books for single semester come to mind...
but let's be direct - are we talking about market share in the millions of views, where pirate copies are also available, or the sale of any books at all compared to a few hundred over a year. Quite the difference on a subsistence level of an individual author, no?
If someone makes a commercial activity of "answering any question about book contents at any time 24/7", hires tons of people to read those books and reply to billions of such questions daily thereby helping everyone not buy any books, is that robbing book authors?
Food for thought.