[specproc]

People trying to justify anti-piracy was embarrassing in 1997. It's petty and sanctimonious now.

Not everyone lives in rich Western countries with cushy Silicon Valley pay grades; lots of folks are young, studying; they may be temporarily underemployed, or simply have to prioritise other costs.

Knowledge is a right, not the privilege of a moneyed minority.

[Arainach]

You have no claim to other people's knowledge or work. If they want to share it, it is on their terms.

If you're prioritizing other costs, then prioritize those. You don't have an inherent right to consume everything in history.

[specproc]

I'm a bibliophile. My current library stands at over 600 books, I'd wager I've purchased around a thousand in my lifetime. Please shed any assumption that this is the only way I read.

I am one of the book industry's better customers. This is pretty typical, AFAIUI. We see study after study suggest that pirates spend more on music and film than non-pirates.[1] Just the other week, I bought a physical copy of a book I'd first read from LibGen.

I pirate when I'm broke, or when living somewhere where certain books are hard to come by, as I did for a good 15-20 years of my life.

I have zero qualms about anything I've pirated. Not because of my prior "support" to authors, but because I'm aware most people in the world cannot afford to spend 65 dollars (plus postage) on a book.

Let me invert your claim on rights. What right do US lawyers have to deprive the majority of reading? Why should only the wealthy be able to access quality material on Linux? There is a particular irony in your gatekeeping of knowledge on an operating system which is designed to be free and accessible for all.

Imagine a world in which there was no Libgen, or Anna's Archive, or people sharing PDFs on forums. Would this be a better world? These things exist today, authors still get paid. In a world without, we'd have worse engineers, dumber people.

Frankly, I wish book piracy was much more mainstream. I'd much rather everyone was sat down of an evening with a copy of Linux Basics for Hackers, or The Leopard, or God-help-me, even Harry-chuffing-Potter, than doom-scrolling bile on their social media platform of choice.

Piracy is, all told, globally, a service to humanity, and we'd be better off with more of it.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/study-again-shows-pirates-te..., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/06/piracy-fi...