Me, stealing every pdf I can find:
It’s a shame the people who you stole them from don’t have them any more…
Next you’ll tell me that you wouldn’t download a car.
Digital piracy is not theft. You’re not depriving the person who shared the pdf to you of anything.
This is clearly a indoor Bazar with doors that lock on both ends, they leave them out cause it’s not technically outside and ain’t nobody breaking in to steal some books, shits heavy and probably doesn’t sell for all that much on the black market
I also don’t steal. I download my books from online copies, which is copying, not stealing.
Cool, you hate creatives and feel entitled to their work on the basis of semantics
on the basis of semantics
It’s not semantics when “stealing” results in the loss of the original by the owner while “copying” just results in a new one being created.
TL;DR: ✨die mad✨
Publishers don’t lose money when I download their products, but I wish they did.
Too bad. Because it’s being redistributed through a third party, you aren’t even stealing a negligible amount of electricity, bandwidth, or CPU time from them. Damn, when you think about it, it’s just not “stealing” in any capacity, is it?
That’s a semantic point. The truth is that artists deserve to be paid for their work. Whether you “copy” or “steal”, you’re getting the work without paying the creator. That’s fundamentally shitty behavior.
Okay, but I literally just expressed how they’re fundamentally, pragmatically different while you keep reaching for the word “semantics”. You can still disagree that it’s wrong to copy – that’s not what I’m trying to litigage. To call it only semantically different from stealing is asinine.
I never said it was only semantically different, only that you were making a semantic argument: namely, citing the semantic distinction between copying and stealing as grounds for one being acceptable and the other not (“stealing” is wrong but I’m “copying”), ignoring that the injustice against the work’s creator is not pragmatically different. Practically speaking, the author is equally robbed whether you “copy” or “steal”; therefore, arguing that copying is not stealing obscures the heart of the matter behind a semantic distinction.
That wasn’t me you were talking to initially; that was TheLeadenSea. You’ll have to ask them, not me.
Oh, fair enough
I mean that’s literally semantics but whatever, if that’s the definition you’re going with then sure. If you ask me, you breached a contract and got a product out of it anyway, I’d call that stealing. I don’t think scarcity even factors into whether it’s stealing when it’s all about whether it was a legit transaction. Lack of scarcity may help justify it when the distributor is a shithead but it doesn’t make you not a thief.
-a proud thief, steal your shit, especially from Adobe fuckem
i often buy books on a DRM’d store or a paper copy, but then download the epub to put on my e-ink tablet so i don’t have to deal with the shitty DRM’d app it would be stuck in.
Here people even “steal” books from public bookcases and sell them.
For people who aren’t familiar, let me explain: These public bookcases are a weatherproof shelf, old phone booth or something in the streets. The concept is you can take any book and leave any book. There are no written rules and you can keep a book if you like or just read it and put it back. In recent years people started to scan the barcodes and checked what books they can sell. There is a debate going on if people should mark these books or not, so they can’t be sold.
Who tf is buying normal books from the local black market in 2025 is my real question here
It’s more of an online market. eBay, Amazon to a certain extent, there’s loads of book specific ones and some that are for used items generally and allow books. And unless marked it’s not the black market at all. I mean obviously the book is stolen, but it’s just entering the used market as opposed to being sold through a fence or whatever
Sure looks like a regular Street, you know, with a roof and stuff.
You might call it a shopping arcade. Pretty common in many cities, and likely is a public street, despite having a covering.
There’s a wet gutter down the center…
We do this at a used book store. It’s books that we don’t think we can sell inside for whatever reason, and we put them on shelves outside. There’s a big awning so they don’t really get rained on unless it’s raining sideways. We sell them for a dime or a quarter, and there’s a slot for overnight drops in case people want to get books at night. Every morning there’s at least a couple of bucks from the previous day/night.
We donate the proceeds to public radio, and over the years we’ve donated over $100,000.
Can anyone from Iraq confirm?
But what if the thief steals the books not to read them, but just to fill their house with books and make themselves seem erudite and intelligent?
I’m imagining the most extreme version of this, where a man is living in a house that is a veritable library. Yet, they’re actually illiterate.
Sounds like a “truther” or flat earther.
I was about to describe here a world wherein a flat earther glass through a book to call it out on all the “lies”, then I realised “oh wait, I literally watched a video on that”
… It was a children’s science book 😂
That’s common as a backdrop for offices and stuff, they sell books by the pound for that.
I have stolen books and then read them, so …
You suck
I think that’s just one way of saying they’re not prints worth stealing
i do think you’re wrong, but I am not willing to spend time to prove it so yeah i agree with you.
Yeah but the vandal does vandalize. In my country there are tons of shitheads who like to see the world burn and destroy someone else property when nobody is around. Like in some neighborhoods in certain cities you can’t have a mini library in your front yard, since a certain type of teenager will ransack it and set the books on fire.
And it doesn’t rain
It’s Iraq, not Arrakis.
The vandal does not read, either.
But the arsonist, tho…
Those poor books 🥲
