Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy.

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.

You said you relied on piracy.

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?

If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing.

Enough with the false equivalence.

Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery.

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.

You wouldn't download a car ...

If.

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.

I would prefer for my work value to be multiplied by piracy, personally.

Piracy isn't stealing. Legally or morally.

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.

There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it.

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.

They're talking about learning, probably as a broke teenager who wouldn't have been able to pay anything, I think you can save the outrage.

Mee too! Although I like the mentality of "make it easier to use without piracy than with" (i.e excessive drm)

there's where you're wrong...

What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had).

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.

The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down.

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.

It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing.

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).

If I hadn't pirated Photoshop when I was a kid I would have just never used it.

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.

Copyright and patents actively stifle innovation. I think a statute of 5 years for both is acceptable. If you fail to be commercially viable in 5 years it probably wasn't on the cards but at least someone can learn from the work and continue with it after it lapses.

Both are blatantly anti-competitive measures.

You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.

100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop.

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.

Yet to meet anyone who could have bought a full fat commercial Autocad or Solidworks license as a 13yo kid. Even more so 20 years ago.

If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

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.

That is the point. A legal time limited monopoly. But it has to be time limited or progress is stalled. Five years is plenty of lead time to be remain ahead of competition.

That world we life in sure feels innovative ..not. 1 new thing per day,with 8 billion humans alive and connected. The web promising the new edison or tesla, meanwhile those two lifed in a time of mass book copying without repercussions. Copyright is toxic, extractive landlording , mining innovationspaces with penalties and bureaucracies. Its deeply anti-libertarian on an individual level.

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.

> If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not 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.

If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products).

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.

Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.

A lot of great software today is SAAS. They seem to have solved the problem.

If only we could: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5918367

Well, maybe a future version of 3D printing. :)