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

(torrentfreak.com)
326 points hn_acker | 1 comments | 20 Nov 24 23:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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bastard_op ◴[21 Nov 24 01:17 UTC] No.42200020[source]▶
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.

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jjtheblunt ◴[21 Nov 24 01:26 UTC] No.42200079[source]▶
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?

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1. mxkopy ◴[21 Nov 24 04:10 UTC] No.42201017[source]▶
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.