Ask HN: Necessary piracy?

50 points

16 years ago

This is quite a hard topic for me. As a programmer I feel bad about piracy. I wouldn't like to steal somebody's work. I know how hard it is to make smth nice and that cost of software/music/book/whatever is not just it's physical format.

I heard about Tony Hsieh's "Delivering happiness" quite a few times. Today I decided that I want to read it. I live in Lithuania (aKa ex-ussr), so naturally book shop next door doesn't have english books in stock. But I've got Kindle! Let's try amazon... Whoops, "books is not available in your region". F*ck! Next stop - book's website.. They don't sell directly at all. BN sells to US-adresses only as well. I checked amazon.co.uk as well - no digital version available, paperback can't be shipped to my address.

What shall eastern-european-to-the-bone do? Let's google "delivering happiness download". Long story short: I got it on my kindle in 15 minutes. For free.

For Americans and most of westerners piracy may be about morale and choice. But for many piracy is not a choice. And not because of price. That's the only way to access information.

What's your take? Is it OK to "steal" stuff that is very hard to obtain in legal ways?

55 comments

55 comments