That depends on your attitude. Only a very small minority of content creators make a living from that activity. Some people are always going to be cheapskates of varying degrees. Unless they are actually manufacturing and selling counterfeit copies of my books, in my view it doesn't rise to the level of a tort, much less a crime.
Google indexes downloads of my books. What consequences should that have? Same as for Pirate Bay? If you are a poor person in Pakistan, how else are you going to get it? If you are a rich person in a developed country, you are just a jerk if you lack the creativity to ask for a review copy. I don't see a practical way to have a different view of the situation. I could rail against downloads, but what is that going to do?
Publishing is a leaky bucket. If you take the advice of someone like Guy Kawasaki on how to promote a book, you should go with the flow and give away as many copies as you can. Every time I speak at a conference and give away a few dozen signed copies, sales go up. Someday that kid in Pakistan who torrented my book might work for a system integrator that hires me to train them.
If I thought reality wasn't OK, what should I do? Many of the problems in the computing industry come from efforts to deny the reality that content can't be protected beyond the audience's willingness to be honest.
Many of the problems in the computing industry come from efforts to deny the reality that content can't be protected beyond the audience's willingness to be honest.
And that's where the entertainment industry's efforts to brainwash people ("you wouldn't steal a car") and to make copyright violation a criminal offense (the longer the sentence, the better) come in: they are all efforts to try to make people so afraid that they'll be honest. What a way to treat their customers.
If you search my first name on Google, the first downloads of Programming Android appear on the third page of results. Not convenient enough for you? And what did I say about asking for a review copy?
Many of the arguments you use could be just as easily used to allow GPL works to be derived from and distributed in ways against the license. How do you reconcile that?
In this particular case, I think that's about right: The RIAA/MPAA publishers should consider Pirate Bay disreputable and everyone else can make up their own mind whether to do business with them or not. That's how GPL violations work in practice.
That's about how O'Reilly views people posting downloads of O'Reilly authors' books. That's why they don't use content protection on the e-books they sell. Content protection mechanisms are poisoning computing.
Well, whether tainting or actual legal actions are taken depends on which GPL violation you're talking about. The Busybox developers are quite happy to pursuit legal options when lesser means fail, for instance, and I will certainly not say they're doing anything wrong.
I personally don't think copyright infringement warrants anything near the level of legal activity it had just a few years ago, so I'm glad the RIAA/MPAA are moving away from suing the pants off of everybody. But a lot of people seem to have the idea that copying digital works is morally right as long as you're stealing from a business, and yet simultaneously believe that copyleft should apply all the time, which is doublethink.
> Content protection mechanisms are poisoning computing.
So we should get rid of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL in the Linux kernel?
That depends on your attitude. Only a very small minority of content creators make a living from that activity. Some people are always going to be cheapskates of varying degrees. Unless they are actually manufacturing and selling counterfeit copies of my books, in my view it doesn't rise to the level of a tort, much less a crime.
Google indexes downloads of my books. What consequences should that have? Same as for Pirate Bay? If you are a poor person in Pakistan, how else are you going to get it? If you are a rich person in a developed country, you are just a jerk if you lack the creativity to ask for a review copy. I don't see a practical way to have a different view of the situation. I could rail against downloads, but what is that going to do?
Publishing is a leaky bucket. If you take the advice of someone like Guy Kawasaki on how to promote a book, you should go with the flow and give away as many copies as you can. Every time I speak at a conference and give away a few dozen signed copies, sales go up. Someday that kid in Pakistan who torrented my book might work for a system integrator that hires me to train them.
If I thought reality wasn't OK, what should I do? Many of the problems in the computing industry come from efforts to deny the reality that content can't be protected beyond the audience's willingness to be honest.