At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking.
I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.
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.
Academic textbooks are mostly a racket, forced upon a captive market (the student body) and - with rare but notable exceptions - not books that most students would care to hold onto after graduation.
Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts.
Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.
Never forget Aaron Swartz
We need the equivalent of Z-Library or Sci-Hub for standards documents. It's a shakedown to pay $300 for a PDF of a public standard.
On VirusTotal, 5 different vendors flag Z-Library as malicious. Are they just flagging the site because of IP issues, or is the site full of malware?
Annas Archive is even more popular these days, these shadow libraries often present a better user experience than many online bookstores as well.
> Z-Library, or a similar website, is helpful to students living in poverty (82% agree).
I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?
I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.
Here's a weird story. I found a PDF of an algorithms book I liked on Anna's. Not a scan, but an original PDF.
It's a good book, so I decided I should buy it. But I don't keep a physical shelf anymore. The thing is, the publisher doesn't sell the PDF!
Which makes me wonder where the pirated PDF came from. Insider leak?
I think it's just replacing what a a good Library or Bookstore would have given you in previous times: cross reading many different books, without having to commit and pay upfront. The assumption that I'm going to pay for a book upfront without being able to leaf through it from front to back is preposterous.
> The findings, however, suggest that students are more likely to draw comparisons with “Robin Hood”.
This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles.
In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.
I'll still never forget the day I learned about the existence of Z-library.
I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library.
I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"
libgen is the modern library of alexandria. and it is free as in beer. thank you russians
Especially in the age of DRM (enshittification of ownership), where many games that lose functionality when the developer shuts down servers, where ebooks routinely get redacted, rewritten, or censored, where the availability of movies you "bought" shifts year by year as licensing changes occur, it is evident that "buying" no longer means "owning", and if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
If you grew up in a 3rd world country, you know you could never afford access to any of the academic/training resources needed to get out of the cycle of poverty. So you did what you had to do. Now I'm addicted to buying books, some of which I'll never read past 2 chapters, probably because of the trauma.
I'm surprised they were on the regular internet and not on Tor. Like, what else did they expect.
I don't blame them. If buying isn't owning, then downloading isn't stealing.
> “Living in a 3rd world country, 1 book would cost like 50%- 80% already of my daily wage,” one Redditor wrote.
Typical technical books are priced at upwards of $50. $100 a day is not poor by any means in 3rd world countries.
Aaron Swartz was right
I dont have to like it but if we are doing competitive capitalism we should upgrade the citizens as much as possible. In stead of publicly funded limitations we should spend the money on the opposite. If we want to win the game that is.
knowledge should be free - for the benefit of mankind.
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I will say that in my college classes, the first thing I always do is to download the PDFs of the recommended books to accompany the classes.
Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty).
Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages.
I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.