Asklemmy

Great reply :). I definitely agree, and do understand that libraries contribute to sales and can make or break books from certain authors. And I also agree that it feels different when buying something from a massive greedy corporation vs something from a smaller production where the creator probably isn’t making millions of dollars, and might be kind of struggling. I’m definitely not saying I condone these authors and creators starving or these works not being able to be created in the first place because piracy might make them unprofitable. I absolutely think that’s a bad thing! But at the same time I do think it’s a shame we can’t freely distribute these works with all of the amazing tools we have, and it’s a shame we’re losing the right to loan and resell things with digital media. It makes me wish we had some giant government digital library that paid for things with taxes (I mean… arguably this is just a library, but the restrictions and DRM on digital lending are depressing) or universal income or something so this was more feasible. Obviously neither of these would be perfect solutions, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a better way.

Just wanted to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying that we should pirate things and have authors starve or whatever. I guess I just don't think it's as simple as saying "piracy is immoral / moral", I think it depends on the context and on what the overall economic system is, and I like to believe that we could live in a world without artificially imposed digital scarcity and where sharing is a virtue and not a sin.