Booksellers (who dared sell it) typically kept it behind the counter since the intended audience did steal it.
The antics of Abbie Hoffman were legendary: He once brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt for several minutes when he threw hundreds of $1 bills from the visitors gallery onto the NYSE trading floor, and all the brokers scurried around grabbing the money. The gallery was separated from the trading floor by bullet-proof glass shortly after his visit.
The book is chock full of hacking techniques, by which I mean using systems (subways, payphones, shelter, society, politics) in unexpected ways. Contrary to popular belief, the content of the book is mostly legal things one can do to live for free.
Reflecting the times, Hoffman's politics are very socialist, not libertarian. However, the book would be well appreciated by HN readers. I'm sure there are free copies easily found on the web.
I also thought it would be about Abbie Hoffman's book. I read it in highschool just after Jerry Rubin's Do It!, because Rubin talks about Hoffman's book in his own. To this day Do It! is still my favorite book, and Steal This Book is close to second. It was my first encounter with what I naturally called "hacking" outside of the computer field.
I doubt age has much to do with it. The tech industry tends to lean libertarian to a greater degree than the population-at-large in general. Or at least that's been my observation.
Of course, as a 40 year old Libertarian, I may be a bit biased.
Agreed. Age has less to so with it than the tech worker's self identity, which is that they know better than everybody else--including the government. It's a common belief among people with IQs between average and genius, if a bit sophomoric.
That's not the entire picture though. I mean, regarding "techno libertarian" types, that could be part of it. But regarding Libertarians in general, it's not about knowing more than everybody else (I for one freely acknowledge than plenty of people know more about plenty of things, than I do), but rather the principle of being free to make choices - even bad ones. Freedom from the use of aggressive / coercive force, is it's own end, to Libertarians.
Even IF the use of that force would be to prevent me from making a bad choice, it's still wrong. Outside of economic arguments which are largely rooted in the Austrian School, that is the mindset that defines Libertarianism.
Now, as it happens, I will argue that, in many, many case, I do "know better", regarding things that pertain spefically to me. And that may be a bit of conceit, and that conceit is probably common to many Libertarians and is probably the essence of your statement above. But I would be a Libertarian whether or not that was the case.
1. Some prominent people are libertarians, and outspoken about it (Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Eric Raymond, etc.), so the ideas are circulating in the community.
2. This part of the economy is doing well, and as a result techies have little personal incentive to support any alternatives to free-marketeering. We generally have options and can get away with telling our employers where to stick it, if we don't like their policies, without the result being poverty. Being in an "employees' market" where we have substantial leverage insulates us from many of the less enjoyable aspects of market economics. In a few situations where this doesn't hold, e.g. the issue around health insurance for small startups in the U.S., I think you do see considerable defection from the otherwise pro-market views (health reform was popular in the Valley).
I put it down to experience. It sounds great, until you actually try to live it for a lengthy period. Ayn Rand, after all, eventually collected social security.
Was she a hypocrite for buying from state-run food depots when she lived in the Soviet Union, as well? Are free market advocates now obligated to starve themselves before taking money out of a system they were forced to pay into? That's quite a stacked deck of cards you're arguing with.
I am an author of 1-2 books about programming (Cocoa & Objective-C). The books my co-author any myself wrote are very "thick" (about 700 pages each) and we get about 1 Euro per copy sold. Although the books we wrote are among the best selling programming books in Germany we do not make a fortune. We make most of our money indirectly from the books: consulting, seminars.
When I found the torrent for our books I was pretty happy about it to be honest. :) Of course our publisher does not like it for sure. I have thought about publishing new books on my own so that I get more than 1 Euro per copy. Then again: The German speaking audience is too small in my opinion.
So if I had the balls I would make similar statements.
I wonder why authors are still working with those publishers and not switching to print on demand or even giving digital copies away for free in order to reach a larger audience. I never published a book, but to me it looks like the publishers are selling the books for pretty high prices, while giving the authors only ridiculous shares of that. Is the editing, printing and marketing job they do really worth it?
Publishers do provide editorial service. If an author writes a book in a year, there're more than 2 years of editorial process before the initial writing becomes a consumable.
Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate. Think about your weekend prototype project. And how much effort it takes to make it into a "successful" start up. For books, you put all the effort before printing. And that effort to turn a prototype into a profitable product is what publishers provide you. And many publishers are really good at that.
Of course with ebooks and tablet, you can start thinking of a book as software: an interactive multimedia thingy that can be updated often. You are welcome to innovate this digital medium. But we are not there yet.
> Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate.
That's not true at all. Check out https://leanpub.com/, Manning's MEAPs, The Pragmatic Programmers' Beta books, Apress' Alpha books, Oreilly's Early Release books, etc, etc. Of course these are all digital (mostly PDFs), but they are still very much books.
Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate.
Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java was written in public. Early drafts were available as PDFs. High quality feedback, iterations, rapid releases, community engagement, mindshare, etc.
It was great to observe. Once it hit paper, I bought maybe 10 copies, as gifts, just to support the author and the new strategy.
I'm a bit disappointed it hasn't become the norm. Being on the outside, I rightly don't understand why.
I don't recall if Eckel had a publisher at the outset. Or if he was able to get a publisher by demonstrating the size of his audience. (The market for Java books at the time was flooded with schlock.)
Those aren't exclusive goals. Michael Hartl has had great success with a free HTML version of rails tutorial. I presume zed shaw is also making money with his learn X the hard way series.
I'm not a programmer, but I've released a free HTML version of my books and print sales didn't decline at all. Too soon to be certain, but they may have increased. I sell PDF copies too.
A smart player will consider the volume under the sales curve, setting a price point that will lead to the greatest revenue at the least cost, instead of focusing on maximizing each sale.
I made good money publishing shareware. Maybe 1% of my users registered their copies. Mostly government contractors, who were required to. And free tech supp led to conversions about 1/2 the time.
At my scale, there's no way I could have profitably bought ads, maintained a copy protection scheme, etc. (Having since done it both ways, I know.)
Many, many artists identify exposure as the major hurdle to financial success. The same applies for indie games, phone apps, authors, etc.
Congratulations on publishing such huge books, I can't imagine how much work it is.
I self-published a programming book on C#, it's a bit less than 300 pages and that took a long time to finish.
1 EUR per copy sounds like a really bad deal though? I imagine the book is selling for at least 30 EUR so if you have a normal author royalty of ~16% that would at least give you 5 EUR.
If you self-publish through Amazon(CreateSpace) you get about 50% royalties and you don't have to pay any upfront fees to get it printed since the cost for printing is take out of the other 50%.
libgen.org is one of the most important sites on the internet at the moment. Yes it's illegal. But it enables you to gain knowledge and have your textbooks if you want to learn something. If you don't have the money for textbooks and no library at hand you are in a worse position. I'm sure that a lot of people started their career and deep understanding of internet technologies by reading illegal downloaded books and eating everything that is in them.
I first try to find a book without paying. If I read a good chunk of it, if it is any good I buy the book. Otherwise I would have to pay a fortune for all the books I browse and probably may not end up reading.
I generally use the regular library first, but I've had to resort to libgen in a few cases where: 1) no library in my country has the book; and 2) the book is out of print. Without that possibility, I would have had to either not read the book, or travel somewhere with more libraries (like the U.S.).
In case anyone is curious to understand this comment thread, the original submitted title of this link was "Steal this book". It has since been changed to "Time Series Analysis and Its Applications: With R Examples".
I'm just guessing, but what probably happens here is that the authors don't get too much money per sold copy anyway, and the benefit of being an author of a very popular book is probably higher than of collecting the royalties for a few sold copies.
Seems to me like they are trying to get libgen into the spotlight so it might be shutdown. Remember library.nu?
"If you want to steal the text, it's pretty easy to find an illegal copy, but you can get a nice illegal copy from LibGen. There's little risk in stealing stuff off the internet,"
It looks like they implemented some countermeasures. There is an I2P service for the site and you can download torrents of the content: ftp://libgen.org/repository_torrent/
They can and some do, depending on how much your university is willing to pay. I got many books this way and it's completely legal as far as I'm aware.
1) Great, more textbooks need to be available for everyone.
2) The EZ version is an interesting idea. Somewhat automatically generating easier/higher level versions of textbooks sounds like an interesting problem.
I think automatically changing the examples to problem domains that interest the readers (or that make less assumptions) is an interesting subproblem. Textbook mass customization if you want. I've come across quite a few textbooks that used examples that were pretty common for someone who is already familiar with the domain but for someone coming in with 0 knowledge they just seemed esoteric (think programming books that use compiler/parser examples). Simply swapping those out for something more approachable for the general audience could increase the value of some textbooks quite a bit.
> increase the value of some textbooks quite a bit
I think so too! This idea has been around for a long time. Marshall McLuhan suggested the idea of a "custom book" almost 50 years ago, yet still nobody has done it:
I'm currently working on software for generating custom version of my math book. There already exists an XML format called DITA which has conditional-text, but I'm started from scratch.
Obviously if the author invite you to copy their book they are aware that it is not stealing, so I think it's a reference to Abbie Hoffman's book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book).
Theft \Theft\ (th[e^]ft), n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e.
See {Thief}.]
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and
removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful
owner of the same; larceny. [1913 Webster]
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the
owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious;
every part of the property stolen must be removed,
however slightly, from its former position; and it must
be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of
the thief. See {Larceny}, and the Note under {Robbery}.
[1913 Webster]
(a) To wrongfully obtain or exert unauthorized control over the property or services of another or the value thereof, with intent to deprive him or her of such property or services; or
(b) By color or aid of deception to obtain control over the property or services of another or the value thereof, with intent to deprive him or her of such property or services; or
(c) To appropriate lost or misdelivered property or services of another, or the value thereof, with intent to deprive him or her of such property or services.
(Emphasis added)
The point that is missed when engaging in these word games, of course, is that in common parlance, "theft" is used to mean any act that deprive others of something. In this case, it is the rightful payment for the value provided by the intellectual property that has been appropriated.
> The point that is missed when engaging in these word games, of course, is that in common parlance, "theft" is used to mean any act that deprive others of something.
Indeed, all your a,b,c) examples include "with intent to deprive [the owner] of such property or services". And it is a necessary condition for it to be considered theft. If not it is not theft. It might be fraud, but that is different from theft! In particular the sentencing for larceny and theft have traditionally been harsher afaik almost everywhere. Most times, if you simply refuse to pay for something, you can settle up by paying for it (assuming no one else has been deprived of the same thing as a direct result of you not paying) -- and that will be the end of it. Possibly with a fine in extreme cases.
> In this case, it is the rightful payment for the value provided by the intellectual property that has been appropriated.
I'm not sure I get your point...are you saying there was no intent? Here's what I'm trying to say: If you buy a copy, everyone involved in making it gets paid. If you pirate it, they don't get paid. In other words, they were deprived of that payment. I'm sure the legal specifics are quite different, but in common parlance, taking something without permission is theft, even if it's not tangible property (e.g. "he stole my idea".)
That's bullshit. I pirate Springer books that someone else (whoever ripped them had lawful access to them) paid for - no different than when I go to the library and read Springer books that someone else (the library) paid for. The bottom line is: __I'm not paying___. No authors or profiteering publishers are deprived of _any_ payment.
They gouged me when I went to school and they continue to gouge students each semester with their new editions that come out each semester of 400 year old subjects (calculus). That's what they need to do to maximize profits. I'm simply a 1-man corporation that needs to maximize my own profits and copying my books happens to be an unpopular corporate decision.
[edit:
> I'm not sure I get your point...are you saying there was no intent?
I'm saying there was no intent to deprive someone of access to something they already own, or are in possession of. There might be intent to not pay for a licence to access something -- but not paying isn't the same as stealing. Everyone else still have access to their licences and licensed copies.]
Legally, theft means you deprive someone of their access to a thing. There's a difference between that, and "getting something for free that you should pay for" -- when that 'thing' isn't a thing at all -- it's a copy -- and by the act of copying you aren't depriving anyone of their access to the thing you copied.
If you steal a book, you're staling it from the current owner: either an avid book fan, a shop, a library. On very rare occasions, say at a conference -- the owner of the book-thing will happen to be the same legal entity as the author (tough even more seldom the copyright holder, as that might be the publisher).
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is legal, I'm saying it's not theft.
On a side note, the use of the word piracy is even worse -- it implies threats and/or application of violence -- effectively lifting something that is a civil matter to a criminal matter.
> in common parlance, taking something without permission is theft, even if it's not tangible property (e.g. "he stole my idea".)
And you can also call "a bargain" "a steal". That doesn't mean it's illegal to shop at a fire sale...
Yes, it is. If you do that with physical items, it's called "shoplifting" :-) You may now argue that taking, say, a loaf of bread deprives somebody of it. But consider that between 14 and 40 percent of perishable supermarket groceries are discarded as waste. Who's to then stop you from saying you took the loaf that was going to be discarded anyway and so you're not depriving anybody?
> I'm not saying that copyright infringement is legal, I'm saying it's not theft.
And I'm saying, colloquially, copyright infringement is equivalent to theft. This is why there are laws against it, it's just that the legal code is different for different crimes. Now, one may insist on using the proper legal terms, but note that this is not a legal forum or a legal debate, so colloquial usage is fine :-)
> And you can also call "a bargain" "a steal". That doesn't mean it's illegal to shop at a fire sale...
And you can say "she stole my heart". That does not mean it's illegal to be attractive either. Obviously the context of how the word "steal" is used matters. But note that it typically has negative connotations, implying that the act is somehow unfair. And when talking about taking without permission, stealing describes the act pretty well.
> - but not paying isn't the same as stealing.
>> Yes, it is.
No it isn't.
>> If you do that with physical items, it's called "shoplifting" :-)
You're being purposfully vague, using "if you do that" rather than
stating plainly what you mean by "that".
If you go into a store, and not pay for something, then that is
perfectly legal. If you go into a store and take a photograph of a
magazine page, that may or may not be legal -- but if it is illegal, it
isn't theft. It's copyright infringement. And it's not a crime against
the store (the current owner of the physical copy of the magazine), it's
a crime against the copyright holder (because, when the store bought the
magazine, it didn't buy a copyright licence).
Now, if you take physical item from the store, then that is shop
lifting. The store can no longer sell that item to recouperate it's
costs, nor can it return it to it's supplier as unsold.
> You may now argue that taking, say, a loaf of bread deprives somebody
> of it.
Yes, it deprives the current owner of it. That is the nature of
physical goods.
> But consider that between 14 and 40 percent of perishable
> supermarket groceries are discarded as waste. Who's to then stop you
> from saying you took the loaf that was going to be discarded anyway
> and so you're not depriving anybody?
First, I'm all for dumster diving, efforts to make a more sustainable
world, making it illegal to dump unspoilt food etc, etc -- however:
You're still depriving the store of the physical good. Who's to say the
store doesn't have a policy of donating unsold food to soup kitchens?
So, yes you can ratinaolize breaking the law (self defense and the
defense of human life is one example ingrained in most modern laws) --
that doesn't mean that making a copy is the same as stealing.
Sorry, but you are mistaken. I have a wonderful piece of software on my disk that your are not buying. Are you "depriving" me of that payment?
Even more - schoolchildren are regularly copying massive amounts of files - are you (obviously dishonestly) claiming that they have the funds at their disposal to pay for the
"in shop" prices of those files?
If the publisher is cool with this (obviously, the authors are), I hope more publishers continue to see this not as a zero-sum game. I guess I can count myself as part of the lucky privileged class that will buy a book if I like it, whether it's free or not, just to pay my respect to the author...and to have a reliable copy of it (downloading a PDF from a url of store.free-college.org/noleech1.php gives me the slight heebie-jeebies...what can I say, I'm old!)
Recently I purchased a Kindle version of Gregory Brown's "Ruby Best Practices"...even though I'm sure I bought it from Oreilly when it was released in 2009 and even as Brown has been offering the book for free on his own site since 2010 (http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/022-rbp-now-...)
I bought it again because as I've recently been googling for Ruby-specific application methods, I constantly land on the text scraped from the free book...that's worth giving up a few more bucks to the author. Brown also started a paid newsletter for indepth Ruby discussion (practicingruby.com)...it's the first paid newsletter I've ever, well, paid for, and I'm happy to patronize the author. So, at least from people like me, generous authors can always get a few bucks.
I'm taking a course with this book right now... and yes, I stole it at the authors' recommendation. Textbooks are too expensive and I don't want to carry it around anyway.
Depending on how they structured their deal, it may very well be possible that Springer knows about this and is allowing it. There are quite a few other Springer books available on authors' websites, for example The Elements of Statistical Learning (http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/)
Except the book isn't available on his website. His website has link to a warez site with his book on it. So whatever deal he has with Springer it doesn't seem to allow him to host the book on his site.
He does host a simplified version of the book however, 'EZ version' as he calls it. I'm sure the 'steal this' full version comment is just tongue in cheek and/or sarcastic. Perhaps even a veiled prompt at Springer to send their lawyers after LibGen, who knows, perhaps it hasn't happened as fast as he wished for, thus the comment. Or maybe it just saves him some bandwidth if people get it somewhere else :) So many possibilities.
Springer's books cost so much that I'm sure even Springer doesn't expect to sell them directly. Their money comes from academic subscriptions that they will get regardless of how their readers get the content. This is why I think they are so fond of the golden model -- they just want tonnes of money for their brand. Elsevier is a nest of sociopaths in comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_this_book
Booksellers (who dared sell it) typically kept it behind the counter since the intended audience did steal it.
The antics of Abbie Hoffman were legendary: He once brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt for several minutes when he threw hundreds of $1 bills from the visitors gallery onto the NYSE trading floor, and all the brokers scurried around grabbing the money. The gallery was separated from the trading floor by bullet-proof glass shortly after his visit.
The book is chock full of hacking techniques, by which I mean using systems (subways, payphones, shelter, society, politics) in unexpected ways. Contrary to popular belief, the content of the book is mostly legal things one can do to live for free.
Reflecting the times, Hoffman's politics are very socialist, not libertarian. However, the book would be well appreciated by HN readers. I'm sure there are free copies easily found on the web.