Who do you think has more viewers? This particular thread or Google? I think that typically (myself excluded) people won't even read something with "too much" text, if it doesn't directly effect them (and by not reading it, they don't know).On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Peter Rabbitson wrote:
Anyway my 2c - I myself use the [$elided] archives quite a bit, which does not prevent me from owning hard prints of the Cookbook, the Pocket Ref and recently Object Oriented Perl. It however prevents from owning 2 pcs of each of those not-so-slim books so I could equally easy refer to this or that at work and at home.
More to the point, it prevents you purchasing copies of the CD Bookshelf series from O'Reilly that the site you mention has posted copies of. Carrying around all these books might be a pain, but carrying around your own, legal, copy of the CD would be fine.
I believe that Manning has also provided _Object-Oriented Perl_ in an electronic form that has been pirated on sites like this, but I haven't seen that one.
So... your point doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. It *IS* a form of theft, no matter how much you would prefer to whitewash that fact. If the site were legit, it wouldn't need to hide on a Ukranian server.
Michael made a solid point - he found it via google.
And I can't & won't stop Google from finding & indexing sites of varying levels of legality & ethical acceptability. On the other hand, if a site is ethically questionable -- as these sites clearly are -- then at a minimum it would be wise to at least not give them any publicity, and by so doing encourage other people to also pirate these books.
These sites have come up before on this list and other ones, and pretty much every time they do, at least one noted Perl author speaks up saying that these sites are effectively stealing from him, that he does not condone this, and that he's personally offended that people are passing this stuff around. I sympathize with that. It takes a lot of care and effort to write a technical book, and even then the authors don't really earn a whole lot for their efforts. To repay that effort by encouraging piracy is, in a very real sense, a way of saying "please stop publishing these books, we're not interested in buying them anyway."
Please step back from this whole "information wants to be free" nonsense and think about the consequences of what you're advocating.
That said, if anyone else wants to discuss this, it should probably be done off list. I'm not trying to encourage a flame war here; I'm trying to discourage advocacy of something that should have no place here.
But people use Google and will continue to do so. While it would have been better to give the author credit and not mention the site in the first place, people are not thinking of giving appropriate credit when they type in <popular_site>.com ;-)
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