Ftyjtk

With that in mind, would it be appropriate to simply send those odd 10 dollars to the author of the book that I am illegally downloading?

First, I would be concerned about your legal exposure. You would be effectively admitting piracy.

Second, you cannot unilaterally change the terms of sale. When the professor published the book, they agreed to sell it through the publisher in exchange for certain terms. The legal and (in my view) ethical options are to accept or decline these terms; you cannot invent and execute your own terms instead, even if they seem reasonable. In short, this is a rationalization. (That said, I personally am sympathetic to your concerns about publishing companies exploiting college students.)

Thus, the "appropriate" thing to do is to buy the books through legal channels.

If you are a professor who authored a book, how would you feel about this?

Not a professor, but I have taught and written a book with thousands of copies sold. I'm sure I am losing money due to piracy, but I have never received a payment like you describe.

• Realistically, if I were to receive cash anonymously, I would probably chuckle and pocket the cash, or maybe set it aside for a few years to see if anything came of it.


• If I received money from a known student, I would be very concerned about the appearance of impropriety, and would not accept it. I would also be concerned about whether I should report the piracy, though I probably wouldn't.


• If this "caught on" and I was receiving a non-negligible amount of money from many pirates, I would have to talk to the publisher and seek guidance.

I find the moralistic tone of some of the other answers a bit distasteful, and also unhelpful. It’s pretty clear to me that you didn’t come here to ask for a general lecture about the pros and cons of piracy of textbooks and other digital content, and that is the sort of knowledge that already exists in a zillion different places and isn’t worth repeating. You had specific questions that aren’t addressed anywhere else, so I’ll try to answer them.

With that in mind, would it be appropiate to simply send those odd 10 dollars to the author of the book that I am illegally downloading?

I don’t find anything inappropriate about the act of sending $10 to a book author, no matter the reason. However, I should emphasize that that doesn’t mean that I think everything you’ve described yourself doing is “appropriate”. And to the extent that some of the other things you are doing are inappropriate, they will still be inappropriate even if you send $10 to book authors.

If you are a professor who authored a book, how would you feel about this?

Well, I am a professor who authored a book.^* I would be a little amused, but mostly indifferent. I wouldn’t think more of you for doing it, but I wouldn’t think less of you (compared to my opinion of someone who pirated my book but didn’t send me $10, that is) either. I would likely think that you had decent intentions, but were expressing them in a way that was somewhat misguided.

Should I send professors 10 dollars for illegally downloading their books?

The sending of $10 to authors by itself is not a terrible idea and on the face of it is mostly just harmless and inconsequential (as opposed to the act of piracy itself, which is a lot more consequential but is not what you asked about, so I won’t discuss it). I’d still advise against it, but not for any of the reasons other people mentioned. Mostly I think that if you went ahead with it it would be a way for you to delude yourself into thinking that this act cleanses your conscience and absolves you of ethical responsibility for the act of illegally downloading the book. It is a kind of a cop-out: you want to download books illegally but also want to think that you’re an ethical person, so you’ve come up with this plan to allow yourself to think that you’ve achieved both goals but for a fraction of the “normal” price. Well, I’m afraid you don’t get off so easily. Ethics doesn’t work that way.

To summarize, I can’t tell you what you should do, but whatever you do, my advice is, own your actions. If you choose to download books illegally, do so after informing yourself about precisely what that means and what the consequences (ethical and otherwise) are — for yourself, for book authors, for publishers, for other readers and people who would have become readers of books that might never get published, etc — and make sure you can defend your decision and be at peace with it. But don’t go for half-baked solutions like sending some pittance to the book author to help yourself feel better and pretend you don’t need to think about the issue anymore. The truth is, you do need to think more about the issue. It is a complicated issue and the level of thinking about it where I think you’re currently at is only beginning to scratch the surface of its true complexity.

Thanks for the interesting question!

^*Actually my book cannot be pirated since I give the digital copy away for free on my website (for a variety of reasons, including the knowledge that if I don’t then a pirated copy would likely be available anyway), with my publisher’s permission of course. What I wrote above about how I would feel refers to my best attempt at imagining a hypothetical scenario in which I wrote a book that I was not giving away digitally for free. But I think it’s a fairly accurate guess anyway.

After thinking about it a bit more, I wouldn't do this. Here's a few reasons:

• The professor will have to waste their time trying to decide whether or not to accept your offer, and surely they have better things to do.




• They may have to declare such sources of income if they become large enough, so you're creating issues for them w/o offering much help.




• You need to hide your identity otherwise it will be obvious you've breached anti-piracy laws.




• The publisher may or may not have contributed considerably to the book (e.g. editing, advertising) and cutting them out of the picture goes "too far" in the direction of rewarding the content creator and denying rewards to the content distributor.

In short then, I wouldn't do this.

However, also I disagree with Buffy's answer. Ebooks are a non-rival good. Hence the ethics of "stealing" them is pretty complicated, and in my view there are situations where "stealing" a non-rival good is permissible or even obligatory. It's inaccurate to call this "simple theft" in my opinion. In any event, whether you send them money or not, I wouldn't feel too guilty about this.

If you are a professor who authored a book, how would you feel about this?

I'd feel extremely annoyed. You're not only doing something illegal, you're cheating someone of their work. This wouldn't be because of money - it's very unlikely I wrote the book to make money. It'd be about justice and fairness, concepts which are too core to my values to compromise for $10. Plus the fact that you pirated my book means someone with even less scruples than you could also have pirated it.

My likely reaction is to notify the publisher at once, and if it comes to a lawsuit, I'd testify against you.

Actually, what you should do, if you want to behave ethically, is purchase legal copies of the books you've stolen.

Undertake a sincere and useful civic action as penance for your (somewhat self-righteously defended) abuse. Collect all the students at your university. Sign a petition to your state representative (or equivalent for outside the US). State your case with proof rather than subjective statements such as "... it is well-known that". Demonstrate why you believe that publishers hold the equivalent of a virtual monopoly on textbooks, for example because they keep the costs to enter the textbook publishing business at a prohibitive level. Demonstrate where you find their business model has increased the expense of textbooks unfairly, for example because relatively higher portions of the costs for a textbook are going to pay salaries at upper administrative levels. State a case for how this is causing the cost of education to be well beyond the means of today's college students even with loans. Propose and demand appropriate legislative action to fix the problem.

Start a movement that will do something beyond raising a (rather disrespectful) attitude about the problem and then asking for moral support in a discussion forum for what amounts to a penny that will be given in disdain. In other words, as much as I emphasize with the pain any student faces with covering the costs of textbooks, my proposal absolutely will not make right the action of effectively stealing a textbook. If nothing else, it is only a far better penance than sending money to the author.

You got a textbook illegally, without paying, but you are thinking about giving some money to the author. That puts you ahead of many people.

The implementation is not too good. If you send $10 to the author, that is income to the author, which needs to be declared if the author wants to stay legal himself.

I would recommend that you figure out how much the book was worth to you, and donate that amount of money to a charity.

It sounds like you would be sending the money anonymously, presumably cash in the mail, and that raises another point: receiving anonymous mail can make people nervous.

My instinctual guess on receiving an anonymous envelope would be that it's going to be something unpleasant: a scam, or hate mail, or sexual harassment, or crazy ranting, or (in this day and age) maybe anthrax. "Money from a reader who pirated my book" is not going to make the top 10. There's a fair chance that I might destroy it without opening it.

At the very least, for many people, it'll cause them more than $10 worth of anxiety. If your goal is to do something nice for the author, this seems likely to achieve the opposite.

I think a reasonable answer would be to create an anonymous email account and ask those authors this question. That said, I wouldn't worry about any full (tenured) professors' going hungry, nor would I worry about the publishers, who have an obscene profit motive with hugely inflated costs (and a very wasteful business model). There is a reason why there is huge consolidation in publishing: it is a capital intensive, highly profitable business. If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket and a desire to make a contribution, then find some way of puting that money toward the book purchases of someone less able to afford them.

No,If it for personal use is fine, but if you trying to make money of it, then that would be a crime, he should understand student not rich.