[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:48:46 -0400, digited <digited at yandex.ru> wrote:

> [heavy_ot]
> Piracy is not stealing - author actually loses nothing from it, and  
> .torrent user
> is not guaranteed to buy a book if unable to download a .pdf
> Futhermore, .torrent distribution may be a good advertisement and help  
> to find out
> if a russian-speaking coder wants to actually order a 1300+ rur book in  
> english or
> not.
> [/heavy_ot]

You have this completely wrong.  Book publishing, like most copyrightable  
material, works on an investment model -- a publisher invests a lot of  
money to get a book written and published, and then recoups that  
investment after selling N copies of the book at a much smaller price.   
What you are saying is that the author doesn't lose anything if someone  
doesn't buy their book.  But when someone uses their creation without  
compensating them for it, then the model breaks down -- who will pay for  
creating books when it is going to be a losing investment?  All you will  
get is books that people are willing to write for free, and those won't be  
very good.  People with excellent talent for writing books won't write  
free books, because they can use their talents elsewhere to make money and  
provide for their family.  The reason we make stealing IP illegal is so  
people will have an incentive to innovate and create IP.  If you want to  
live in a world where all you get is what Richard Stallman gives you, you  
can have it.  I'd rather have people do what they're best at (and Andrei  
is good at writing), and pay for the results than only measure the  
physical cost of an item, ignoring the innovative qualities of it.  How  
many good books do you think would be produced if copyright law didn't  
exist?  Copyright and patent laws exist to *encourage* creation, they  
achieve the result with an indirect requirement, because otherwise it's  
impossible to charge for innovation.

IP is a funny thing, and most people don't see how the model works -- hey  
it costs you nothing to produce *this one copy*, so why should I pay for  
that?  Well, because it didn't cost nothing to produce the *first one*,  
and nobody is going to pay for me to write the book in the first place if  
they can't charge you for this one copy!  It takes some logical thinking  
to see why it's stealing, but trust me, it is stealing.

> as for me, i prefer paper books over reading from screen, but i'm not  
> interested
> in d2. I won't buy tdpl in english because of questionable rate of
> price/usefulness for me, but i'll buy it on russian (for collection), if  
> it will
> be translated and will have a reasonable price.

As someone who is frugal, I may not ever buy TDPL.  But that's mostly  
because 1) I feel like I have a good understanding of D2, and I'm  
comfortable with the online resources, and 2) I reviewed the book already,  
so I already know what's mostly in it :)

But I would recommend anyone who wants to learn D2 to buy the book, it's a  
much simpler process than the time it takes to do it the way I did.  And  
it *is* a good book.

-Steve