I am an author and I making my living from book sales. You're right, I'm absolutely obsessed with money, in the sense that I need money to buy food and pay my electricity bill.

> Robbing a bank and giving away the money is a decision not based on money or liability, but you shouldn't be very surprised you still get put in prison for it.

Quoting the other comment here to make my point.

AFAIK IA they did not give away the books, the books still were shared the same way as before, with DRM and expiration dates. They just temporaly removed the limitations of amount of books you can loan and increased the loan period with an initial max end date of June 30.

So, yeah, what IA did is pretty different from robbing anything, in unprecedented times of a global pandemic they provided access to a digital library the same way a public library which holds those books would in normal times.

You are free to give away whatever you want so long as it's yours to give away. For example, the ACM has opened up their pubs during this health emergency which is a nice move on their part. Do I think it would have been preferable for the publishers and IA to reach some sort of agreement? Of course. But, much as I'm a fan of the IA, they shouldn't IMO be doing this unilaterally.

Again, libraries are closed. Libraries do this every day. People are locked in their homes with nothing to do, so they opened their archives as a gesture of goodwill and generocity to a nation of people who cannot get books from libraries. While this may not be legal, it is humane. The problem with this country is that the humane thing is often illegal. We cannot give this food to the hungry, we could be liable.

It's honestly what sucks most about this country: if someone is making money on it, everyone else who comes near it is powerless against it.

Yes, they are breaking copyright law. Who gives a flying fuck about copyright law when there are 100,000 dead people and riots in the streets?

" Who gives a flying fuck about copyright law when there are 100,000 dead people and riots in the streets?"

Plenty of people. Perhaps you haven't heard the news, but it's possible to care about two things at once.