It is wrong ethically and... to engage in work that is violating laws of our country and taking away from owners their hard earned rewards that they have worked and slogged days and nights to produce.
On the other hand...
Better way to address your problems are to support and develop electronic formats and buying books in these formats e.g. LaTeX, PDF etc (which don't yet prevent users from distributing) which individual writers can write and make available in formats that allow them to get returns that they would have normally gotten without going thru a publisher... And also people can print copies of that and mail it to you if you wanted a paperback version. But to not pay for somebody's hard work is akin to stealing and such is not the purpose and intent of our community.
They will open source it after GNU/Classpath is well developed and ample effort has been wasted by the FSF community at duplicating the work.
And I speak from experience on Netbeans . After spending significant time developing a module because Forte was not going to open source it. After significant effort duplicating the functionality in Netbeans because we did not have that capability, after rewriting most of the code from scratch with some refactoring previous efforts... they open sourced the project.
My wasted time...
A lost project...
Don't get me wrong I still think Netbeans is a fine project but just goes to show consistency in making dumb decisions.
Also, I do think IBM has more to gain in this than Sun has.
Big blue is the enemy of my enemy but that does not make it my friend.
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It is wrong ethically and ... to engage in work that is violating laws of our country and taking away from owners their hard earned rewards that they have worked and slogged days and nights to produce.
On the other hand...
Better way to address your problems are to support and develop electronic formats and buying books in these formats e.g. LaTeX, PDF etc (which don't yet prevent users from distributing) which individual writers can write and make available in formats that allow them to get returns that they would have normally gotten without going thru a publisher... And also people can print copies of that and mail it to you if you wanted a paperback version. But to not pay for somebody's hard work is akin to stealing and such is not the purpose and intent of our community.
And I speak from experience on Netbeans . After spending significant time developing a module because Forte was not going to open source it. After significant effort duplicating the functionality in Netbeans because we did not have that capability, after rewriting most of the code from scratch with some refactoring previous efforts... they open sourced the project.
My wasted time... A lost project...
Don't get me wrong I still think Netbeans is a fine project but just goes to show consistency in making dumb decisions.
Also, I do think IBM has more to gain in this than Sun has.
Big blue is the enemy of my enemy but that does not make it my friend.