But, real pirates do sink the seas, what we do is just to share the music we bought.

Also, books are among the lowest selling items on ebay, many of which sell for under £1. I buy lots of books from there, I even got a few for about 10p. Pirating books is never going to be as popular as films and music unless the quality is vastly improved. Personally I find it hard to read books on the computer anyway.

I’d expect a lot of publishers to be more open minded about file sharing. After all, if you have a story to tell then you want as many people to read it as possible. File sharing could actually have a far bigger effect on the publishing industry than it did for local bands and local filmmakers getting themselves heard.

Authors are pretty much at the mercy of the publisher – if a publisher won’t take your book then you have no alternative. A filmmaker still needs the software to edit their films and an artist still needs the software to record and mix their tracks. Although this software is relatively cheap, for an author they don’t need any of this. They just post the .doc/.odf/.txt or whatever of their book and they are instantly published to hundreds of thousands of people for no cost whatsoever. Granted, they can pretty much forget any ideas of making money from it, but they wouldn’t if the publisher rejected them anyway.

As for the academics screaming so loud about it, if you didn’t overprice the damn things so much, you wouldn’t see already cash-strapped students turning to them.

I saw one student that was being threatened with expulsion for using a PDF format of her text book in class. The teacher said he would of normally ignore it but the various publishing corporations are putting pressure on post-secondary schools to threaten students with compliance.

Another example on how corporate greed is hurting society.

PassThePopcorn’s staff member’s homepage! Invites!!

It’s time to show BREIN and the MAFIAA who’s boss :P