Pirated Books within Ethical Context of Refraining from Stealing

[Onka]

[QUOTE=kirkmc;279103]Would you expect a baker to give you bread for free? Would you expect someone to give you a car for free?

You example is a “successful” artist, which means they are earning a living and can afford to give some of them work for free. Yet you would expect all others to give their work away?

You have obviously done the mental gymnastics to justify this, so there's no point discussing any more.

Gassho,

Kirk

Sat

I apologise for not outlining in simpler ways how my friends and I measure success and earning but it is more to do with integrity, freedom and community service than money, Mutual Aid. Weird but not a new idea. I prefer the company of creative, IT, and academic folk who want to make the world a better place without putting a monetary value on their best work, offering it for free, leaving their average work for their employer. Open Source is a prime example that's not limited to IT. Treeleaf and a bloke named Jundo is another example I would argue. No mental gymnastics required as I see it but hey, I'm just a muppet living a very simple beautifully ugly and complicated life, and loving every minute of it.
Gassho
Onka
Sat today/apology for over 3 sentences.

*Do check UBI though

[Ryumon]

I apologise for not outlining in simpler ways how my friends and I measure success and earning but it is more to do with integrity, freedom and community service than money, Mutual Aid. Weird but not a new idea. I prefer the company of creative, IT, and academic folk who want to make the world a better place without putting a monetary value on their best work, offering it for free, leaving their average work for their employer. Open Source is a prime example that's not limited to IT. Treeleaf and a bloke named Jundo is another example I would argue. No mental gymnastics required as I see it but hey, I'm just a muppet living a very simple beautifully ugly and complicated life, and loving every minute of it.
Gassho
Onka
Sat today/apology for over 3 sentences.

*Do check UBI though

I'm a strong believer in UBI. However, we're not there, and neither my landlord nor my supermarket offer me free rent or food. (Of course, UBI is not "free," it's just distributed from taxes.)

It remains that, today, the attitude that art should be free is selfish, and it reinforces the trope of the "starving artist" which is something that has harmed artists for centuries. And while I understand that you have the worldview that you have, it's not realistic, and in the context of whether pirating books is ethical or not, something I find insulting. (In part because the books I write are not "art" yet you seem to suggest that they should be free as well...) I've seen these arguments for decades, and it's just that here, in the context of a spin-off of a thread on one of the precepts, this comes across, I'm sorry to say, as selfish.

Curiously, I've been reading the comments on an article in the Guardian about how musicians aren't making enough from music streaming services. No one there has suggested that music should be free, quite the contrary.

Gassho,

Kirk

sat

[Soka]

Sorry for the long post (this is mostly what I had written originally, but now with a couple of added bits)

I prefer the company of creative, IT, and academic folk who want to make the world a better place without putting a monetary value on their best work, offering it for free, leaving their average work for their employer.

As a former university lecturer, this statement makes me really sad. I find it rather depressing if you know academics who feel those students only deserve to receive their average work. Those students are often paying significant sums of money to be taught, often ending up in crippling debt, for someone's average work? Similarly every researcher I know does the best research they can. These people give away a lot of their knowledge too, but not at the cost of their employers. I would argue that the people in your statement above are also breaking the precept. They are taking money by their employers that they have not earned. To me if someone pays me to do something, it is for me to do my job well, whether that be teaching, IT work, or stacking shelves. That work is independent of what I give away for free.

Onka, as you avoided the baker question: I am wondering why you are limiting your argument to the labours of people who have invested in earning their income through using their mind? If I state that everyone deserves access to nutritious food and somewhere safe to live, would you not agree that farmers should give their produce away for free and construction workers should build houses for free? As someone who earns money through applying knowledge, I could readily give it away for free if there were other people providing me with my own home to live in, clothes to wear, food to eat, etc. Unfortunately that is not the world we live in. Even if it is unsavoury to profit from our skills, for me it is how I make sure I have a roof over my head. Mutual aid is a great idea, you might have friends who can provide you with food, housing, clothing, etc, in return for your skills but not all of us are that lucky. Some of us still have to use money to get these things.

Everyone with an internet connection already has access to art and information for free - just not all art and all information. Plenty of folk give useful stuff away all the time. You can spend a lifetime reading and not get through everything in Project Gutenberg. If you want to learn a skill there are plenty of online courses through places like coursera available for free. If you want entertainment then there are lots of interesting YouTube channels or podcasts. There is no need for someone to take something not freely given, other than their own personal desire for that specific thing, taking Zen as an example, there are plenty of wonderful resources out there available for free, this being one of them. If someone pirates a book on Zen that the author has not given freely, they are making a choice to steal that particular thing from that particular author. Open source is a great example. You can get plenty of open source software, and not pay a thing towards it, but that does not give you the right to download an illegal copy of Photoshop and use that. Proprietary and Open can exist side-by-side and it is the creator who should be in control over what category their creation falls under. Some people are luckily enough to not to need to put monetary value on their work, others are not. I don't know a single tattoo artist who can afford to tattoo everyone for free in the hope that some people will donate.

If artists or knowledge creators are getting commissions from governments, or were in recipient of Universal Basic Income then the art and knowledge isn't free. It is being paid for by someone at some level, in your example it's through donations and taxation. So if you are paying taxes, you are paying the artists. It is great in this particular case that your friend has access to resources to allow her to provide open access to her work, but your friend is still profiting off her skills and is part of the capitalist system. Personally, in the UK I'd rather trust my judgement on which artists/creators I want to support, rather than having the government act as a gatekeeper over who can have funding for creating the right types of art, but I can see arguments for having a balance fo the two.

While I'd love all art and all knowledge to be freely available. I'm grateful that science has made a big push for open science and open data, where any science funded by public money is available to the public. We don't have anything like Universal Basic Income, so we can't treat artists as if we do; we have to live in the world that exists. I believe that everyone deserves fair compensation for their work, so until some other/better system is in place, it only seems fair to pay. And while there are so many things that are freely given that can be enjoyed instead I can't see any way that pirating art and knowledge doesn't break the precepts.

Gassho,
Phill
sat

[Inshin]

To me if someone pays me to do something, it is for me to do my job well, whether that be teaching, IT work, or stacking shelves. That work is independent of what I give away for free.

Gassho
Sat

[Kaishin]

Not to dig up a divisive thread... but I'm going to do just that :P Came across a very specific example today and wanted to share. This is from Sanshin-ji:

Protect Okumura Roshi. Stop online piracy.
We're aware that bootleg copies of Okumura Roshi's books are sometimes available free online. The files are acquired or created and posted without the permission of the publisher or the author, and amount to stolen property regardless of the intent of the person posting them. Yes, the dharma is free. Okumura Roshi's intellectual property, the result of countless hours of intensive work, is not. Royalties from his publications constitute a significant portion of the income with which he supports himself and his family. If you respect Okumura Roshi's writings and are drawn to him as a teacher, you will choose to acquire your copies of his books legally and provide the support he needs to continue his work.

-stlah

[Jundo]

Not to dig up a divisive thread... but I'm going to do just that :P Came across a very specific example today and wanted to share. This is from Sanshin-ji:

Protect Okumura Roshi. Stop online piracy.
We're aware that bootleg copies of Okumura Roshi's books are sometimes available free online. The files are acquired or created and posted without the permission of the publisher or the author, and amount to stolen property regardless of the intent of the person posting them. Yes, the dharma is free. Okumura Roshi's intellectual property, the result of countless hours of intensive work, is not. Royalties from his publications constitute a significant portion of the income with which he supports himself and his family. If you respect Okumura Roshi's writings and are drawn to him as a teacher, you will choose to acquire your copies of his books legally and provide the support he needs to continue his work.

[Gregor]

I buy his and also Jundo's.

Blyth's out of print stuff and The platform Sutra I downloaded.

Hopefully Hue-ning's mummy wont mind.



gasho,

Greg
STlah

Sent from my SM-N981U using Tapatalk

[Ryumon]

Following up on this, I discovered that Okumura has a number of huge collections of audio talks on Bandcamp:

https://bandcamp.com/search?item_type=&q=shohaku+okumura

They're a bit expensive, but it's good to see that they are distributed like that.

And, of course, there are lots on YouTube. Here's a very long series on Opening the Hand of Thought:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9Vi3s1UrMe7mQ2j0Lnpj39cuNwTn3j4c

Gassho,
Ryūmon (Kirk)
Sat

[Kokuu]

Hopefully Hue-ning's mummy wont mind.

In the case of The Platform Sutra, I guess we have to consider the work of whichever translator spent time and effort to render the text into English.

Gassho
Kokuu
-sattoday-

[Ryumon]

In the case of The Platform Sutra, I guess we have to consider the work of whichever translator spent time and effort to render the text into English.

Hear, hear. As someone who has translated a couple dozen books, the lack of understanding that translation is not free irks me.

Gassho,

Ryūmon (Kirk)

sat

[Gregor]

In the case of The Platform Sutra, I guess we have to consider the work of whichever translator spent time and effort to render the text into English.

Gassho
Kokuu
-sattoday-

The one i have I think was public domain / translated in the 30s, I would agree about downloading Bill Porter's version, ect.

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[Bion]

Pirated Books within Ethical Context of Refraining from Stealing

In the case of The Platform Sutra, I guess we have to consider the work of whichever translator spent time and effort to render the text into English.

Gassho
Kokuu
-sattoday-

Also, the Sutra can be acquired for free and legally in printed form from Budaedu .. So, no need to sneak around with pirated pdfs [emoji1]

[emoji1374] Sat Today

[Nengei]

My first "expensive" Zen book was Yampolsky's translation of the Platform Sutra. I think it was maybe $68 around 20 years ago, for a trade paperback. I thought the price was horrible. Not so much, now.

[Jundo]

[Showan]

Also, the Sutra can be acquired for free and legally in printed form from Budaedu .. So, no need to sneak around with pirated pdfs [emoji1]

[emoji1374] Sat Today

I LOVE LOVE LOVE http://www.budaedu.org/ and have gotten many Dharma texts from them. They have a large selection of printed copies in many languages, and an even larger selection of .pdfs, all available legally and for free as Bion mentioned. They also have posters!
You can get free, legal .pdfs of the entire Taisho Tripitaka (at least as much of it as has been translated into English!) from Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai here: https://bdkamerica.org/
The Buddha Dharma Education Association has a lot of free, legal materials available at https://www.buddhistelibrary.org/
There are plenty of alternatives to https://terebess.hu/ that don't occupy that same morally and legally grey-tending-toward-black area that people have pointed out here.

Sorry to run long!
Showan
Sat today/lent a hand