The Burning of Library.nu (2014)
Downloading books and articles from libgen is technically &quot;theft of intellectual property&quot;. So is torrenting proprietary software, music, etc.<p>I&#x27;m often surprised to observe the extent to which Americans, both inside and outside of academia, and regardless of their station in life, overtly engage in this form of &#x27;IP theft&#x27;, given how much anger there is these days at China for alleged IP theft (I&#x27;m granting for the sake of argument that the allegations are fully accurate).<p>Why don&#x27;t Americans find this form of &#x27;IP theft&#x27; equally ethically problematic? I suspect the answer is some combination of:<p>(i) deep down people don&#x27;t really feel that &#x27;big evil publishers&#x27; like Springer, Kluwer etc really deserve all that money; we are less likely to feel bad about &#x27;stealing&#x27; from someone if we don&#x27;t feel that the person from whom we are taking the thing away is morally entitled to it.<p>(ii) $30 per article etc is just too expensive and impractical. Paying is not a consistently followable policy, so we may as well consistent pirate.<p>To the extent that &#x27;Chinese theft of intellectual property&#x27; occurs, can it be attributed to the same motivations?<p>Some analogue of (i) arguably obtains. After all, Americans committed two of the biggest thefts in human history: first the entire continent stolen from the natives, then, entire human lives stolen from generations of black people. So much of America&#x27;s present-day prosperity and advantage can be chalked up to these two egregious acts of theft, neither of which they have remotely adequately compensated for. Obviously you can&#x27;t return something you stole from some person (people) if you killed him (most of them). And the idea of reparation for slavery has never gained mainstream acceptance. The example this sets is &quot;let&#x27;s steal with abandon, after all our descedents can play the &#x27;I was no part of that&#x27; defense just like present-day Americans&quot;.<p>As for (ii), I&#x27;m not entirely sure. Has anyone ever looked into just how much money a Chinese company would have to pay if it were to fully comply with intellectual property laws? I find it hard to imagine it <i>not</i> being just as exhorbitant as Springer, Kluwer etc, in many cases.