Should I be enraged or flattered?

[Stormlight]

Sucks that happened to you. Unfortunately that’s the way of the world. People are entitled and self-centered and don’t give a shit about the artists/authors they hurt when they rip them off like that, whether it’s pirating books, ripping free music/movies, stealing artwork to resell on t-shirts, or recasting BJDs.

[Jobee]

I bought your book!

[WhiteDove01s]

How you feel about it is completely up to you. However, since this smacked down on something that I consider one of the biggest and most dangerous problems in modern society, and I happened to see it just after Public Domain Day... beware possible teal deer of a rant. Now, I have an unusual viewpoint on the morality (albeit not the legality) of piracy in certain specific circumstances, and this stems from certain issues regarding modern copyright law and corporations. For a good source on what copyright law was supposed to be and what some corporations have turned it into I highly recommend heading over to the Duke Law University's Center For The Study Of The Public Domain and check out where they made a couple free comic books on the matter. Or, better yet, I will and add the links...
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/
https://web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic/
The one on the first page covers things like why the civil rights documentary "Eyes On The Prize" can no longer be aired, and various other ways corporations steamroll over the fair-use doctrine (meant to protect people from exactly this kind of unreasonable legal tangle) in order to suppress free speech or destroy parts of culture and history. The second comic on the other page is the one that's more on topic as it covers what copyright was meant to be (a way to protect the creator's ownership of a work and give them the rights to say who could make copies of or perform it, so they could make a living off their work and also be incentivized to produce more) and what it has become (a legal ownership that can be claimed by a corporation, descendant of the original creator, or quite frankly anyone who can get their mitts on an intellectual property so they can then mooch as long as they want while the original creator gets nothing or is often already dead and isn't going to be incentivized to produce anything else because they're too busy DEcomposing to compose.) As far as I'm concerned, non-creator copyright holders are the ones who should be considered thieves. They're not going to be incentivized to create anything because most of them don't have the talent. All they're good at is trying to keep sucking what they can off a dead Bono, or destroying history and culture and creating orphan works in their determination that no one else will ever put their hands on a long-dead man's steamboat willie.

Moving on before that part of the rant gets any longer, I think that in some situations people engaging in acts of piracy against certain corporations isn't done because they're "spoiled, entitled, or self-centered" but as a form of civil disobedience and a way of attacking those corporations. Like a boycott, but going a step further and significantly less legal - but when used in that way I am not going to begrudge those willing to take the risk the damage they manage to do against a part of our society that I consider to be, put simply and bluntly, evil.

Another situation I can see it as criminal but still understandable is in the case of textbooks. The prices of school textbooks are utterly ridiculous. Not too many people seem to realize it's a way to say a poor person can get a scholarship to go to college and then make sure they STILL can't go because it doesn't cover the $200-a-piece books they'll never be able to afford. If they happen to get a tetchy copy that someone printed out from a bootleg PDF just so they can get an education? I wouldn't report them if I caught them. The remaining situations I can think of where I would see some semi-justified reason for pirating various media is if the work isn't in print or available in any other reasonable way ("Keep circulating the tapes" in regards to some old TV shows - or the fact that we only have the classic horror film Nosferatu because a ton of people made bootleg copies and refused to destroy them all even though the then-owners of the Dracula copyrights were insisting.). The last reason is a stretch, and is only viable if you have no library access or the book is not available in public libraries - if you are on an extremely tight budget (as in, well, here, where we have two people living on roughly $7,000 a year and I do online surveys for - in a good month - about $25 discretionary income to spend on something to bring me some joy so the state of my life doesn't make me suicidal) and want to be very sure you like a certain media item before you spend money on it - and ONLY then with the full intent to delete it with the rest unread if you don't like it or buy the actual copy if you do. There's a lot less excuse for this one in recent years now that libraries are happily going digital. (2020 has actually been a GOOD year for some things.)

So let's see...
1. You didn't write a textbook or reference work that might be needed for a class.
2. You are the original author, not a corporation or some such.
3. As far as I know you aren't, er... being like J.K. Rowling lately is the nicest way I can think to say, so the odds of someone pirating something as a social protest against certain behaviors is unlikely.
4. Your book isn't in libraries, but Amazon has that wonderful preview function that sends the first chapter (even if they make how to read those in Cloud Reader for people who don't have or can't afford tablets to be clear as mud...) and by then I can usually tell if the story is going to engage me enough to read more. Even then I don't even look at books that are more than maybe $10 tops because that's just too much of my budget. (And I continue to be wary of what happened to a friend once where she bought a book she thought she'd like because it was part of a series she'd read another of. She told me that halfway through she had to give up in disgust because there was some whole rape-apologist subplot thing. I was glad for the warning and dropped those from my possible reading list fast!) Along with the preview, your book is listed at $3, a price that definitely does NOT say "I'm an elitist who thinks poor people don't deserve to read."

Or, put short (yeah, too late, I know XD) I live below the poverty line and if I like the preview I would probably buy your book. I see no valid remaining moral reason for someone to pirate it. (Did thing of a digital-only one about the time of the last postscript - if they bought a legit version but it was in a format they don't have anything that will read, and the pirate site has a converted PDF.) But how you choose to feel about that is still up to you.

P.S. Just as a note, while I have thought of getting an eyepatch because my eyesight on one side has gone bad enough it's actually interfering with seeing out of my good eye, I am too scared of the police summarily shooting me or my dog to risk getting caught in illegal activities. I will not pirate your book. If I like the preview (which I think I will just go read now, btw) I might buy it next time I have $3 not earmarked for something else. (which means after a couple pending doll hair orders that have wiped me out for this month and possibly the next.)

P.P.S. Going to go open my financial planning textfile I use and save the link there to go spend 1/5 of my monthly discretionary income on your book between the planned doll hair orders. Also known as whenever Mypoints help center gets back to me about turning the thing off again where they won't let me cash out without verifying my account via SMS message to my nonexistant celphone. >.< But, yeah, liked the preview and I am now budgeting for that... pending. (Covid check? That was mostly spent before it even properly cleared. XD I got my first new mattress since I was 16 (I'm 42 and getting too old to comfortably sleep on a 3" futon), two new monitors, monitor stand, nice UPS for my computers (one of which is still parts bought with the previous check, because I ran out of funds before getting a monitor), sewing supplies, dolls... I had a list that I'd been building on since the last check XD)

P.P.P.S. I just remembered there was a really good example of piracy as a form of social protest on the Public Domain Day page this year, and of a specific type I forgot about in the first runthrough (tho remembered when I did the numbered part and mentioned Rowling - protesting or raising awareness of a writer's unacceptable behavior).
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2021/
Scroll down to "The Story Of Hitler's Copyright" for the time someone was sued for making an unofficial English translation of Mein Kampf in 1939 and pledged any profits to help refugees from the Nazis. (The official English version at the time was sanitized to hide a lot of what that ugly little Austrian mistake was up to.)

P.P.P.P.S. Finished my shopping, have $10 left (some of the restoredoll hair I wanted was out of stock, plus I habitually overestimate prices when budgeting to be safe), going to go buy your book and one of those cheap screen magnifiers (my eyesight keeps getting worse on me), and then I will officially be flat busted broke again. And going to stop post-scripting this now. XD