There's a book that I've been loaned by a friend in another company here: Bioconjugate Techniques by Greg Hermanson. It's a major tome that has become THE seminal work on bioconjugation methods, and is likely to be an essential reference work for me in the future. The obvious step is therefore to buy it.
A quick hunt on google and Amazon turned up legit copies for sale, and also a lot of sites, mostly torrents, offering to let me download it free in .pdf format, which is obviously piracy. Or is it? The book is also available free on Google books.
Now I've been aware for some time of Google essentially taking/breaking copyright on books that were out of print, and fair enough in many ways. However this appears to be the latest edition, no more than 2 years old and available for purchase from any number of bookshops internationally. There is no justification, therefore, for Google publishing it 'online'.
There was a time that I felt like the LAW was an absolute, laws (in the UK at least) as they had been made were reasonable, just and for everyone's best. The older I get the more I see laws being designed as tools for shaping society to fit the desires and wishes of a few. Whether it's enforcing slower and slower speed limits on roads, knee-jerk reactions to substance abuse or in this case, quietly subverting copyright rules for written work while there is a major furore over the exact same thing being done by individuals to recorded music.
Never before was the law an ass like it's an ass now. And it seems there's no limit to the loads this ass will bear on it's back to benefit some and not others.
In case you wonder, I'm going to buy the book so the the author will receive a royalty. It's worth it in the hope it will inspire others to write similarly useful works.
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