Originally posted by deeploser
Looks like the internet police are after you.
Nope. I just like to hear people rationalize this type of thing. Sure, I have a few PDF's of rare material that simply is not available for purchase. I also own a few books like Suba's 'Dynamic Chess Strategy' or Lane's "Ultimate Colle' that are going for $100 and up on Amazon. These books are out of print and $100 is not really a reasonable purchase price. I consider the unavailability of these two terrific books to be the publisher and/or author's fault. If someone wanted to photocopy either of these two books for personal use I suppose I wouldn't have a problem with that. Maybe that's rationalization on my part, I don't know.
However, downloading scanned copies of copyrighted, readily available, and reasonably priced books is theft. No real gray area there. You are taking money out of the publisher and author's pockets. Are the cops going to break down your door, of course not. If you can sleep at night then great. I guess I was just brought up differently.
If you want some free material there are thousands of pages of it here:
http://www.chesscafe.com/archives/archives.htm