3am sa3d… An everlasting symbol of our faculty, maybe more famous than the dean himself to people outside our faculty… This man has been violating copyrights since 1964
It’s inevitable that you deal with him once you were by any way associated with the faculty… Students and professors alike, his knowledge with every book ,it’s contents and it’s version which may exceed the instructors knowledge astonishes everyone, at least everyone who stops at such things in this fast non stopping faculty.
I once had a talk with this guy and to my surprise he was very friendly and open… he told me that he first came here in 64, and it was the same job as it is now, only now he has people assisting him, he said students come and go, doctors come and go, even deans come and go, but only he stayed the same, he was proud to be the only fake books provider in the faculty.
For the community this guy is a hero… as he helped many students get their hands on books that otherwise they would’ve never seen, he is like the social justice that keeps rich students from having a better advantage, of course all of that was in the pre-internet era, but still he does a great job -from the social point of view of course-.
But from the legal point of view this guy should be imprisoned for life… running a simple calculation , our faculty has 15,000 students, say only half of them buy at least 2 books a year, which means 15,000 fake books per year, that’s 15,000X 300 L.E average original book price X 45 years he have worked = 202,500,000… yeah :D you are looking at hundreds of millions of losses which are enough to hang him five times.
What remains is the ethical point of view.. is it OK to violate a copy right to keep social justice ? and is it a must that only inadequate students buy from him ? well I am not an ethics expert nor am I a social analyst, but I can tell that as long as the books prices are far from the average citizen’s reach -the average citizen income in Egypt is 80$ per month-, and as long as the publisher has another market that makes Egypt looks like a school canteen to him, it’s ok for THE STUDENT who’s incapable of buying the book to buy a fake one… which means -in my humble opinion- that these students are ok, but 3am sa3d himself is a thief -maybe a noble one- but still a thief.
I don’t care what legal maniacs say or what ethics experts recommend, because no matter how hard they try to emphasize that it’s not a gray area, I’ll always think it is, it’s not like stealing food, but it’s not like taking pictures of a statue either.
