Is it ethical to use a textbook required for a class that was easily found online?

Question

I am taking an online class that requires a textbook to be purchased. I have found the book through my first simple search using the Google search engine. The website where I found the book seems to be foreign and not related to the original authors. Is it ethical for me to use the free version that I have easily found online and not purchase the book?

Edit: I think there is a valid distinction between resources found on controversial websites like SciHub and the Google search engine. Furthermore, my intentions were to purchase the book before I stumbled upon it in the first few search results.

Answer 1

If you're asking whether this will be seen as ethical by a university administration, the answer is no. The law probably lines up with the ethics that fall into the professional norms of the university admin.

However.

The money that the public pays for textbooks does not flow into the pockets of the people that generated or summarized that knowledge, so the system is far from fair.

I had a professor who actually told us to download his book illegally if we could get it, and when we pointed out he was the author, he said he made negligible returns on the sale.

Which gets us to the professional norms of your field. Some fields are big supporters of free access to knowledge. In these fields, the arxiv and scihub are popular. Downloading anything illegally if it's academic knowledge would generally be accepted as ethical within the professional norms of those fields.

Personally, I believe academic knowledge should be much freer than it is, and everyone should have access to the work we do. I'm not studying physics because I want to get rich. I study this because it's beautiful and it's important, and because these are fundamental questions for humanity, and answers should be shared with humanity. We all benefit from living in a society that's informed about itself and the world around it.

Answer 2

Rather than asking if it is ethical, I recommend that you be open and honest and listen to your conscience. You can help yourself to clarify your conscience by consulting with the people who are directly concerned with this question. So, in this case, I recommend that you email the authors of the textbook and the publisher of the textbook and then ask them how they feel about you downloading their book instead of purchasing it (you could probably find their contact information by searching online). If they reply that they have no problem with that, then your conscience should be perfectly clear to download the book without paying for it. But if they reply that they are not happy about that, then you should do what your conscience tells you, even if that means paying for a book that most other students are downloading at no charge. Your conscience is priceless and is worth much more than the cost of a textbook.