Thank you very much,
This is the publisher’s site in any case. I don’t know whether this is a legal action, but it also doesn’t really seem to me that it isn’t. It’s not “hacking” or anything. You can simply get to the image through ctrl+U and search for the link to the desired JPG.

But theoretically, isn’t this a bit similar to someone who goes to a bookstore and does not intend to buy the book? True, here apparently they suffer no loss at all. But still, isn’t there some halakhic problem here? It doesn’t seem to be a case of “this one benefits and that one does not lose,” since this is how they make their money.

Then they shouldn’t put the book there.

I didn’t understand why “like an item swept away by the sea” wouldn’t apply. What difference does it make who the thief was? At the end of the day there is despair here…

When the despair comes after the item is already in someone else’s possession (for example, with a finder or someone who bought it from a robber), there is an obligation to return it, and that obligation does not lapse because of the despair. Here, however, there is no specific physical item, so there is still room to discuss it.

“There are various books in digital libraries”?
A “book” is something created in the soul of the person reading; no book exists outside the soul of the reader.

What exists in digital libraries are atoms.
What is special about libraries is a certain arrangement of atoms that, after many transformations, becomes words and descriptions for the reader.
And since you are not taking the atoms themselves, you are not violating theft or robbery.
And since you are not even taking the arrangement of the atoms itself, but only creating a copy of it, there is not even a suspicion of theft, and there is no prohibition here.

And even according to the stringent view, one can be lenient, since you are not even copying the arrangement of the atoms yourself, but rather other servers that are not yours and with which you have no connection to the software running on them; and the information passes through countless forms of arrangements and computers of various owners who transfer information until it ends up displayed as pixels on the screen, and from there it becomes “photons” that strike the eye. And regarding photons or their arrangement, it makes no sense to say that anyone has ownership. So there is no basis to forbid it on those grounds.

Decisor,
See my article on copyright:

גניבת דעת וקניין רוחני

It’s too long. I didn’t see there the basic question of:
What ownership is in the first place.
First of all, one has to clarify what ownership is.
Seemingly there is no ownership, because everything is His.
Not even over a person’s own body.
So you begin from the fact that no one has ownership over anything more than anyone else. Everything belongs equally to everyone, or to no one.

And immediately you discover that a person will not let others harm his body. No decisors are needed for that. We learn it from lions.
Then you understand that ownership can be defined over something a person can defend, by his power, in practice.
If a person has no ability to defend the thing, then it makes no sense to say he is its owner, even if he cries until tomorrow.
Your house belongs to you for the reason that if someone tries to enter without your permission, you will use force. Because if not, then it is not your house.

And then you also understand that ownership is a relative concept. Were the homes of those expelled from Gush Katif theirs? We saw that they were not. Whoever is higher in the chain of power is owner over more and more things.

From that one immediately draws the conclusion that a creation that has entered the public domain is not something the creator can defend, and therefore he is not its owner.
And there is nothing wrong with that at all. Not even a trace of anything wrong. Because that is how we defined ownership.

And all those decisors who rule that there is ownership should keep their rulings to themselves, since that is their creation and they are its owners, and it is forbidden for anyone to listen to them; and anyone who follows their ruling violates the Torah prohibition, “You shall not steal.”

The prohibition of deception, and in modern language trickery, stems primarily from “you shall not wrong one another” and other prohibitions of fraud, and from “you shall not steal, you shall not deny falsely, and you shall not lie,” and from the matter of cheating with weights and measures, and the Torah is full of this. I did not understand the complication.

I could not even, a priori, create a link between deception and benefiting from another’s creation.
If anything, the opposite. The trickery of Jacob, who stole Laban’s heart, included there also “and you did not tell me”; part of the trickery was that Jacob did not tell him. So if the owner of a beautiful creation does not publicize his creation, then he is in fact “not telling,” and that itself is deception.

Therefore every creator is obligated to publicize his creation to whoever asks for it. And one who does not do so violates deception.

For me too, it’s too long.

It is impossible to read such a basic discussion without a defined concept of “ownership.”
That is where all the confusion and hair-splitting comes from.

I did not see there an answer to the question, “What is ownership?” From the definition of “ownership” it should automatically follow what it applies to. Otherwise it is not a good definition.
There you begin deciding on your own, or based on others, to determine what it does or does not apply to. That is vague and arbitrary. A result of the lack of a definition of “ownership.”