When I was in school all the solution manuals were hanging out at .ru if you were persistent enough.
I'm assuming that what flagamuffin means is that usually the Runet (Russian part of the world wide web) has most of this stuff, like solution manuals, textbooks, etc, online for free, while it's harder to find it in the English part of the web. And I agree, speaking from experience.
No, most of them are not legal, I guess. Piracy is rampant in the .ru world. I was born in Russia, and a lot of my friends (and my girlfriend) are Russian, and I can tell you that it's a sort of a national pride to not have to pay for stuff that can be found online for free. I was laughed at just a short time ago when I mentioned to a good friend of mine that I actually use Steam to buy my games instead of just pirating them. I guess a lot of it is due to the fact that large content providers are either non-existent in Russia (and probably most of Eastern Europe) or have a very small selection (like the Netflix catalogue in Russia, which at this point has next to nothing). So you'd turn to piracy because it's faster and it's free. As for the moral qualms I personally have about it, again, I love paying for stuff when possible, and I usually consider myself to be a fairly upright citizen. However, I think I'm a complete opposite of you, because textbooks are probably the only thing where I have no problems with piracy, seeing how ridiculously expensive they are and how a new edition of the same textbook with rearranged exercises and some added info gets pushed into the university bookstores every two years simply to curb used books resale.
Entirely illegal. You might rethink your stance if you knew more about the vagaries of textbook publishing, though. If you are, for instance, stealing from up-and-coming musicians but not from the textbook-industrial complex, something's wrong.
Good lord.
I don't think that flagamuffin wanted to patronize you or accuse you of anything (although hey, I'm not flagamuffin, so what do I know). What I find curious, however, is why you seem to feel the need to defend yourself in this particular case. You say that you aren't a pirate while also admitting to pirating music. Listening to a song on the radio once does not entitle one to downloading the entire album... even if that album is crap. Piracy is piracy. I do not oppose it, hell, I, being a poor college student, pirate stuff myself all the time. But why do you feel this intense need to prove that, just in your case, "piracy" actually means "living on a tight budget"? Let's call everything by their actual names. Piracy is piracy, even if you make an exception with textbooks. Why are you, while being pretty lax about everything else, so opposed to textbook piracy to begin with? It's not like pirating a book in an .epub or a .pdf format stops you from getting the paper version - in fact, I find that it's great to have both. Why is it a big no if your only motivation for buying textbooks seems to be the fact that you can resell them, not some moral qualms about piracy in general? Again, not trying to patronize or accuse you of something, just genuinely curious.I'm smart and can live on a budget, not a pirate.
I'm not some complete prude when it comes to piracy but textbooks/education are a big 'no' in my mind.