Quote:
Originally Posted by rogerVA
I assumed Amazon would be somewhat thorough checking out the rights and their availability before offering something for sale... am I giving them too much credit here?
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Unfortunately, yes.
There was already a publicized case of an indie publisher offering a Kindle edition of George Orwell's 1984 that it had no right to offer. Amazon took it down when it was informed of infringement.
Unfortunately, an innocent student had bought a copy and was using it for schoolwork. When Amazon removed it on their end, it also removed it from his Kindle the next time he synced with Amazon,
and removed the notes he had been taking on the book that were stored on his Kindle, because they were associated with the volume. He was not happy, and it became a major flap, and black eye for Amazon.
Amazon encourages small and indie publishers to produce Kindle editions and sell them through Amazon, so there are a plethora of public domain titles offered that way, and some titles that probably shouldn't be up, because the publishers don't have the rights to offer them.
But in Amazon's defense, I'm not sure it would be
possible to vet every offering like this to insure it was legal. (It would certainly be time consuming and expensive, and make it far less attractive for Amazon to court small and indie publishers in the first place.) If it's not, and the rights holder becomes aware of infringement and complains, Amazon simply takes it down, and points at whoever offered it illegally.
This collection might well be legal. I don't
know. I just happen to know where the stories probably came from if it isn't, and have a query off to the admin of the CAS site to see if he's aware of it.
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Dennis