Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylaM
j: I try to be a basically HONEST person. I know they're few and far between now days, but if I'm not supposed to have it, I don't.
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Y'know, as a basically honest person (like nearly everybody on MobileRead, which is tens of thousands of us), I really resent that.
An interesting question: Let's say you live in the US (a life+70 country) and go to visit a life+50 country. On the way home, you buy a life+60 book (legal in the country you're buying it in, but not in the US) in the airport bookstore to have something to read while you wait. You (and your book) get on the plane to come home. In the US airport ... what do you do with your book?
The Internet makes all sorts of things complicated.
But in any event, nobody cares if Joe Schmoe downloads an in-copyright book or two so long as he doesn't pass them around; nobody will, in fact,
know about said books. Even if Joe picks up the latest and greatest, rather than something decades old and forgotten about by everyone, including the decades-later successors in interest to its publisher, nobody is going to know unless they raid the servers and sloooowly sort out what person, from what country, and when, downloaded which book. The letters in question went out to people who were handing out large numbers of recent songs, not people who deleted a handful of ancient books, and given how well the RIAA's efforts weren't received, that's unlikely to change.
I'm sure, somewhere in my collection of books legal in my country, I've gotten one or two that are actually only legal somewhere else. No little letters, and I don't expect any. Sorry to say, but the publishing industry doesn't think you're important at all.