Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
What if the author broke into the pirate's house, raped his dog, smashed up his scanner, pulled all the wheels off his car and rolled them down a hill, at the bottom of which he had tied up the pirate with the USB cable from the scanner? Isn't that EXACTLY what has happened here????????????
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You're on to me, Mr. Ploppy!
Seriously, I left the room because the atmosphere was becoming toxic with smoke. I don't promise to stay, because this isn't how I want to spend my life. But since some reasonable people have weighed in in the interim (I read through quickly, and so apologize for not acknowledging folk by name or post), I thought I should at least state some clarifications. I am
not going to rejoin the conversation about piracy and rights per se--too much of that already--but since I've seen some misstatements about what I did, here's a recap:
A fan sent me a PDF of my novel, telling me he'd downloaded it from a torrent site and thought I might want to know, or be able to use it. Said PDF was a digitization of my novel, distributed worldwide without my permission (or even a request for permission, which I might have granted if I'd been asked). I was in the process of getting the book into ebook production at the time, so instead of using the publisher's scanning service, I converted the PDF to an RTF file and proofed, edited, and reformatted
my own copyrighted novel and sent it to the publisher for production.
I have no idea who the original scanner is, but somehow--unless the person is a real jerk, which I have no reason to think--I doubt that this person would object to my making use of his/her scanning work in the creation of a licensed version of the book.
Others here have defended this action on my behalf already--and thank you. I've seen nothing in this discussion since then to persuade me that I did not have the moral and legal right to do what I did.