Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
If it's in the public domain, there's no problem. If it's copyrighted and you want to create an ebook and give it to the author, that's OK, too. But when you share it with others, that's taking something that doesn't belong to you (the right to copy a work) and giving it to others. It's kind of like taking a book from a bookstore to give to your friend.
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No, if I take a book from a bookstore, the bookstore can't sell that book anymore. If I give a friend a digital copy of a book they already own in paper, the author's already been paid for that person's reading of the book.
They have the right to shift the format from print to digital themselves. The question is whether they have the right to have someone else do the shifting for them.
Copyright law decided that you can tape shows off the TV, and has never had a problem with "I asked my neighbor to tape my favorite show, since I was going to be at a birthday party that evening." Not even if the neighbor ran two VCRs at once on the same show, or taped the show for himself & ran off an extra copy.
And while a lot of people stopped home-taping when high-quality commercial copies became available, that hasn't worked for ebooks--in part because the commercial copies are often hack jobs.
I'm looking forward to the ebook piracy lawsuit in which the defendant says, "it's fair use; I'm not competing with the commercial ebook version because my free version is *better.* The publisher has refused to make a version that [transfers easily to multiple devices/has a working TOC/is proofread/includes the maps and other pictures], therefore this copy fills a niche the publisher has declined to exploit."