Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
That's one hell of a leap.
Just how many gigs' worth of e-books is your mythical $15,000-a-year wage slave allowed to have? There's the vast library of books from Project Gutenberg and Manybooks and Munseys and here at MR, dozens of free books every day from Amazon and BN, thousands of indie books that are free or cost only a couple of bucks, vast numbers of non-Agency books in all price ranges with coupon codes, etc.
And a search warrant is not a license to go trolling through every aspect of a person's life.
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I'm not going to give you his name, since that seems wrong. However, for a time there were several personal collections of ebooks made available on the Internet that had thousands and thousands of copyright books and he downloaded seven of them--each containing about 2000-3000 books from authors such as Terry Pratchett, Terry Goodkind, Anne Rice, Laurell K Hamilton, Alan Dean Foster, CJ Cherryh, David Weber, Ursula LeGuin, David Drake, Jim Butcher, etc.
Obviously, none of those books were Public Domain. He paid no money for them and had no record of any purchases. He laughed about it and thought it was funny. He's just lucky someone didn't put a trace on the torrent like the movie studio did when they uploaded the Hurt Locker and tired to sue everybody
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/10/tech...uits/index.htm or even a nasty virus.
He didn't get busted for illegally downloading books or whatever. He tried to avoid paying taxes on casino winnings by drawing a bunch of stupid people into his plan to cash in his chips. In a case like that, it is a pretty serious deal, so someone in the casino cage took five minutes to fill out an SAR form and attached a security photo to it. Those forms go straight to the FBI and Homeland Security, who do, in fact, have the right to rip through every single aspect of a person's life on the suspicion that they may be funding whatever choice group of the moment. And finding a bunch of ebooks on his hard drive probably didn't look too good for him.
Say I'm wrong or whatever, I don't care. I never called for mass executions of anyone or to have peoples' names dragged through the dirt. All I've said is that a person-to-person transfer of an ebook is probably no big deal and you probably won't get in trouble. Then I just pointed out that ebooks maintain whatever form they're in--no wear and tear. Which means there probably won't be a place to resell your used ebooks in the future, especially if people can just buy a used ebook and stick it on some torrent site somewhere and the author or publisher does not receive any form of compensation while the book is downloaded thousands of times.
And again, all I've ever said is that if someone is going to do something they know is illegal or can get them or their friends or family in trouble, it's probably a good idea not to broadcast it all over the place. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the nail that sticks up gets pounded flat. I.E. Terry Goodkind.