Quote:
Originally Posted by gweeks
While morally suspect, it's not piracy if the books are public domain. If the books are public domain you don't get to impose additional restrictions on them for other uses.
Greg
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Absolutely. It's despicable, but not illegal.
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It is more than despicable, it is illegal since the books in question were more than just TXT files. They had the copyrighted work of the person who uploaded them -- the unique, handcrafted CSS design and HTML tagging which gave it its look, as well as possibly images which may have been derived from the public domain, but may have been created by the uploader.
Merely using those books as a source for the text is not a problem, but that would have little point, since you can already get them from so many places.
To clarify: the thief in question pirated uploaders' hard work. Formatting is legally copyrightable. (I believe the books in question were doubleshuffle's in case he remembers where the original thread was. I don't.)