Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
The attitude expressed in the OP seems awfully self serving.
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So, lets assume you missed a giveaway, and are now a book short in a series you can never complete by any official means. A friend, who DID download the book during the giveaway, tells you about the Way Back Machine, or even proposes to just copy the book for you.
Are you going to say: "Nah, thanks man. Missed it; can't take it now. I have to live with it that the series will never be complete."
That seems awfully pretentious.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ekbell
Good Point!
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If you read through it they do not guarantee that all material is free of copyright restrictions, in fact they state that the 'researcher' must abide by local Intellectial Property laws...
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In the past, downloading any media (movies music, books) was legal, because we paid taxes to do so. A download was seen as a copy for personal use (which was allowed even if you didn't have the original).
Now, the law states that downloading 'copyrighted material from a clearly illegal source' is prohibited. Is an archive of the official giveaway site, created by a well-known agency (the Way Back Machine / Internet Archive) 'clearly illegal' ?
If so, I shouldn't have downloaded the book, and almost the entire internet archive should be destroyed, as the site is now in the same league as a Torrent site. If not, it may never be possible to remove once-free material from the internet completely, and you should take that into consideration if you offer something for free. I.e., put up a Robots.txt file, or put the book behind a (temporary) login, so the Internet Archive can't grab it.