Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Piracy of ebooks began quite innocently, long before there were ereaders or places to buy ebooks or even, I think, before the term "ebook" was coined. My first awareness of it was on the HP forum in Compuserve in the days before the internet was available to the public. I had an HP 95lx, a pocket sized MS-DOS computer and that and their calculator forums were where I participated. Someone wrote a text reader for the 95LX that was specifically designed for reading books that had been scanned into plain text files.
The problem with this was that none of us had heard of Gutenberg.org so we had no place to get books for it. A lot of people started scanning the books they were reading, proofing them and exchanging them. Compuserve had a very strict and rigidly enforced no-piracy policy but in those days that term only applied to software. Up to that point there wasn't anything else to pirate. MP3 hadn't become a thing yet and monitors didn't have the resolution to display decent images and even if they had upload speeds (1200 baud in those days) were far too slow to make that possible. Compuserve provided the forum space to upload these books for download, not seeing any legal or ethical issues.
Anyway, perfectly honest people, mostly software developers who had a high regard for the rights of authors, were trading books. It was years before anybody thought to call this piracy. It was done in complete innocence. There was never even a question asked about whether it was okay. Trading books was something we'd been taught to do since we were kids. Of course the ramifications were different with ebooks but it took a while to realize that.
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And Harlan Ellison was still peeved about it!