Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Talking about how you scanned and converted your own physical copies of books to ebooks for your own personal use is perfectly acceptable. Always has been. It's talking about how you (rhet.) shared them online with friends that's taboo.
Personal scanning and converting may have been the "real history" of ebooks, but sharing copyrighted books online was the real history of ebook piracy. That it may have felt like a labor of love to you (rhet.) is immaterial to that fact. The golden - "Before We Were Called Pirates" - age of online ebook-sharing that some like to harken back to with a sense of nostalgia is a myth. You (rhet.) were always pirates if you made them available on (or downloaded them from) whatever they called your corner of the internet back in your glory years.
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Not everything in this world is binary. By your definition, anyone who read an ebook prior to 1998 (Baen) or 2006 (Sony, then Amazon in 2007) was a pirate unless they were reading PD books. For many, who are not so rigid in their beliefs, there were a couple of different dividing lines between who is a pirate and who isn't.
At the time, one dividing line was, did you make money off any ebook you scanned. If you did, and you were not the copyright holder, you were a pirate.
Another dividing line was did you own a physical copy of the book. Some people held that if you owned a physical copy of the book, then you didn't necessarily have to scan it yourself. You might scan one book and someone else scan another book and you traded. As long as you were not paying, no one was making money and you owned physical copies of books that you downloaded and were not commercially available as ebooks, then you were not considered a pirate.
I think those dividing lines were at least defensible for the time period. Of course, things are very different now. It's a rare book that has come out in the last 10 years that isn't available as an ebook commercially.
One can argue about orphaned works. Personally, I would argue that the correct solution for orphaned works is to put them in a separate category and come up with a fair way to make orphaned works available and still protect the rights of the copyright holder if one turns up. But do that via legislation. Others may disagree, but that's fine. It's a difficult enough situation where people can legitimately disagree on how to handle it.