[cmbs]

"Excellent advice. Unfortunately, you often have to download the file to see the copyright info, even at indisputably legitimate places like MobiPocket Fictionwise, and the like."

This is true, but I was talking about books being legally distributed by the author, or any legit site (like we talked about freebies from Fictionwise earlier). So downloading wouldn't be the problem. The point was even though it may be legally distributed somewhere, doesn't mean it's legal to distribute it in other places. So if a blog is redistributing books that are free elsewhere, that doesn't automatically mean the blog downloads are legal.

I see a lot of blogs giving away free ebooks, most of which I think are not legal or are at least what I'd call suspicious. And sites like Blogger will not take them down. They have to get complaints from each individual copyright owner with proof before they'll make the blog owner remove that one book. I have found some file hosting sites that will delete the illegal downloads and close accounts if it continues. But a lot of these sites don't care and won't remove them even when it's obvious the downloads are illegal. So you can't count on websites to do any policing either. There are sites I trust, but you have to assess them for yourself, again. You can't just assume this is a big well known website so they wouldn't allow anyone to use it illegally.

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Correction to the first sentence of the last paragraph above: I see a lot of blogs giving away free ebooks, MANY of which I think are not legal or are at least suspicious. Many of the blogs I see giving away free ebooks are author blogs, and most of those I think are fine.