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Originally Posted by cmbs
To me the main question is what are they distributing and how do they have the right to distribute it? As you said, some books are obviously illegal. Some books are obviously legal like Public Domain books. But why does any one blog or similar website have the right to distribute a lot of still in copyright ebooks from a lot of authors? MOST DON'T. Booksellers presumably do. Collaborative sites where authors go to publish their work do.
Even if an author is giving a book away for free, that doesn't make it legal for everyone else to do the same.
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That's all true.
However, copyright law is (in the US) a matter of tort, not crime. That means it's only enforced if the damaged party wants to complain. Like breach of contract, it's only enforced if one of the parties involved cares about it.
Some authors set up free ebook downloads at their site, and while they don't officially allow others, they don't prevent them, either. They'd rather have the free publicity, but don't want the liability of giving actual permission, in case their publishing contracts change, or they decide to change how they deal with ebooks.
Copyright is not a law where you must get permission in advance to copy. Permission in advance protects you from litigation--lack of it does not require litigation, does not obligate an author to stop the activity. That doesn't mean all those sites are legit, but a site can be without specific permission and still be acceptable by the copyright owner.
ALSO: permission is not required to be publicized. An author can give a person permission to share their ebooks, and the sharer might not mention that on the site.
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You've got to read the specific copyright notice on each book and if there's none - then nobody has permission to distribute.
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The copyright notices on books are often useless. I've read plenty of public domain works that claim to be copyrighted by their publishers, when only the layout is copyrightable. And any site that could create an archive of free ebooks, could also create copyright notices of their choice.
I'm curious about which blogs or giveaway sites you think are questionable.