Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Not really. Both the uploading and downloading of ebooks with no distribution contract with rights-holder in place to do so is copyright violation. And whether money changes hands or not, the ebooks in question have been pirated. Many uploaders make money from their efforts whether it be through direct payment or ad revenue. Neither scenario is more, or less, piracy.
You want to argue that a friend passing another friend a copy of an ebook (outside of any official "sharing feature") isn't piracy? I'll entertain that notion (but I won't definitively agree with it, either). But online file-sharing sites? That's piracy whether money is directly changing hands or not. Uploading or downloading copyrighted ebooks you've no right to upload or download is both copyright violation and piracy.
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Agreed.
It's all well and good if Amazon "is okay with it," but again, Amazon's policies are not the arbiter of law; they're the arbiter of Amazon's desire to be profitable and to please their customers. (Also, probably a very clear-eyed assessment of the
realistic chances of them successfully telling Dick that he can't share his book wth his wife, Jane, whilst they abide together; Amazon is nothing if not pragmatic, so why NOT behave as though it's a benefit, a plus? It's lemonades from lemons...)
Piracy is piracy, whether the eventual pirated reading customer is paying for it or not. I mean, I suppose we could come up with different terms, to distinguish one from the other, but under law, they are the same thing. It doesn't matter if you take a book, de-DRM it and park it on Kim Dotcomm's latest mega site for freebs, or if you take it, put it into Sigil, change some names and a few locations, give it a new title and a new cover, and upload it for sale on Amazon--they're both "simply" copyright violation.
The damages, in a court case, would be assessed differently, as one party received payments, as opposed to the other--but they are the same crime. Arguably, one might rise to felony copyright infringement, if it's performed on a large enough scale, but still--it's infringement, not some "other" statute under which it's enforced. There's no distinction between one and the other, statutorily. There might be relevant case law that makes some fine distinctions, but again, the terminology and interpretation under law is the same.
Hitch