Originally Posted by Hitch
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
|