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Originally Posted by scotty1024
The same laws that protect Mobileread's freedom to publish public domain works also protects Amazon's publisher's rights to control how and where their copyrighted works are published.
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File conversion for person use is not "publication," and is legal in the US.
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I also suspect your attitude would be highly negative if I backed up a virtual dump truck over in the 10,000+ edition free ebook repository and started scooping up piles of content there and hauling them over to Amazon and putting them up for $.99 each.
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The books here are individual publications of public-domain (and sometimes creative commons) content. Many of them are CC; some are public domain; and some are copyrighted by their designers, who have allowed them to be distributed here for free. There's no automatic right to distribute them elsewhere.
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If you feel a law is too broad in it's powers you work to change the law, you don't break it. Because when you start breaking laws you may discover they protect things you do care about.
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Breaking an unjust and pointless law is one of the ways we get our rights. Especially civil rights related to free speech--because it's not until it's widely understood that the law itself does no good, and that it's repressing useful and valuable activity. If nobody breaks it, it's much harder to get people to realize what they're missing because of it.
But aside from that--format-shifting for personal use is not against the law in the US. They're not trying to prevent crime; they're trying to prevent competition.