Quote:
Originally Posted by hypothetical
After the events of last week, I was a little dismayed about how quickly some of you did a 180 on your feelings about amazon. Everyone here seems to be taking this very personally, even going so far as encouraging others to return their devices because of a grand conspiracy at amazon to oppress their rights (and possibly steal their children!)
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Let me explain the situation.
Moderators here are so *keen* on keeping Mobileread "clean" and without any reference to piracy or "darknet" that, sometimes, it looks almost ridiculous.
When I joined the forum and started to answer newbie questions about "where to get books" several of my posts got deleted/moderated because I dared to mention that there are people that [self censored word] books.
Mind you, I was not posting any how-tos, I was not posting addresses of questionable sites, or names of IRC channels, I was not encouraging copyright infringement. I have simply dared to mention that the emperor has no clothes.
References to files, books, sites, that are not *strictly* "legal" are quickly deleted on this forum.
Some moderators here have many times expressed very strong feelings against anybody who is committing copyright infringement, calling people CRIMINALS.
Now the Mobileread receives a
legal threat because it linked to the site that linked to the site containing a script. And the script even can not be called a "circumvention tool".
If Amazon tried to contact moderators, or site owners and ask nicely, everything would have been resolved very quickly and quietly.
Imagine a situation:
You have just purchased new furniture.
Your neighbor John is parking his car in such a way that the [big] truck with the furniture can not get to your driveway. He is not blocking it, and if you tried to park your [relatively small] car there there would be quite a lot of space.
What do you do now?
1. You knock on his door and ask nicely:
"Hi John. Could you please move your car a little bit please?"
2. You call towing service or police (depending on where you live) and you have his car towed away.
3. You go home, load your legally held gun and start shooting at his car (or a that little bit of his car that is actually standing on your property)
Which action would give the best and fastest result?
Yes you CAN do 2. and (In some countries I shall not name here) you might get away with 3. but ...
To sum it out:
The moderators here are annoyed, because the Amazon started to attack us instead of contacting us and asking nicely. Mobileread moderators try
very hard to keep the site in compliance with law, regulations, (even with crazy DMCA), they educate people here how to get books legally, they try to support the e-publishing industry and the industry sets blood-hound^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers on our trail.