Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
My take on the matter is simply that it's the business of the bookseller to sell legal books. The buyer's business is to buy from a well-known and reputable seller. But it's definitely not the buyer's business to worry about the legality of the books bought from that reputable seller.
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Yes. Publishers have always TRIED to make consumers liable. But the reality is that it's the distributor or seller that's liable. Or deliberate pirate uploading.
If you are getting from an official seller, that real publishers deal with, then that seller totally has the responsibility. And yes, Amazon, Google Playstore, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Scribed and Kobo do occasionally sell/loan pirated work. Plagiarised work is more subtle.
Archive dot org DOES have public domain material, but they also deliberately loan and offer downloads of copyright material. Be suspicious of PDFs and OCR conversions of scans/PDFs with no proof corrections.
You'll also see poorly done collections on Amazon selling at maybe 99c that are actually Public Domain. Sometimes at better quality on gutenberg.org but that's not illegal or any sort of fraud or violation.