Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Harmon,
I am not a lawyer, and I'm not going to start quoting "chapter and verse", but I don't need to be a lawyer to know that, at least in the UK, to give someone else a copy of a commercial eBook that is under copyright protection is a violation of civil copyright law, in exactly the same way that buying a CD and then giving a copy of that CD to someone else would be.
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When you say that behavior is "illegal," you should take care to be right.
If a person does something for which the
government can
prosecute him, and send him to jail or fine him, or both, then what he's doing is "illegal" (if he's convicted.)
If the person does something for which
another person - not the government - may
sue to collect
monetary damages, what he has done is
not "illegal."
Do you go around telling people that it is "illegal" not to pay their rent? Or that it is "illegal" to take sick leave from work when they are not sick? Or "illegal" to refuse to pay a contractor for not doing a job you hired him to do? Of course not. Those things might be wrong, or immoral, or subject to negotiation, but they do not involve legality or illegality.
Violating "civil copyright law" may or may not be doing something "illegal." It depends on what the law actually says, and you have tacitly admitted that you don't actually know what the law says. Until you do, you should not go around calling copying "illegal."