Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Your bookstore is unlikely to carry such items. They can only get from publishers/distributors what it is legal for them to sell.
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I can name three books off the top of my head that were pulled from publication for copyright violations. Buyers of those books weren't required to return them or pay any damages.
Legally, there's no difference between the copyright violation of "this book is in the public domain elsewhere, but not here, and therefore infringes on someone else's copyright" and "this book contains passages that were quoted without permission and therefore infringes on someone else's copyright."
It's not the customer's job to research the legality of the store's offerings; the store needs to make sure it's selling legal content. And if the store is multinational, like Fictionwise, it needs to make sure its content is legal in every location it sells.
Among the problems: I, as a customer, have no way of confirming whether FW is paying the *correct* publisher for permission to sell their books. I have no way of knowing if a free book is free because it's a promo, or because it's in the public domain.