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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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How could they? If the buyer paid cash, there'd be no way to identify them
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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."
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Yes, and I'm aware of some cases where books got pulled after publication for reasons like that. But the book was offered for sale because the publisher wasn't aware of the problem when they published it, and found out the hard way afterward. It's a different matter than "the publisher didn't have the right to offer that book in that territory".
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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.
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Agreed, and it's not your problem. It's on Fictionwise.
But in the specific case of books PD here but not there, I don't see much incentive for Fictionwise to try to impose restrictions. Who would go through the time, trouble, and expense to try to force them to do so, and why? It won't happen unless someone sees a pot of gold at the end of a rights rainbow.
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Dennis