Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
There should be a clear purchase trail, either in an email record of the purchase or more likely in the credit card or pay-pal data to validate a purchase.
Not really any different from purchasing anything else.
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Several publishers offer occasional free downloads, with no registration required. I have no way to prove that my copies of those ebooks (for example, the
Harlequin freebies) were acquired from the Harlequin website instead of a torrent network or Rapidshare collection.
If I re-download those from a torrent (because, perhaps, it works better than direct downloading), what have I stolen--site hits? What's the value of the "theft" in that case?
The same problem exists with paid ebooks--while there may be a record of my purchase somewhere (if they don't purge their records; physical stores don't keep a list of who-bought-what forever), there's no way to indicate that the ebook on my Sony right now was legitimately acquired. (If I ran a fictionwise multiformat book through Calibre to convert it or fix the metadata, was it legitimately acquired, or is that an unauthorized copy?)
If I bought a multiformat book from Fictionwise but don't have it with me, and don't have access to login to re-download it, and I get a new copy from rapidshare, there's no way to prove that copy is not legit. (And again... what have I stolen? If I could login to Fictionwise, I could re-download it.)