Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
So all of the customers who (as far as they knew) innocently bought and downloaded the Orwell eBook from Amazon would be criminals. Amazon was distributing infringed material, are their customers criminals or just the distributor?
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Shaggy, there's always going to be a gazillion exceptions to any rule. When it's on a legit site, the penalties are going to go to the site not the people who downloaded it from Amazon.
I mean if some company prints copies of a book they think is public domain or whatever and sells them in stores, etc. they are the one's that are going to get hit with penalties, not the customers who had no way to know they were buying bootlegged books etc.
Finding some exceptions doesn't preclude having laws. The same is true for every criminal law and that's why their is TON of discretion in the criminal justice system--no law is going to be perfect. Police only make arrests in about 50% of cases where the evidence would support an arrest, they often give warnings instead of tickets, prosecutors often drop cases etc.