[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Demented

First off, when it comes to ebooks/mp3s, how is a user supposed to tell the difference between an official free copy and a stolen copy?

A user can't. A court can't, in most cases. That's why all the copyright lawsuits have been based on *uploading,* not on downloading or files on someone's computer, because they can't prove a particular file isn't legit. (Even if it's got DRM that makes it unusable, because maybe that's *your* file, and the fact that you can no longer open it because you updated your computer settings doesn't make it unauthorized.)

Also, most courts, maybe most publishers, don't have a way to open DRM'd files to find out if they're supposed to belong to the person who has them.

I have like 25 drm free ebooks from TOR that they gave away. Once a publisher gives a non-drm file away, does that automatically remove their right to prosecute for illegal copies?

They don't lose their right to prosecute, but the practicalities make it almost impossible. Also, in Tor's case, they'd have a hard time indicating monetary damages from the unauthorized copies--those ebooks aren't available at any price at the moment; they can't show how many sales they've lost because of them.

That's not a lawsuit-killer; free materials are still copyrighted & damages can be established even if there's no market value. (For example, if a company's employee guides were grabbed & copied by a competitor.) But it's a lot harder to declare damages from unauthorized distribution of *promotional* materials--ones that were sent out free to draw attention to the company. Tor would be hard-pressed to indicate exactly who's being harmed by the continued distribution of those ebooks.

The problem is that copyright law was designed for big, corporate offenders, and the tech has shifted to allow individuals to do things that were formerly only possible for companies or very wealthy individuals. From Lessig's The Public Domain:

Imagine someone walking up to you in 1950, handing you a book or a record or a movie reel, and saying “Quick! Do something the law of intellectual property might forbid.” (This, I admit, is a scenario only likely to come to the mind of a person in my line of work.) You would have been hard-pressed to do so. Perhaps you could find a balky mimeograph machine, or press a reel-to-reel tape recorder into use. You might manage a single unauthorized showing of the movie—though to how many people? But triggering the law of intellectual property would be genuinely difficult. Like an antitank mine, it would not be triggered by the footsteps of individuals. It was reserved for bigger game.

Now, everyone potentially violates copyright as a matter of basic online existence. (Technically, replying to an email while including a full copy of the original could be a copyright violation. Copying a FAQ question & answer from a website & forwarding it to someone could be a violation. Loading a page from your cache could be a copyright violation, if the author has removed permission.)

Copyright law needs to be fixed so that it prevents corporate predation *without* stomping on individual people's ability to share culture with each other.