Can free e-books be pirated?

[Stephen Cole]

Regardless of whether a work was ever made available for free, regardless of whether or not it is commercially available right now, if it is under copyright then only the copyright owner (normally the author) has the right to copy it (or to license a publisher to do so).

As frustrating as it is, unless a book is actually in the public domain and its copyright term has expired, you are breaching copyright if you make a copy without the authorisation of the copyright holder, me hardy.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Skeeve

Question: When I buy 20 copies of a printed book, I am free to do whatever I want with it, meaning, I can give them away for free, right?

Next Question: When I buy an ebook 20 times, I should be eligible to do the same and give it away for free to whomever I want, right?

So when there is an ebook freely available, it should be okay for me to give it away, provided I downloaded it for free as often as I want to give it away, correct?

1. Yes.
2. No.

[Stephen Cole]

In discussing copyright it's too easy to confuse what ought to be with what is.

We'd all like it if we could do everything with an ebook exactly as we can with a printed book. But they're obviously different. Those differences bear directly on how you can use it and, importantly, whether or not you can make copies or share it.

Copyright and DRM are there to protect the rights of creators. Sometimes this results in silliness, but that is true of most legal arrangements. They're artificial, but they're there for a worthy reason.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Stephen Cole

Copyright and DRM are there to protect the rights of creators. Sometimes this results in silliness, but that is true of most legal arrangements. They're artificial, but they're there for a worthy reason.

Please don't conflate copyright and DRM. DRM is there to make money for DRM providers, nothing else.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Please don't conflate copyright and DRM. DRM is there to make money for DRM providers, nothing else.

Isn't DRM part of how Amazon sync's books across devices as well pdurrant? I get what you mean about it not being the same as copyright certainly.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by crich70

Isn't DRM part of how Amazon sync's books across devices as well pdurrant?

No. That's just Amazon having the reading software report back to Amazon servers. Nothing to do with DRM, otherwise it wouldn't work for the DRM-free books Amazon sell.

[arjaybe]

My books are free (Creative Commons) and they can certainly be "pirated." In fact, I wish they would be.-)

[ApK]

Except for some details of legal classification and calculating damages in court, money has nothing to do with copyright law. For the purposes of what is an infringement, the rules don't change a whit if the price is $0.00 or $1,000,000.00

[ApK]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Please don't conflate copyright and DRM. DRM is there to make money for DRM providers, nothing else.

I don't think that's fair. It's obviously true in practice, since it'so ineffectual at anything else, but we have to at least acknowledge that the people who choose to use DRM usually do so because they are trying to enforce their terms under their copyright.

If we don't acknowledged that, it's harder to educate them on why it's a bad idea

ETA: I just noticed this thread was 5 pages, and I only read the very beginning and very end. I hate when that happens. Apologies if my comments were made irrelevant or redundant by all the middle pages. Accidental tl;dr!

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by ApK

I don't think that's fair. It's obviously true in practice, since it'so ineffectual at anything else, but we have to at least acknowledge that the people who choose to use DRM usually do so because they are trying to enforce their terms under their copyright.

If we don't acknowledged that, it's harder to educate them on why it's a bad idea

ETA: I just noticed this thread was 5 pages, and I only read the very beginning and very end. I hate when that happens. Apologies if my comments were made irrelevant or redundant by all the middle pages. Accidental tl;dr!

Comments very relevant.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

What's your opinion on this matter?

My opinion is that the term piracy is overused, overbroadly, and the reports of it damaging Big Media are grossly exaggerated by Big Media.
http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/h...e-u-s-economy/

[Barcey]

It depends on if the courts believe that the Way Back Machine is actually time travel.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Barcey

It depends on if the courts believe that the Way Back Machine is actually time travel.

True. If the WBM is legally deemed as time-travel, then there is no piracy.

[Byrdie]

Ah, but then you would have the "Ban Time Travel Because Piracy" thing going on. And there is no way no how that I am giving up my key to the Tardis, so there!

[latepaul]

One of the major selling points of that wholly remarkable travel book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, apart from its relative cheapness and the fact that it has the words DON’T PANIC written in large friendly letters on its cover, is its compendious and occasionally accurate glossary. The statistics relating to the geo-social nature of the Universe, for instance, are deftly set out between pages nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-four and nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-six; and the simplistic style in which they are written is partly explained by the fact that the editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few footnotes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous galactic copyright laws.
It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.

- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams