I have found numerous pirated ebooks for free online. Please tell me the benefits of

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by BookCat

darryl: Interesting, so you are saying that copyright infringement is not a crime, but can be fought in civil courts. I wonder if this is the case in the UK, where I have the distinct impression that it's a criminal offense, but I may be wrong.

I think there has been variance between civil only and both civil and criminal.

Some violations are currently criminal in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyri...minal_offences

And in the USA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimin..._copyright_law

[darryl]

There is such a thing as criminal copyright but it usually applies to large scale commercial type infringements. It is dangerous to generalise amongst jurisdictions since legislation in various countries changes as they try to come to grips with the issue. For the UK see the following government publication for an overview:

Intellectual Property Offences

Generally breaching copyright in the course of a business or for commercial gain or further sharing content may be a criminal offence, but of course I am simply commenting and not giving legal advice. You should not of course rely on any comments I make.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by shalym

Interesting...so if I go to a pawn shop and buy something that later turns out to be stolen...am I committing a crime? What about if a seller puts a book onto Amazon that they don't have the rights to sell, and I buy it, am I committing a crime then?

Shari

No. That's detrimental reliance. The reasonable person has a reasonable right to rely upon the representations of a business owner as to the legitimacy of the item being bought. You are not required to establish the provenance of that lamp you're buying at John's Pawnshop.

However, if it's commonly and widely known that John's Pawnshop is a receiver of stolen goods--and a reasonable person could have or should have known that--then, if it turns out that your lamp was indeed stolen property, there's a solid argument that you should have known, or at the very least made a good faith effort to be sure that it wasn't stolen.

I suppose that in this day and age, you could say that it's impossible for you to know that a Pawn Shop in a small or larger city is a questionable venture, but the counter-argument to that is, it's easier today than ever to establish the bona fides of businesses and individuals.

Anyway, back to eBooks--I think it's a pretty safe bet that if you search for Love's Savage Fury online, and it's for sale for $7.99-$9.99 on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc., and then you see it on Mike'sLegitimateFreeEBooks, for nothing--then a reasonable person should probably question the aforementioned legitimacy of old Mike there. And as Diap said, if you look around the table and can't spot the sucker (can't tell how the business is making money), then you're the sucker (you and your data is the product being sold).

A lot of these spam sites don't even have the book; they just want you to attempt to download it.

Hitch

[Apache]

Also, in the US, you can be prosecuted for buying stolen goods if the price is determined to have been to low. If you buy a TV that retailed for $5,000.00 and you paid $500.00 you could be prosecuted. I know people that have been prosecuted under this law. Some were able to prove that the price they paid was fair and were found not guilty. Others were nor so lucky. Or their lawyer was not quite good enough.
Apache

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by shalym

Interesting...so if I go to a pawn shop and buy something that later turns out to be stolen...am I committing a crime? What about if a seller puts a book onto Amazon that they don't have the rights to sell, and I buy it, am I committing a crime then?

Shari

Pawn shop, no.
A random unmarked white van in a parking lot or a guy in a trench coat in an alley, probably.
It will depend on local laws but typically a common sense rule applies.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Apache

Some were able to prove that the price they paid was fair and were found not guilty. Others were nor so lucky.

What if it was labeled as being at an "it's a steal" price?

That phrase isn't usually part of book marketing, although I did just find a title so advertised at Politics & Prose in D.C. I think the patrons there are safe, but, where you live, who knows

[binaryhermit]

I would hope that'd be recognized to be just a turn of phrase.

But the government isn't always a group that adheres to common sense.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by shalym

Interesting...so if I go to a pawn shop and buy something that later turns out to be stolen...am I committing a crime?

I used to like looking for old computers at pawn shops and one day I found a fairly new Dell Laptop which was currently selling new for about $1500 in perfect condition for $300. This was in the days when computers cost a lot more than they do now.

Anyway I bought it and when I got home I found that there was a password needed to access the settings. I called Dell for help and they said they'd have to contact the previous owner first, so I waited for them to call me back.

The call I got back was from the previous owner, a business owner who had assigned that laptop to one of her salesmen and had fired him a week earlier. She hadn't thought about the laptop when she did. She suggested I call the police or she would.

I called them and they agreed to meet me at the pawn shop along with the real owner of the laptop. I got there, gave her the computer and they suggested the pawn shop owner refund my $300. When he wouldn't they called in for a warrant to search his store. He decided to give me the refund.

There was never any question of me being in trouble. No-one thought I had done anything wrong, either actually or technically. Everyone worked together and resolved the situation. The guy who sold the laptop to the pawnshop was arrested later. It turns out he was related to the pawn shop owner so he also got arrested. All was well. I have no idea where things went after that.

If you buy something that's been stolen you haven't committed a crime unless it can be shown that you knew it was stolen. Then you're in trouble.

I'm no lawyer but I do think the word "steal" implies taking something from someone in such a way that he no longer has it. Book pirates aren't stealing a book. Neither the uploader nor the downloader is stealing if my definition is correct. It may be that they're depriving the publisher and author of the profit from a sale but that's not certain. To prove that it seems you'd have to prove that person would have purchased the book if they couldn't have downloaded it.

I'm not saying piracy isn't wrong. It is. But I don't think "stealing" is an apt description. I think it's used because of it's emotional impact and not because it's really descriptive.

Of course language changes with time and use and I suspect that the meaning of "stealing" might change to actually include piracy. in college I wrote a paper on why the word "fast" can mean either unable to move at all or moving rapidly. The word "silly" in earlier times meant "blessed".

Barry

Originally Posted by barryem

The word "silly" in earlier times meant "blessed".

Barry

My favourite is "nice", which originally meant "blunt," ("not cutting" in Latin) hence by extension "ignorant, dull". Whenever prescriptivists rant against polysemy or insist that a word can only mean what it once did (e.g., decimate, enormity, etc) I just smile and say "that's nice"

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by stuartjmz

My favourite is "nice", which originally meant "blunt," ("not cutting" in Latin) hence by extension "ignorant, dull". Whenever prescriptivists rant against polysemy or insist that a word can only mean what it once did (e.g., decimate, enormity, etc) I just smile and say "that's nice"

So then, I guess that it is nice that language evolution so often makes it more difficult to make distinctions.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

So then, I guess that it is nice that language evolution so often makes it more difficult to make distinctions.

"Decimate" and "enormity" are hills I'll die on. Very useful words in the original sense and they add nothing to the wealth of synonyms in their corrupted usage.

[barryem]

I know about the common usage of "decimate" but I'm not familiar with the corrupted use of "enormity". Please explain.

Barry

[BookCat]

Originally Posted by barryem

I'm no lawyer but I do think the word "steal" implies taking something from someone in such a way that he no longer has it. Book pirates aren't stealing a book. Neither the uploader nor the downloader is stealing if my definition is correct. It may be that they're depriving the publisher and author of the profit from a sale but that's not certain. To prove that it seems you'd have to prove that person would have purchased the book if they couldn't have downloaded it.

I'm not saying piracy isn't wrong. It is. But I don't think "stealing" is an apt description. I think it's used because of it's emotional impact and not because it's really descriptive.

Of course language changes with time and use and I suspect that the meaning of "stealing" might change to actually include piracy. in college I wrote a paper on why the word "fast" can mean either unable to move at all or moving rapidly. The word "silly" in earlier times meant "blessed".

Barry

Strangely, I had a long telephone discussion with a friend regarding this exact subject just last night. He held the same opinion as you, whereas my point of view was that to steal is a more broad concept. I gave the example of someone who has a paying library, the only one in a remote town where nobody owns books except the library owner. People borrow books from the library for a small amount of money.
Along comes Joe, who has state of the art technology. Joe borrows books, pays his pittance, then goes home and scans the books. Over time, he has scanned all the books in the library. The library owner still owns the books, so by your definition they haven't been 'stolen'.

But:
He now offers, for free, or a small signing up fee, or a far smaller price than the library owner charges, downloads of ebooks, all gleaned from the original library. The townspeople see this (er .. they have computers and ereaders) and immediately start downloading Joe's ebooks, which they can keep on their readers/computers for as long as they like.

Meanwhile, the library owner is slowly going out of business because fewer and fewer people borrow books from him. He occasionally has a few people who prefer physical books, but the income isn't enough to keep on the staff and pay the utility bills etc. So he has to close the library for good.

Under barryem and my friend's definition of 'theft' Joe didn't steal from the library owner. But I contend that in 'stealing' the content of the books he's deprived the library owner of his income, therefore has stolen money from him.

So despite the fact that none of the books from the library were permanently taken by Joe, the effect was the same.

barryem's and my friend's definition of stealing is too narrow, in my opinion.

This discussion went on for about two hours.

Originally Posted by barryem

I know about the common usage of "decimate" but I'm not familiar with the corrupted use of "enormity". Please explain.

Barry

"Corrupted" is a judgment call. The meanings of both words have expanded and shifted, as with words like "nice" and "silly", but to say the meanings have been "corrupted" is a moral judgment. Which is apt in this case, since "enormity" was once reserved for describing things considered to be enormously wicked, bad, immoral, etc. Whether the inevitability of linguistic and semantic shift is in itself an enormity of that sort, or simply enormous, is for each user to decide.

[darryl]

@Bookcat. It is quite simply not stealing. Your argument is for moral equivalence, not that legal equivalence exists. You will find that logic and morality are more often than not poor tools for determining what the law is. The copier in this case has breached the copyright of the copyright holder by making copies. They have also breached the terms under which they borrowed from the library owner by making copies. They have not stolen anything so far as the law is concerned.