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

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Hitch

The DMCA added three new areas of criminal acts. Circumventing DRM; selling devices intended to circumvent DRM, and selling devices that are intended to "bypass a copyright owner's normal copyright rights."

N.B. circumventing DRM is only a criminal act if done "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain".

So removing DRM from your own purchased ebooks is not a criminal offence, unless the publisher also sells a DRM-free version of the ebook at a higher price, at least in the US.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

N.B. circumventing DRM is only a criminal act if done "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain".

So removing DRM from your own purchased ebooks is not a criminal offence, unless the publisher also sells a DRM-free version of the ebook at a higher price, at least in the US.

The issue is somewhat nebulous since it hasn't been through the courts. I rather doubt that it will ever be taken to court. I point out that certain companies do sell programs to remove DRM and have been for years. IMPO, the major reason these companies haven't been taken to court is that it's not really in anyone's interest to remove this bypass to DRM.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

The issue is somewhat nebulous since it hasn't been through the courts. I rather doubt that it will ever be taken to court. I point out that certain companies do sell programs to remove DRM and have been for years. IMPO, the major reason these companies haven't been taken to court is that it's not really in anyone's interest to remove this bypass to DRM.

I don't beleive that any USA-based company sells DRM removal software.

[Greg Anos]

And some have been taken to court. . .

But they have been commercial enterprises. ANY DVD moved it's web site after losing a US court case. There was a UK firm (Lightning? A one-man shop, anyways) that was shut down with a cease-and-desist order around 2006 if I remember correctly. (The binaries are still floating around the Internet)

To see how obtuse things can get, look up repairing modern John Deere tractors. you can't fix them once you buy them, because all the control codes are copyrighted and encrypted. You have to pay John Deere whatever they want to charge to fix the $100,000 tractor.

[barryem]

I'm a long time fan of old time radio shows and back 2 or so decades ago there were some major copyright lawsuits over them. The vast majority of old time radio shows are NOT copyrighted anymore and for years collectors have been collecting them and trading them with each other, trying to get the best quality recordings of old shows they can. Also they've constantly made them available for the cost of media to anyone who wanted them. And more often than not even the media was free.

Then a guy named Carl Amari set up a big website, Radio Spirits to sell these old shows. All perfectly legal since they were public domain, even though he was selling the copies the collectors had been working so hard to accumulate for years.

This was pretty successful, or so I heard, and he began suing the collectors. He had no standing to do that but he had money and most of the collectors were old retired guys and quite a few had to mortgage their homes to pay legal fees to defend themselves. Some gave in and settled and lost their homes.

Some OTR was copyrighted, although very little was. Some contained songs that were copyrighted, although not many. The vast majority of these shows, something like 99.9% if I recall, were in the public domain.

I was in a number of forums at that time with these collectors and I got these stories directly from the people it happened to. Very bitter people they were, as you might imagine.

In the days when old time radio shows were the norm, before TV, there were no reruns. A show was broadcast and discarded. They were recorded and sent to stations all over the country, who played them and stored the records in closets till the closet got full and then put them in the trash to start over again. A lot of shows were lost forever. Were it not for collectors nearly all of them would have been lost. So Radio Spirits was suing the guys who made his business possible.

Copyright is a good thing but it can also be an opportunity for bad guys to make money harming innocent and defenseless people. Cars are also a good thing unless they're being used while drunk or escaping from a crime. I think in the case of copyright, even though it might be essential for progress, it probably does almost as much harm as good. It needs to be made more rational!

Barry

[Alan_Bernardo]

Originally Posted by Divinejames

There have been instances where I have seen books for $8.99 for the Kindle version on Amazon and then free versions of it online. Some of them pirated, and some of them not. For instance, a lot of books on programming are actually free online, but the Amazon will charge money for it.

Clearly, the morally correct thing to do would be to not be a thief and purchase the books in support of the author. I'm absolutely all for that, but could anyone please explain other benefits to purchasing the Kindle version vs using a free or pirated version other than the obvious legality/moral issues?

thanks

I think you know the route you want to take. However-- although this is no justification for doing maybe the wrong thing-- some Amazon ebooks are excessively over-priced.

Generally, I enjoy reading history. And some of the books I'm after are not the popular type, but more specialized and scholarly. Some of these ebooks can run $50 or more. Quite honestly, I'm not about to spend that much for an ebook that actually I will not even own (do what I want with it, for example) when I do buy it.

As far as any advantages to purchasing, I see none, besides supporting the author. But that support, at least not for me, doesn't involve paying crazy dollars for a book.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by barryem

I'm a long time fan of old time radio shows and back 2 or so decades ago there were some major copyright lawsuits over them. The vast majority of old time radio shows are NOT copyrighted anymore and for years collectors have been collecting them and trading them with each other, trying to get the best quality recordings of old shows they can. Also they've constantly made them available for the cost of media to anyone who wanted them. And more often than not even the media was free.

Then a guy named Carl Amari set up a big website, Radio Spirits to sell these old shows. All perfectly legal since they were public domain, even though he was selling the copies the collectors had been working so hard to accumulate for years.

This was pretty successful, or so I heard, and he began suing the collectors. He had no standing to do that but he had money and most of the collectors were old retired guys and quite a few had to mortgage their homes to pay legal fees to defend themselves. Some gave in and settled and lost their homes.

Some OTR was copyrighted, although very little was. Some contained songs that were copyrighted, although not many. The vast majority of these shows, something like 99.9% if I recall, were in the public domain.

I was in a number of forums at that time with these collectors and I got these stories directly from the people it happened to. Very bitter people they were, as you might imagine.

In the days when old time radio shows were the norm, before TV, there were no reruns. A show was broadcast and discarded. They were recorded and sent to stations all over the country, who played them and stored the records in closets till the closet got full and then put them in the trash to start over again. A lot of shows were lost forever. Were it not for collectors nearly all of them would have been lost. So Radio Spirits was suing the guys who made his business possible.

Copyright is a good thing but it can also be an opportunity for bad guys to make money harming innocent and defenseless people. Cars are also a good thing unless they're being used while drunk or escaping from a crime. I think in the case of copyright, even though it might be essential for progress, it probably does almost as much harm as good. It needs to be made more rational!

Barry

Patent trolls work more or less the same way. Few have deep enough pockets to fight, and large corporations will pay them just to go away.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

N.B. circumventing DRM is only a criminal act if done "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain".

So removing DRM from your own purchased ebooks is not a criminal offence, unless the publisher also sells a DRM-free version of the ebook at a higher price, at least in the US.

Nope.

Consider a DRM medical text sold with max copies=2

You remove the DRM and give copies to all your doctor partners.

That's private financial gain, yes?

Same if there are 30 students in a class and you want each to have their own.

[Deskisamess]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Nope.

Consider a DRM medical text sold with max copies=2

You remove the DRM and give copies to all your doctor partners.

That's private financial gain, yes?

Same if there are 30 students in a class and you want each to have their own.

But is that what pdurrant meant? I read their comment as removing drm from a book I've purchased for my use, to format shift perhaps to use my specific device. They made no mention of handing out copies once the drm was removed.

Many of us do just that, with no thought to handing out copies to others.

[barryem]

For a few years I've been sending ebooks I've bought from Amazon and converted to my Kindle library and back to my Kindles. I do this because I keep switching Kindles and I also read on my phone and it's not uncommon to run into the "too many copies" message. Converting it and reading the doc that I've emailed to my library avoids that problem.

However I value my account with Amazon. I live in a very small town and I don't have a car and most people around here are afraid to drive in the larger towns so shopping, other than groceries, is impossible for me. I need Amazon. So I called their support and explained exactly what I was doing and asked if that was likely to get me into trouble. The guy didn't know the answer but he called me back the next day and said his supervisor and everyone else he could find to ask said not to worry about it.

Still, I wondered if that might be a fluke. Amazon is a big place. So about a year or two later I called back and did pretty much the same thing. Again the guy had to call me back and again he gave me a similar answer, adding that a lot of the people in Kindle support did the same thing.

I buy the books. I pay for them. I only read one copy at a time, except occasionally when I put one on a Kindle to loan to a neighbor, which I also told those support guys. I don't feel the least bit bad about this and I plan to continue doing it and it seems Amazon is fine with it.

That makes me think that Amazon has DRM not because they feel a great need to protect themselves, but so their publishers will trust them with their books. I was told this by some officials at Audible a few years ago, well before Audible was part of Amazon. I suspect it's true of a lot of book sellers.

Barry

[barryem]

But sometimes things get complicated. I was given a book, the first book in Louis Lamour's Sackett series, and I don't know it's source. I loaned a Kobo to someone with a book on it and it was returned to me with this book on it as well, from the son of the woman I loaned it to. I don't know him but my assumption is that it's a pirated book.

I started reading it, decided I liked it and bought the book for my Kindle. Now here's where it gets tricky. The copy I bought is rather difficult to read. There are neither indentations at the start of a paragraph or blank lines between paragraphs. I began reading the next chapter and got a few pages in and it was a real fight to figure out who was saying what to whom.

I've just gone back to reading the book on my Kobo, where it's very nicely formatted with a blank line between paragraphs.

I can't really be sure that it's a pirate copy. i wouldn't bet lunch on it, yay or nay. But it's a lot better copy than the one I bought. I doubt I'd finish the Kindle version. I rarely leave reviews but I'm going to leave one for this. It's really difficult to read.

Barry

[darryl]

Commercial advantage or private financial gain does not mean what some posts seem to believe it means. In fact. the US Department of Justice, in referring to a provision of this type, wrote:

The drafting committee's purpose in retaining this requirement has been to exclude from criminal liability those individuals who willfully infringe copyrights solely for their own personal use.

You can find this at Copyright Infringement

If you download a pirated copy of a book for your own personal use you have arguably advantaged yourself financially to the extent of the purchase price you did not pay. But it seems, at least in the US, that this alone is not sufficient to make the infringement criminal. Of course the Courts could see this differently if the matter is ever tested, though I doubt it.

[darryl]

There has been little focus so far on the relationship between law and morality. A simplistic view is of course that law and morality always coincide, though we all know that this is simply not true. Is breaking the law itself immoral? If so we have taken moral authority from the hands of philosophers and religious leaders and handed it to a rabble of politicians, dictators and even tyrants, most of whom have no claim to any expertise on the subject.

Say we accept that it is immoral to infringe a copyright that lasts 14 years total. After the 14 years expires, it would seem to be perfectly legal to do something that would have infringed copyright only the year before. Is it also moral? When a new law then extends copyright for a period likely beyond the life of any living person, has it also legislated the morality of actions infringing copyright?

Moving on, should we judge the morality of each individual act in isolation, or is a more holistic approach the correct one? Is "two wrongs don't make a right" really the correct approach. In common law jurisdictions it is an equitable maxim that one who seeks the assistance of equity must come to the Court with "clean hands". Thus someone with a perfect legal claim can find themselves without relief because of their own conduct. In judging the morality of infringing copyright must we ignore all of the immoral acts of rights owners? Must we ignore the fact their lobbying has resulted in an unconscionably long period of copyright protection and a legal framework which, at least in the US, now works in many cases against the public interest and the very purposes for which the constitution granted the power to make such laws?

Please note that I have not myself expressed any views in this post, though the very questions do themselves carry some implications.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

There has been little focus so far on the relationship between law and morality. A simplistic view is of course that law and morality always coincide, though we all know that this is simply not true. Is breaking the law itself immoral? If so we have taken moral authority from the hands of philosophers and religious leaders and handed it to a rabble of politicians, dictators and even tyrants, most of whom have no claim to any expertise on the subject.

Say we accept that it is immoral to infringe a copyright that lasts 14 years total. After the 14 years expires, it would seem to be perfectly legal to do something that would have infringed copyright only the year before. Is it also moral? When a new law then extends copyright for a period likely beyond the life of any living person, has it also legislated the morality of actions infringing copyright?

Moving on, should we judge the morality of each individual act in isolation, or is a more holistic approach the correct one? Is "two wrongs don't make a right" really the correct approach. In common law jurisdictions it is an equitable maxim that one who seeks the assistance of equity must come to the Court with "clean hands". Thus someone with a perfect legal claim can find themselves without relief because of their own conduct. In judging the morality of infringing copyright must we ignore all of the immoral acts of rights owners? Must we ignore the fact their lobbying has resulted in an unconscionably long period of copyright protection and a legal framework which, at least in the US, now works in many cases against the public interest and the very purposes for which the constitution granted the power to make such laws?

Please note that I have not myself expressed any views in this post, though the very questions do themselves carry some implications.

IMPO, morality exists outside the law. There have been and are laws which many consider immoral. I would say that the argument about copyright law really breaks out more into those who believe that copyright is property and those that don't. For those who believe that copyright is property, any limit is unacceptable. It's property that belongs to the copyright holder and his heirs for eternity.

For those who believe that copyright is simply a government granted monopoly, the question is what is the right balance between encouraging the artist and providing for the common good. That's the main driving force behind fair use in the US.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Nope.

Consider a DRM medical text sold with max copies=2

You remove the DRM and give copies to all your doctor partners.

That's private financial gain, yes?

Same if there are 30 students in a class and you want each to have their own.

I obviously wasn't clear enough in what I wrote, since you didn't understand what I meant.

I was indeed considering the situation where DRM removal was the only (civil) offence committed.