Copyright & Pirated eBooks

[KyBunnies]

If you came across a site that was distributing/sharing eBooks what would you do?

[Cinisajoy]

Though I love the last answer.

[Tex2002ans]

There is a mismatch between the title of the thread + the "question" (a statement?) in the poll + the initial post.

I won't vote in the poll, but I will only focus on the initial post:

Originally Posted by KyBunnies

If you came across a site that was distributing/sharing eBooks what would you do?

Use it of course. The more and easier access people have to knowledge, the better. The more people can read and learn, the better.

Archive.org is one of the greatest distributors/sharers of books. So is Project Gutenberg.

Then we could be talking about what type of ebooks are being shared? Scientific Papers? Journal Articles?

Here is one article from the New York Times last year, Should All Research Papers Be Free?

“Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. “The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.”

[...]

“The prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care over the past 20 years, so there’s a real scandal there to be exposed,” said Peter Suber, Harvard’s director of the office of scholarly communication. “It’s important that Harvard is suffering when it has the largest budget of any academic library in the world.”

The price of many academic journal articles is insane, and not many people/institutions outside of the Western countries can even afford such fees. How effective is your education going to be if it becomes impossible to even get access to some of the latest research in your field?

Then there is those filthy places called libraries that share works to millions of people FOR FREE.

One of my favorite articles on the topic is this one:

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

[...]

And another one of my favorites is this one on Falkvinge.net:

The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This supposedly deprives the author or artist of those millions of people’s money. One group has acquired over 50 million media items, and makes each of them available to approximately 20 million people — which must be a tremendous hit to creative professionals’ wallets. This notorious institution is called the New York Public Library.

[...]

[drjd]

I would simply ignore the site and move on. I've tried earlier to help and inform one original publisher and author about their book on one such site and my experience was pretty bad. They interrogated me by emails for long like policemen as if I had done a crime finding that pirate-site. Sorry for the next time.

[Nate the great]

I would join it.

oh, wait, you're not talking about mobileRead ...

[pdurrant]

I just ignore pirate sites. There are too many of them for me to waste my time on reporting them.

[gweeks]

Ignore it. Life is too short to try to be a copyright cop for somebody else who most likely will blame you anyway instead of the real culprit.

[jhowell]

Ignore it and move on, the same as if I saw someone selling knock-off "designer" watches and handbags on the street.

(It would also be nice to have a "none of the above" choice in the poll.)

[Apache]

Ignore.
Apache

[KyBunnies]

Sorry I did not make it clear in the original post.

I am talking about sites that illegally share books and/or sell books for their own gain.

[Sweetpea]

I ignore it. Same reason as pdurrant.

Originally Posted by KyBunnies

Sorry I did not make it clear in the original post.

I am talking about sites that illegally share books and/or sell books for their own gain.

You could edit your first post to make the question more clear...

[theducks]

Contacting the site would just get you added to their addresses to (sell for) SPAM list.
Those Fileshare site probably want the traffic (ads)

Only 100% Legit site will do something about it.

[ekbell]

Normally I would ignore.

However, I admit that I have searched for and downloaded fan created/scanned books that are Public Domain in my country (Canada) without bothering to check the location and/or legitimacy of the website.

[ucfgrad93]

I would ignore it.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

The price of many academic journal articles is insane, and not many people/institutions outside of the Western countries can even afford such fees.

Not even the major universities in the United States can afford the fees.

I don't remember if it was Library Genesis or Elsevier that claimed the user base for Library Genesis was academics in the United States, and not third world students, which is the target demographic. Either way, more than one researcher at a Big Ten University has publicly admitted to going to Library Genesis, when their library didn't have the material, because their research budget couldn't cover the US$30+ per article that Elsevier was charging at the time.

But it isn't just research papers that are too expensive. I've come across more than one highly respected professor, casually requesting a book for their university library, only to have it denied, because it was too expensive. Turns out that the US$500 that the prof thought was the hard copy price, was the price of the ebook. The hard copy was a multiple of that price.

Amber