Harry Potter 6 e-book already being pirated!

[Chaos]

It would be an interesting case in court, to say the least.

"I copied this entirely by myself." vs. "You downloaded this."

I don't know how they could actually prove one way or the other... Any ideas? Maybe if you left the ebook site in your history... But even then, it's not conclusive. "Oh, I just found that website one time... What? It's illegal?"

[doctorow]

Is it actually true that we are allowed to make electronic copies of the hardcover books that we bought for ourselves?

[sUnShInE]

I love how copyright arguments become these overdrawn moral debates. I guess law is like that regardless... but without a full explanation of the law, no one can answer these questions and so consumers are left to make their own decision as to what is moral.

You can actually see the same craziness going on with ebooks that messed up the record industry. Because the commercial sector would not provide for consumer demand (ie, selling mp3s on the net), the public took it upon itself to distribute their own copies. Similarly, because the publisher won't release the ebook version, people are creating their own. We don't have a p2p for these small files, so we use IRC.

Will this result in major litigousness by a strong book lobby? I certainly hope not. I hope they're smarter than that and learn that consumer demand is important. The market and the public keep asking, "Who the heck wants to read a book on a device? They'll always be a need for paper books!"

Oh yea? Tell that to the newspaper industry.

Incidentally, I logged onto a nefarious IRC channel when Order of the Phoenix came out just to see how quickly they were able to produce the book online. When you think about it, all you need to do is unbind it and drop it on a good photocopier and you've got a ready-made ebook in about 5 minutes (give or take). Someone should point that out to the head of Scholastic.


.02

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by volwrath

Why won't you touch .lit? I try to buy .lit exclusively.

.lit is a closed, proprietary format that requires a Microsoft product to read.

Text, HTML and RTF are all open, public formats that (for the most part) provide all the benefits of LIT and can be read by just about anything.

Oh, ya, those formats don't support Digital Restriction Management - unlike LIT.

Originally Posted by volwrath

Actually hacker is correct about this. Fair use means I could take my copy and scan/ocr it. Downloading an electronic copy , however is not the same.

Only because lawyers say so. The end result is the same: You have a paper copy and an electronic copy.

Funny, after all this, how can Rowling or her publishers still claim that E-book business is a "niche market" not necessary to approach?

A 510mb audio book read by Jim Dale, broken up into chapters and tagged nicely for straight import into iTunes, is also floating around already. Kinda crazy, since it is not even supposed to be out yet (according to Amazon: July 19th).

[StuBear]

Originally Posted by hacker

DRM is only supposed to get in the way when you try to redistribute the DRM-protected work. Its not supposed to get in your way when you try to use the media you've legally purchased with a device you legally own. That is the key problem here.

And this is why DRM is so nasty and evil.

Now iTunes and MS are telling me I can read/listen to the content I purchase for x times on y different devices (where x and y are usually far les than 10). What is to stop them from changing these rules after the majority of users have adopted DRM? Nothing because they hold the controls and when people meekly accept these kind of conditions they are only encouraging the pigopolist to greater and greater restriction of our digital media.

You wouldn't buy clothes or physical goods that the manufaturer set the kind of limits on that DRM is inflicting on us, so why accept the same for ebooks, videos and music?

Stu

[hacker]

Originally Posted by Alexander

But the outcome would be the same, wouldn't it? So who has the burden of proof later on how you obtained the electronic version if you also own the hardcover book?

It could be as simple as word analysis. Perhaps one single word out of order in the 500 page book, or a very slight misspelling, could easily identify your electronic copy as one that was not obtained from scanning or OCR'ing of your purchased copy.

But that doesn't even get into the issues with the Internet not having any anonymity. Your provider has a log of the transaction from you to a remote site or service hosting that electronic copy. Many routers along the chain (which may or may not already have monitoring on them) could also log the hit and traffic, etc.

As we've seen, merely implying intent can land someone in jail now, without any burdon of proof. They'll simply take everything in your house with a plug that looks like it has electronics (phones, radios, mp3 players, dvd players, whatever) and you'll never see them again, even if you are innocent.

We live in a very screwed up world right now.

[hacker]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Only because lawyers say so. The end result is the same: You have a paper copy and an electronic copy.

Well, lawyers and Copyright Law of course.

What you have is a paper copy you paid for, and an electronic copy you did not. Its the same law that protects you from going into a public library and photocopying pages out of a book there for reference. Though thousands of people do it, it isn't allowed. The same goes for duplicating pages from a newspaper, or rewriting parts of articles found in printed media for including in your "blog", etc.

Some interesting quotes from the book can be found here:

http://paperlined.org/obscure/halfbloodprince.html

The interesting thing about that page, of course, is that under the recent MGM v Grokster ruling, links like this are probably illegal in some cases:

http://google.com/search?q=%22Her+in...in%22&filter=0
http://google.com/search?q=%22frogli...ig%22&filter=0

While the underlying Google data remains completely legal. This is especially notable since the vast majority of the work done here is on Google's side (eg. the URLs comprise less than 100 characters, while Google has enormous databases on a huge amount of hardware dedicated to fulfilling this request).

Some interesting eDonkey stats over at this site:
http://www.ratiatum.com/p2p.php?article=2257

[rmeister0]

One correction: Palm Reader does tie the book to a person rather than a device, via the Credit Card number you purchased the book with.

I'm pretty damned sure people won't distribute their cc numbers just to spread an e-book around. As far as DRM schemes go, eReader's is the most inoffensive.

It still doesn't protect you from the file format becoming obsolete. Only HTML really does that.

[Alexander Turcic]

Yeah and HTML doesn't protect you from piracy, so publishers argue, and henceforce refuse to release e-books in the HTML format. Disregarding the fact that it doesn't really matter whether or not they offer HTML files, as it is made obvious with this case...

So Rowling refused to release e-books of Potter because she didn't think there was a market for it or because she feared piracy? How ironic.