Harry Potter Pirated Editions on Kindle Again

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Apparently Amazon is not doing its homework at all:

54 Books of Robert A. Heinlein - now listed at $200 published by "Amazon Digital Services" - another badly formatted obviously pirated edition. Still listed for sale.

Crefit where credit is due.

Good formatting is what would be a tip off regarding piracy.

Bad formatting is a hallmark of the regular publishing houses.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Crefit where credit is due.

Good formatting is what would be a tip off regarding piracy.

Bad formatting is a hallmark of the regular publishing houses.

well, perhaps you would know better than me but the few pirated PDF versions I have ever seen have been full of OCR'd errors, input by several people with every chapter having different kinds of errors.

Dale

[Hellmark]

I guess it varies like all pirated material. Some people release high quality things, some don't care about quality because they just want it out there (and fast)

[tompe]

What a lot of pirated material have is a system for marking up what the quality is. Usually the information given is the revision number and the status of the file.

[Daithi]

I'm really surprised that Amazon doesn't check the names of titles and authors before allowing someone to upload them -- at least for popular books. How do you get burned with pirated copies of Harry Potter? Twice? Especially after the Nineteen Eighty Four fiasco.

I'm not a big fan of lawsuits but Amazon is begging for one.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Yes, if you're fixed into a very narrow view which refuses to see the box. The actual content of the database is irrelevant. The value is that google have for each book they scanned identified the rights owners.

Is it going to be near perfect? No, but it'll eliminate many of the common-case problems. Trying for perfection is this sort of thing is a very good way of paralysing the system into doing nothing.

You are mistaken about the content of Google's database. Google is not researching who owns what works. Rather they are relying on the rights owners to come forward and let Google know that they own some of the works.

According to Larry Lessig, about 80% of works currently under copyright have no known rights owners. So about 80% of Google's database will have no known rights holders. Of they 20% that are known, they are probably rather well known, so Google's database doesn't help much.

And to further complicate matters, there's no penalty for claiming to hold a copyright when you don't.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Amazon is the direct beneficiary--they get a percentage of each sale. This is unlike ad revenue, where a third party pays them for the interaction that takes place between Content Poster and Viewer. In Amazon's case, they get direct payment for that interaction, from the people involved.

Hmm. I'll have to think about how this is similar to or different from eBay. (It may be identical to eBay, and eBay just gets less hassle because they don't allow direct download sales, and proving infringement on a physical medium is harder; someone else would have to buy the "disc of 100 ebooks" and arrange complaints from copyright holders first.)

The big difference between eBay and Amazon is that the seller pays eBay while the buyer pays Amazon. EBay's direct profit comes from the listing rather than the sale, which puts them on different legal ground.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

You are mistaken about the content of Google's database. Google is not researching who owns what works. Rather they are relying on the rights owners to come forward and let Google know that they own some of the works.

Sure, and that's why it's useful. It's going to be a pretty good database of the major authors and publishing houses rights to electronic editions. Again, I'm in no way suggesting that it's comprehensive, but it will deal with the vast majority of pirate works.

Sure, they might be "well known", but the problem as this has illustrated is a problem with well known works and Amazon's (non)filtering in the first place!

According to Larry Lessig, about 80% of works currently under copyright have no known rights owners.

Sorry, taking that with a very large pinch of salt - does that apply to just books or to all published works, including electronic publishing?

And to further complicate matters, there's no penalty for claiming to hold a copyright when you don't.

Oh sure there is, if you've profited from it. If you make an explicit penalty for the claim itself, then you're in danger of creating a situation of more money being the arbitrator of who owns copyright (more than at present, I mean).

[pwarren]

Yah, the Harry Potter reference quality ebook collection that I've acquired have been the most beautifully formatted ebooks I've ever found. IMHO J.K.R. should pay those pirates for doign what her publishes can't! (or is it she herself who doesn't want ebooks, I forget)

I wonder if they'll delete these copies from kindles like the did with '1984' a few months ago.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Sorry, taking that with a very large pinch of salt - does that apply to just books or to all published works, including electronic publishing?

All copyrighted material--which includes all grammar-school essays written since 1963 or so. Shoeboxes full of vacation photos that wind up at thrift stores. Doodles in the margins of textbooks. Badly-edited home videos that got thrown out when the couple moved. Answering-machine recordings of the drunk guy trying to give directions to where he is now. Copied-and-shared email signature lines from 1994. ("The rest of this tagline is umop apisdn")

The vast majority of copyrighted material has no commercial value, and we are not better off as a culture for requiring permission to use it.

Oh sure there is, if you've profited from it. If you make an explicit penalty for the claim itself, then you're in danger of creating a situation of more money being the arbitrator of who owns copyright (more than at present, I mean).

There's no penalty for claiming to hold copyright when you don't. There's only a penalty for infringing on someone else's copyright. There's no penalty for publishing a public-domain work, and claiming you own the copyright on it and that no part of it can be reprinted without your permission.

I'm not sure it's even illegal to get permission to publish, and then put your own copyright notice on a work that someone else owns. It's a violation to do this with CC works, because "attribution" is the most basic form of them, but I'm not sure there'd be anything illegal about, for example, contracting with Salinger to print a new edition of Catcher in the Rye, and announce in the inside, "Copyright [elfwreck] 2009; all rights reserved." (Odds of me getting Salinger to agree to this: very very VERY low. However, I could very likely get permission to reprint my father's college papers, were I able to find them, under my own name... which would give the impression of ~40 years more copyright protection than they should have.)

I'm not sure there's any law against putting a *false* copyright notice on a work, now that copyright notices aren't specifically required for the protection to apply.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by pwarren

Yah, the Harry Potter reference quality ebook collection that I've acquired have been the most beautifully formatted ebooks I've ever found. IMHO J.K.R. should pay those pirates for doign what her publishes can't! (or is it she herself who doesn't want ebooks, I forget)

She doesn't need to pay the pirates--they didn't have permission to make the works in the first place; they don't have copyright on it.

I'm surprised more authors who want to convert their older works to ebooks don't just go download them through the torrent network (after all, it's not illegal for them to get copies of their own works), and proofread & edit those, instead of starting from scratch.

(From what I hear, the new Tolkein ebooks were *not* made from the .txt versions that have been floating around since 2001. Those don't have typos in the titles.)

[Hellmark]

pwarren, it isn't that her publishers can't, but rather that she does not want to. She's been openly against ebooks.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by pwarren

Yah, the Harry Potter reference quality ebook collection that I've acquired have been the most beautifully formatted ebooks I've ever found. IMHO J.K.R. should pay those pirates for doign what her publishes can't! (or is it she herself who doesn't want ebooks, I forget)

Too bad, they are crappy pdfs !

[Andybaby]

while on the subject, copyrights should be registered if you want to keep the copyright for more than 1 year, after 1 year if you havent registered it, it should be considered public domain.

second, copyrights shouldn't last longer than Life +21 years

[Dave Berk]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Too bad, they are crappy pdfs !

Not the PDFs I have seen. They are identical bit for bit to the US version. It was quite amazing, actually. Also, you can get the whole series (maybe not the last two) proofed in html (the UK version).