Monday, July 26, 2010

bookmix13 - Bookmaster

This is just my opinion, but when I see books that I know darned well are in copyright, and I see careful wording like this:


Please note that we are not the 'hosts' of these books, neither did we upload them to any hosting provider. We simply find links to books, that were freely available on the web and share our findings with our members!
My blood begins to boil. How is it legal for someone to facilitate copyright infringement? How is it legal to describe ebooks as "free" and "freely available" when any reasonable person could reasonably conclude that they are only that way as a result of copyright infringement?

And, publishers, please note that these pirates charge would-be downloaders $2.00 , so if the books are indeed intended to be "free", this is a commercial use.

bookmix13 - Bookmaster

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Some Great Books Needed part 8 (General Fiction) - Share Term Papers

Ethical question...

If a file sharing site has various "Share" applications which permit anyone at all to post a link to any page of that site on Twitter, Facebook etc
and given that all participants in the public chat on this file sharing site are fully aware of what is on the page, is it wrong to use the functionality that is provided?

Some Great Books Needed part 8 (General Fiction) - Share Term Papers

Does sharing a public link to a public page constitute quoting a person's remarks? I shouldn't have thought so. It is almost certainly covered by Fair Use, which permits limited quoting for the purposes of commentary, critique, reportage, education and so forth as long as it does not negatively impact the author's ability to make money from his or her writing.

What do you think?

Sunday, July 4, 2010

iOffer and Pirates

There are 38,000 copies of ebooks being sold on iOffer.com and most of those sales are in violation of the authors' copyrights.

You cannot resell an ebook.

You most certainly cannot create 10 copies of one ebook, and sell all 10.