eCrooks

[quarrel]

Let’s say you own an ebook reader, so you buy an ebook and you read it.

Did you just reward unethical business practice? It’s possible.

Maybe the company that published that ebook deliberately played fast and loose with copyright law, like Mobile Reference did in 2009 when it took novels that had gone public domain in Australia, turned them into for-pay Kindle versions, and sold them to customers in countries where the works were still copyrighted. (Amazon, which operates the Kindle, delisted the book from its market and remotely erased all purchased copies.)

Maybe the publisher operates entirely legally but in bad faith with the author, who expressly wishes not to have her book published electronically but who is locked out of authority in that decision by a rigid contract that predates the existence of ebooks.

Maybe the publisher simply ignores IP laws and operates in willful disregard of copyright. There have been activist groups in the past that patrolled for piracy of this sort, but one particular group sabotaged itself by being too careless with its DMCA takedown notices and made an enemy of the Electronic Frontier Fountation when it reported too many stories as pirated that actually were not. As it did not feel capable of the rigor required to avoid such errors in the future, the group chose to disband, leaving the authors it formerly acted on behalf of to patrol for violaitons themselves.

Maybe the work itself is properly licensed but the ereader’s manufacturing company is part of a pricing oligarchy. Yes, the author or her agent voluntarily chose to allow distribution on that platform, but it was either relinquish all control of pricing to the ereader company, combined with a promise never to allow any other distributor or reseller to sell that work at a lower price than the ereader’s arbitrary one, or else forfeit her presence in the electronic publishing market.