KINDLE is the greatest boon to book piracy ever invented. Since it appeared, the book business has gone into collapse. Author advances have shrunk. Libraries have seen a marked decline in visitors.
Over on EBAY, they look the other way when it comes to book piracy. They will not remove obvious examples of piracy even when they are reported to eBay's "copyright" division. Here's an example.
This British prick posted and boasted in various auctions, that he could offer bidders ANYTHING they wanted (anything he could download from thieving forums).
Did you follow that caveat? That crap about GNU? About "freeware?" Just typical brat-speak. "Sharers" and "bootleggers" come up with all kinds of childish excuses for what they do. It's "for review" and "it's fair use" and "it's being offered collector to collector." Ad nauseam.
The Crypto-Nazi bastards of EBAY play the Sgt. Schultz game. You remember him from "Hogan's Heroes." He stood around saying, "I know nnnnnothing! I know nnnnnnothing!"
The Crypto-Nazi bastards of EBAY insist they have no idea if there's a GNU, or if the item is "freeware" or whatever else their sellers are saying. They won't ask, either. The logical thing to do would be to knock off the auction and demand the seller or the seller's attorney prove they have a licensing agreement to put EVERY BOOK ON THE PLANET on a DVD-R or CD-R.
Instead, the Crypto-Nazi bastards of EBAY shrug and say, "It's up to the authors to check our auctions and point out if something infringes. Because WE KNOW NNNNNOTHING."
OK. You'd think that Amazon would be interested in protecting their stranglehold. They'd want to make sure people only download from THEIR site, and that people don't get pirated copies on a DVD-R or CD-R.
This is Amazon's response to the above auction:
Incredible, isn't it? Amazon doesn't have some low-level intern-schmuck who can file a takedown on EBAY?
Amazon doesn't care if somebody is using the Kindle trademark and bootlegging Kindle books? Amazon would be well within their rights to shut this auction down.
They didn't. It was up to ONE VeRO rep representing ONE author to point out this was an infringing auction. Yes, ONE VeRO rep said to EBAY, "My author's books are being offered illegally here." Even Crypto-Nazis are not always unreasonable. This was a blatant inexcusable auction run by a self-entitled British brat. But Amazon did nothing, and you can go to EBAY and type in KINDLE and find plenty more bootleggers thriving on EBAY.
Sadly, there's too much piracy and not enough of it is being taken seriously. Fat cat Kindle and fat cat Amazon are joined by fat cat Penguin and fat cat Random House and fat cat Doubleday and other publishers who are too busy sucking their Starbucks lattes and taking 2 hour lunches to understand what's going on. These are the same people who sit around reading the Times and moan about climate change and how nobody listens. But are they listening? Hell, they should be shutting this crap down on principle alone. As in: "don't steal our books, how DARE you!"
What's that little word you see before you even start reading the actual book? Oh. Yes. The word COPYRIGHT.
Too bad some big fat cat companies don't take that word seriously.
