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Book 'Em, Dano
theodp writes "An Oregon library worker was arrested after selling at least $10,000 worth of stolen library books, CDs and videotapes online in the past six months. The thief, who scanned the Net to find items in demand and went to the library to check them out, was busted after an alert college president noticed his copy of the recently-published I am Charlotte Simmons, purchased on Amazon.com, sported a library receipt with a due date of Dec. 26. Earlier this month, it was reported that a VT man was arrested for stealing hundreds of books from college libraries and bookstores and selling them on Amazon, realizing more than $4,000. The library thefts are somewhat ironic, since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the NY Times seemed to suggest there might be fewer books in libraries if the Authors Guild, who opposed Amazon's used book sales practices, had their way. Bezos also once told angry booksellers there's no reason why Amazon should have to collect sales taxes, arguing that Amazon gets no police services from other states."
Damn, this guy's a smart one... genious.
To be honest, this sort of thing really grips my shit. Ebay is full of people doing this sort of thing - not what people might think of as 'stolen goods' but things they've borrowed from work or been issued and then flog on ebay.
I'm in the military and every now and again do a search for Military kit, ebay is crawling with brand new stuff that could only have come from stores, so basicly someone is getting it issued, or taking a few bits home and then flogging them straight onto eBay to make a few extra dollars - it still amounts to the same thing.
As a part time resident of VT the past 5 years (the majority of the fall/winter), I can't say this surprises me. Norwich is about 10 miles away and is a military oriented university. I wonder what titles he was pulling out? Anyways, this is just another creative theft of product/services. Contrary to many popular beliefs, Vermont is not the idllyic paradise many would have you believe. High welfare rates, little job growth, few police and much unreported crime. I'll give that this guy was more creative than most, but he is still the typical dirtbag.
Is this really an arrest its legal to make? When signing up to library you agree if you dont return book you pay for it so you might borrow something from library worth $20 to library but find a buyer online who will pay $250 for it.
Well library rules say you pay $20 to library so what is the problem? If youve paid for it you can do what you like with it the library shouldnt have any say over it then.
This is like RIAA when they say they get to control how you use music when they sell it to you but still control what you can do with it, or so they think
Great, so we get to pay taxes on online orders because some asshole stole some library books? Instead of paying the taxes, why not just shoot the jerk. Then nobody else will try it. I buy a lot of books online and they are expensive enough as it is.
Someone you trust is one of us.
on the run for the library policemen...
MP3 Search Engine
probably with the Spelling Police...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Heh, and I used to think that knowledge was power...profitable power in this case :)
They are. No sales of stolen property are ever valid. A clueless person who buys stolen property at a thief's yard sale not knowing the seller stole it still is in possession of stolen property. That item can be taken from the unwitting buyer by the police and returned to the rightful owner, the person it was stolen from. If the buyer wants their money back, they have to sue the thief, which is usually a fruitless effort. So, eBay's role is that whenever they realize that property's stolen, they've gotta kill the auction in order to maintain buyer confidence in their marketplace. They don't want transactions that aren't going to work happening over their system, simply because that'd undermine the trust people have in their system.
Just shows how dumb and lazy most criminals are. I sold books on Amazon until 2 years ago, and I was able to get great stuff for virtually nothing jusst be forging ties at the library and getting their discards - plus buying cheaply from other sources. I never paid more than about ten cents per book. Is saving a dime worth going to jail for? (not to mention the moral compromise involved in stealing.)
This space available.
For the less age-challenged, the Dano (sic) reference is to Hawaii Five oh. I almost wrote "Mannix", such are the problems of being over the hill. I.E., over 40.
I almost fell of my chair laughing as my wife brought me a coffee, Thank god I wasn't drinking it at the time, because my monitor would be a mess right now.
I bet that the possibility of writing really shitty reviews about really shitty books like that only come once in a very great while.
The beauty of self publishing authors is that, once in a very great while someone dissapoints this reader by being as charming and erudite as their subject is pithy, most of the time I am reminded that the value of editors come as much from what they don't publish, and there for spare us from, as how well they do publish what they.
To quote Dorothy Parker: "That's not writing, that's typing."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
greed is good right ? at least it worked for Kenny "Boy" Lay , George Bush, Dick Cheney, even Martha Stewart is richer from going to prison, great messages to send to the kids
just do whatever you can to make cash, if you have to fuck over society , your kids , my kids, anyones kids, while you are doing it then who gives a shit that 30,000 sqft house and 6mpg SUV is more important
people are products of society, if they are bad then society has failed somewhere
does the theft of books from libraries have to do with:
a> Amazon's selling of used books depriving the author's of collecting revenue.
b> Amazon saying that it shouldn't collect state taxes because it gets no police services.
Other than that we want to make an ad-hominem attack on Amazon and Bezos?
Would it change what the thief did if the books showed up on EBay?
I know why Amazon does not want to pay sales tax and its not just the small price difference of the tax or the administrative headaches. The fact is that people really really hate paying taxes to the point of irrationality. I saw the results from an e-commerce study done by MIT on people's on-line spending habits. It showed that a person would rather go with a more expensive online store in order to avoid paying sales tax. In fact, the data suggested that people would pay $5 more for the product to avoid $1 of sales tax.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm sure that Amazon knows that being tax-free means more than it seems when it comes to consumer behavior.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
HEY! I'm in a Vegitative State, you Insensitive Clod (TM)!
Massachusetts?
But where do the grammar nazis fit in?
"According to Jim Strovink, a sheriff's office spokesman, Gray would check out books, then tap into the library computer system and record them as returned."
IANAL, but that sure sounds like stealing to me.
The answers to your questiones are easily found by clicking the link to the Page that has much of the information on it.
This is nothing like the RIAA. This is a man stealing books and selling them.
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
I had a teacher pretty much beat me up in first grade because a kid near me was talking and she thought it was me. If she is alive today she would have to be about 85 and in a wheel chair but it wouldn't stop me from pushing her over today if I saw her.
Look on the bright side, it's nice to see that people are reading!
Maybe it'd be legal to do this with Blockbuster DVDs. After all, there aren't any late fees with Blockbuster.
It doesn't surprise me at all. I buy from Amazon.com resellers commonly, and everything usually works out fine. However, on a couple of occasions, I have recieved cheap imported pirated DVDs. Complaining on /. is more useful than contacting Amazon.com :-)
Even if you explain, in-detail, what evidence you have that a product is illegal, the only response you'll ever get is an apology that you didn't recieve what you wanted (!!!) and an offer to refund your money if you return the item.
They don't want to know anything about illegal activity on their site. They'd rather refund you money so you'll be quiet, and they can ignore it.
Amazon isn't nearly as bad as eBay when it comes to illegal activities (in my experience) but it's certainly not good, and how they (don't) deal with it is the real problem.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
right next to the english snobs
The gentleman who sold it to me, never did catch his name, said he could also get me a deal on a famous bridge.
Although Bezos claimed that the AG "is the same organization that from time to time has advocated charging public libraries royalties on books they loan out," (from news.com.com)
the A.G. website has a slightly different story. Apparently the A.G. did investigate government-sponsored royalties, but funding issues and higher-priority concerns for the A.G. have halted their efforts.
I find it interesting that the A.G. promotes such a system, described as "...a small government-funded royalty paid to authors of books borrowed from libraries." I mean, how could you determine who gets royalties without keeping track of how many times each item gets checked out? Wouldn't that raise serious privacy concerns, not to mention issues of fraud and checkout-padding for certain books?
And then who gets to put media in the library? I mean I could put together some pamphlets about linux or FOSS, and then give them to my local library to put on the shelf. If my friends and I check them out (for free) every few days, we can get money back, right?
What would we do with websites? People coming into the library are increasingly doing so to access the Internet (especially in lower-income areas where most people do not have access at home). If someone does research online and finds good information on Wikipedia.org, shouldn't Wikipedia get some money for that? Who is to say that Britannica deserves royalties for its 3year-old Encyclopedia but Wikipedia doesn't deserve them for its own upkeep of hardware and bandwidth?
If this happens I can see people forming new "free libraries" -- not free for borrowing, but free from any monitoring or recording of who checked out what, when. I thought up a couple of neat ways to do this a while back as a way to 'get around' terms in the PATRIOT Act -- generally including public/private keypairs and money held in escrow (in the event that the materials were not returned). It would be a shame if people felt forced to go out and implement something like this.
coding is life
With the Terry Schiavo affair still on first page news, aren't such jokes a tad tasteless? You didn't make any airplane jokes after 911, or flood/perfect wave jokes after the tsunami either!
well, some of the customers ARE just plain stupid.
Agreed! And a smart business gives its customers what they want, even if that is stupid.
and so bezos can pull their legs, it's not amazons police service that's supposed to be paid with the sales taxes. It's the customers police protection that the cash is going to.
You don't think local retailer get any benefit from police protection? I would imagine that crime against tax-paying retailers is a big deal, too. Armed robbery, shoplifting, embezzlement aren't crimes against customers. Amazon gets no benefit from police protection against crimes against retailers. In fact, it would be in Amazon's interests if local retailers become more frequent targets of crime as that would drive more customers to Amazon.
Sales tax pays for other services that a local retailer benefits from such as tourism promotion, local festivals, parking (if not metered), and downtown rejuvenation projects. One can even argue that sales taxes for stadiums are, at least a partially, for the benefit of local businesses that get a boost from tourism. If local governments stopped maintaining the infrastructure of the downtown and shopping areas, that would hurt local retailers and help Amazon.
You are right that sales tax does pay for services that go to the customer, but its not 100%. Some fraction of the sales tax subsidizes local retailers abilities to do business and attract customers. I can see why Amazon would not want to fund the competition, especially as Amazon (and its employees) have no vote in local elections.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The police help maintain law and order. That way, it's easier for me to go out into the world and earn a living without having the double duty of helping to protect my town. That's how I was able to afford that $500 vacuum cleaner from your website, dumbass.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Maybe they should only give network acess to full-time library workers.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
9/11 was an international incident killing thousands of people and disrupting the lives of millions.
Terry Schiavo is a domestic squabble that has somehow been escalated to the point where some members of the family feel they should appear before the supreme court.
Move along now.
There was something similiar which happened at
Microsoft a few months back.
or do the police serve subpoenas?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
My dad was a paratrooper in Alaska about 25 years ago, and says this kind of thing happened all the time -- a couple of supply sergeants stole literally half the stores, transferring stuff between them to make accounts add up any time there was an inspection. Another time, my dad borrowed a lock from another guy for his locker, and the guy opened it up and took all his stuff (it's possible he was a bit naive back then, huh?).
Anyway, the way I read this, it's probably the military that's rampant with thieves -- not too surprising for the world's largest and best funded bureaucracy. It's possible that eBay aided the process, but I bet it simply put all the thieves into a searchable database and made the problem a little more visible.
Not that I know shit about shit, as my dad would say. What do you think?
As an author, I am tempted to concur with the Author's Guild re: used book sales.
As a voracious reader, I very much like buying used books at reduced cost. (I also buy many for reference when doing research for my own writing.)
My libertarian leanings also give me pause at the notion of restricting free enterprise and doing what one wishes with one's own property (selling used books).
My capitalist leanings (okay, greed, profiteering, whatever) give me pause because, after all, I write for fun AND profit.
Any other authors here with an opinion?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Of course, Oregon does not have a sales tax. (We're weird that way.)
The DMCA--for corporations, the best copyright law money can buy.
Why is a college president reading I Am Charlotte Simmons, a book about the sex life of a college co-ed? I think the perv-o-meter just hit eleven.
Bezos also once told angry booksellers there's no reason why Amazon should have to collect sales taxes, arguing that Amazon gets no police services from other states."
Yeah right. I guess I shouldn't pay taxes because I don't have any kids in school, I'm healthy, I walk to work. My apartment isn't on fire. What an ass. Heeeyy...wait a minute! Maybe I shouldn't pay any taxes! Sorry guys, If you want to operate here and benefit from our people, these are the rules. Just like building codes and health codes. If you don't like it, just close up shop. Someone else will pop up. Quit being such a crybaby, and simply udjust your prices accordingly. Let the voters deicde how much tax you(we) pay. That's the way it's supposed to be!
thankyouverymuch
What?
Those silly brits
I have the world's darkest sense of humor, so "tasteless" is a thing I don't care about. Being a vast misanthrope doesn't help matters. Tasteless is a word, in my not so humble opinion, used by wweak people.
And, actually, I DID make jokes on 9/11 and after the tsunami.
I think he should be strongly punished, but I will also point out that for nearly TWO YEARS, I was checking the dumpster of the Eden Prairie branch of the Hennepin County MN public library because I noticed one day that it was overflowing with books.
I found, checking probably 2-3 times per month, that almost every time I checked, there were bags upon bags of books, even neatly sorted so they weren't mixed in with general kleenex or popcans. They were generally organized by section, so I could tell within a few moments of opening the newest bag if I was going to find a bag full of bodice-rippers, westerns, or nonfiction.
Now, these were *not* the worn, torn, and bedraggled books you might think. Nope. There were some of course, but probably 80%+ were in good or better condition. Not just books, either. I got the collector's edition (2 disc) DVD of Tron, the latest CD of Sixpence none the richer, etc - all from the dumpster, week after week after week. Hundreds of kids books every week.
It got so bad that my spouse would get mad as she saw me pull a shopping bag or box from the trunk of my car - "Dumpster diving again? What are we going to do with all the books you're bringing home?"
I was a little irked as a taxpayer that thousands of $$ were being so casually tossed out, despite it being for my own personal gain. I left a message for the local TV station's investigative reporter (KMSP9) who apparently didn't feel it was worth following up.
As I said, this went on for 2 years.
Finally, I saw that the local boy scouts were having a book drive, so I called the director for the library, ended up getting shunted to the PR person, who SWORE there was no such thing happening. Then she said it was because
EP just moved into a new library, so her first line of explanation was that they were culling. Culling when they were moving into a building 2x the size? And NEW books? WTF? As the discussion progressed, she began to get more irate that I simply refused to accept the 'party line', and finally she claimed that I would get a call to see if the boy scouts would accept the books before any books were tossed out.
18 months later, I haven't gotten a single call. Meanwhile, the flow of books has 'mysteriously' stopped.
So I have thousands of "library" marked books that I'd like to give away - so am I going to be prosecuted?
No. The voting system is rigged at the psychological level.
When people are a bunch of mind-controlled brain slugs, then it is very easy to make them 'choose' that which is not good for them. Controlling populations through a host of on-going and very effective techniques, from drugs and television and religion, to the very manner in which society itself has been built, establishes the illusion of a democratic system when really nothing could be further from the truth. --And when mind-control is not enough, then there are always ways of ensuring that the systems give up the desired results. The last U.S. election offered prime example of some of these methods. (Unless one is of of the camp that no mis-doings were in evidence.)
Democracy is an illusion. People are cattle. Yes, it's true that on a deep level, this is as they choose to be, but it doesn't make me content to play along just because my soul-sleeping neighbors are willing to be slaughtered.
I'll keep yelling about this, but I'll be abandoning ship when the critical time comes, and everybody left aboard can drown as they will.
Christ was quoted as saying once, "Wide is the road that leads to destruction, and thousands walk it every day. Narrow is the path that leads to Life, and few follow it." (Or words to that effect.)
-FL
Don't forget Krychek, from The X Files. He was rogue FBI, so I guess that counts as a cop show.
I hate sales tax and I like living here where there isn't any. You buy something for $99.95; give the clerk a hundred dollar bill; and get back a nickle and a 'thank you'.
To me sales taxes will always be associated with the unlamented sleazy California politician Willie Brown. In 1992, California's government ran out of money and had to resort to issueing 'registered warrants' instead of paychecks to government workers. Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the CA Legislature, 'proposed' raising the sales tax from 4.5% to 6%, (which was a nearly 35% arbitrary increase) and it was instantly approved. Then this weird schmuck Willie Brown gets on television and says, "What kind of person don't wanna pay two pennie to help the poor?"
Since California was in one of its periodic slumps and there was no growth in the economy that year, all the revenue that got transferred to the new sales tax came from depressed retail sales. Six months later, I read a interview with the California state economist where he noted that "a 1.5% rise in the sales tax resulted in a 17% decrease in sales tax revenue".
I nearly fell out of my chair. Was this guy so dumb that he thought that raising the tax rate from 4.5 to 6 was only a 1.5% increase? And since there was no growth in the economy and a sales tax increase, how could there not be a decrease in general sales when the price of everything went up to pay for the tax increase?
Anyway, I just glad to leave California. If your not a millionaire and in love, the place just sucks.
Getting down with Willie Brown! Willie Brown got a closet full of $1000 suits that's bigger than your $1000 a month studio apartment. Between Willie Brown and Jerry Brown, it's no wonder that the people of Oakland need so much crack to escape the reality of their pathetic government.
God, I am so happy to not live in California.
As a rule on such jobs I always required a staff member with me at all times and required that my bags (computer, scanner, etc) be inspected at the entrance and the exit. True CYA. The first day I went to inspect the collection it was clear it had been "groomed". Telltall dust lines in drawers that should not have had been openned in years lead to the possiblity many books were missing. I quickly told them I had no interest in stepping into their mess and advised them to call the Boston PD right way.
My guess was someone was grabbing what look valuable and didn't know how to cover their tracks. It was also likely that person was still there.
The sad thing was there were a number of books I would've looked to have copies of, but it never happened.
Atleast some places, like the BLP, has very good security of the rare books. Once you get known as a researcher their they were pretty cool. Still strick, but still cool. Of course this was before the BPL was gutted. I fear in ten years it will a Starbuck's and Border's.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
At least in the end she got what she wanted. 20 years worth of liquid subsistence.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent