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High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block EBook Sites
An anonymous reader writes: The UK High Court has ordered British ISPs to block seven websites that help users find unauthorized copies of eBooks. Under the order, BT, Virgin, Sky, EE and TalkTalk must block AvaxHome, Bookfi, Bookre, Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap and LibGen within the next ten days. “We are very pleased that the High Court has granted this order and, in doing so, recognizes the damage being inflicted on UK publishers and authors by these infringing websites,” says Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of The Publishers Association. “A third of publisher revenues now come from digital sales but unfortunately this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement. Our members need to be able to protect their authors’ works from such illegal activity; writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material.”
That order also helps to protect users. Sometimes I see a book that I can download for free, and I wonder if I'd break some sort of law by downloading it. It the author really giving the book away for free, or is this website allowing free downloads of the book without the author's permission?
Fortunately, this can't happen in America. In America, they can only seize the domain, remove it from the search engines, send a DMCA notice, accuse you of hacking, but not block the website.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How long before Mozilla integrates a TOR client, available by default, for browsing to .onion addresses? It could also have an "Unblock this site" toolbar button which adds a blocked site to a "browse-over-tor" list and refreshes the page. If that's not been done already, that'd make a great plugin.
Or I could just buy it easily from Amazon, and strip the DRM for backup purposes.
My take on this is that if I'm required to infringe copyright on a legally purchased product in order to make sensible use of it, why should I actually purchase it instead of just infringing copyright and getting it for free from a torrent?
For the record, I don't do either - I've steered away from ebooks entirely until the publishers stop taking the piss. Since books were invented there have been various generally accepted things that everyone did with them that ebooks don't allow you to do: e.g. if I buy a paper book, I can read it, then pass it on to my wife to read, lend it to a friend to read, stick it on the book shelf for years, then hand it onto kids to read, who can hand it onto their kids, or I can sell it, etc. Compare to the T&Cs of Google Play (as an example) which say that I'm not even allowed to lend my tablet to my wife so that she could read an ebook I purchased, let alone actually transfer it to someone else's device. When I can get ebooks with the same rights as I have for paper books, I'll think about buying some.
http://blog.nexusuk.org