Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Spain's Ministry of the Interior has announced the first ever arrest of an eBook pirate. The suspect is said to have uploaded more than 11,000 literary works online, many on the same day as their official release. More than 400 subsequent sites are said to have utilized his releases. The investigation began in 2015 following a complaint from the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO), a non-profit association of authors and publishers of books, magazines, newspapers and sheet music. According to the Ministry, CEDRO had been tracking the suspect but were only able to identify him by an online pseudonym. However, following investigations carried out by the police, his real identity was discovered.

Comments

Not a pirate

[macxcool]

For one thing he doesn't say 'aarh matey' nearly enough. Maybe a misguided Robin Hood. I think pirates are more into acquiring booty for their own use.

Re:Not a pirate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I think the term 'pirate' should be used exclusively for downloaders and uploaders should be called...er...uploaders? Piracy site operators?

Regardless of the term, I do think there needs to be a distinction between the two groups.

Re:Not a pirate

[macxcool]

uploaders should be called...er

Perhaps 'enablers' might be appropriate.

Re:Not a pirate

[Luthair]

Pirate Captains? Then we could call website owners Pirate Admirals.

Re:Not a pirate

[Luthair]

Reminds me of the time some enterprising journalist asked one of the Somali pirates on trial about content pirates ;)

Re:Not a pirate

[RobotRunAmok]

Yeah, he's a Robin Hood. Taking the books from all those evil fat authors and giving them to all those poor peasants absolutely starving for entertainment...

Re:Not a pirate

[Anonymous Coward]

The owners are the Captains and the uploaders should be called Quartermasters.

So, the question is...

[fustakrakich]

Where did he slip up?

Re:So, the question is...

[Phusion]

Uploading from home most likely. Maybe telling IRL friends about his operation... seems like a bullshit operation by Spain's right wing anyway.

The suspect's name

[jenningsthecat]

His name must not be "Information", because he obviously DOESN'T want to be free...

Spanish book pirate? Obligatory...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The battle raged long and hard, but as night fell Sidney overcame the Spaniards. 6,000 copies of 'Tits and Bums' and 4,000 copies of 'Shower Sheila' were seized that day. The tide of Spanish porn was stemmed. Sir Philip Sidney returned to London in triumph.

Doing a lot of illegal reading, eh?

[HetMes]

Yeah, we can't have that.

Re:Doing a lot of illegal reading, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey douchenozzle, uploading is not reading ya dumb fuck

El Aarono Swartzo

[cloud.pt]

Despite the big, commercial-grade numbers (11k), making books available on the internet should be seen as a feat for human civilization. This is another case of state money being used to hamper human development. Who buys and reads paper books anyway, let alone purchase ebooks when the pdf is a free google search away?

If any state agent is reading this: I urge you to start considering using our funds for the greater good, and not the specific good of publishers making a bigger profit than they have to. Capitalism is only as good as the companies that make things actually stocking and making them affordable enough for universal availability. If you're protecting a publisher solely by restricting the channels they offer their products in physical form, limited editions, and medium class-oriented, highly inflated pricing, you're hampering innovation. And innovation is the number 1 rule in capitalism-driven society (right after human rights). Going against it is an oppressive measure. Spend money somewhere else, like feeding the poor or highly overseeing malpractice and anti-competitiveness on books, scientific journals, papers and whatnot.

The guy must have no life..

[toonces33]

If you read the article, the guy went to a lot of effort, and I don't see any tangible benefit that he got out of it.

Re:The guy must have no life..

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the person wasting their own life commenting on a fucking forum for dweebs!

Re:The guy must have no life..

[stealth_finger]

Says the person wasting their own life commenting on a fucking forum for dweebs!

Says the person commenting on the very same forum?!

Re:The guy must have no life..

[Anonymous Coward]

Making information freely available to more individuals is not enough benefit?

Re:The guy must have no life..

[pjt33]

According to the Spanish news articles I read about it a couple of days ago, he was making money from it. They didn't specify how: I assume he had ads on the download pages.

Bloody pirates!

[Anonymous Coward]

As an author, I don't have a problem with someone who wants to read my work for free. That's what libraries are for, and places like the Baen Free Library get it right. If someone asks me, I'll probably send them a copy myself.

I have a bit of a problem with some misguided soul uploading my work to online sites dedicated to distributing stuff they don't have the rights to.

I have a major problem if either the uploader or said distributing site is making money off of distributing my work, unless they're giving me a piece of the action. I suspect that very few of those sites are in it for charitable reasons, and are getting money for it from somewhere.

It figures

[Daetrin]

The police put a lot of effort making sure this guy goes to jail for making information available for free. Meanwhile there are tons of fake authors and stores online (some of them even represented on big sites like Amazon) who are selling the works of others for a profit. And no matter how often they get reported the police either don't care or are incapable of tracking them down (despite the presence of a clear money trail.)

Re:It figures

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because Spains industry is collapsing. In order to encourage more investment, they have to look like they're doing something to protect your investment.

Re:It figures

[smooth wombat]

The police put a lot of effort making sure this guy goes to jail for making information available for free.

It's not information. It's a work someone put a lot of time and effort into creating and this asshat thought he was entitled to give it away to people without compensating the author.

If you want to produce something and give it away that is your right. You do not have the right to give away or steal someone else's work.

Re:It figures

[Anonymous Coward]

I find very few pirates steal anything. After all, all the books he uploaded are still in the stores. But whatever narrative makes you feel better, I guess!

Re:It figures

[Daetrin]

I have complicated feelings about the subject of digital piracy. But i'd like to hope we could both agree that people who make a profit by stealing others' works and selling them as their own are the scum of the earth.

I feel like that's who the police should really be focused on, since they are undeniably causing harm by siphoning money away from those who are actually willing to pay for the product.

Re:It figures

[fph il quozientatore]

people who make a profit by stealing others' works and selling them as their own

From what I read in the article, he did neither of those things. He did not steal (the authors still have their books), he only made copies. He did not sell them, he put them online for free.

Re:It figures

[Daetrin]

...yes, i agree.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

(This is the comment thread that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends...)

Re:It figures

[bzipitidoo]

Understandable, as there is a lot of confusion on this subject. Took me a long time to work out answers I find satisfying.

Firstly, it's a mistake to equate copying with stealing. Copying is not stealing, copying is copying. Vandalism is not stealing. Littering is not stealing, Nor are speeding, trespassing, slander, forgery, creating a parody, taking photos in public spaces, insulting politicians, and a whole bunch of other activities in any way stealing. Nor is buying from Burger King stealing from McDonalds. When you say "stealing others' works" to mean copying, you fall for publisher propaganda that does want the public to accept that copying is in fact stealing, to stir public anger, slandering sharers as "thieves". They're trying to push our buttons.

To really steal someone else's work, you'd have to take credit for it. We have a name for that: plagiarism. You added "selling them as their own" to "stealing others' works", so what did you mean exactly? Were you talking about distributing others' works, or plagiarism? It's a big, important difference.

"they are undeniably causing harm by siphoning money away" Certainly it is harmful to McDonalds for a Burger King restaurant to open up nearby. Now publishers are being challenged by competition that they have never faced before, the Internet. We're 25 years into the rise of the Internet and the Age of Information, and they're still struggling to get it, meanwhile whining how unfair the whole thing is that their old business model that relied on media being a scarce resource doesn't work any more. They want the Internet and computers to be hamstrung so badly they work no better at moving information around than distribution via CD/DVD. That is asking far too much of us all. Just turn the clock back to the 1980s, rip up the Internet, uninvent the CD/DVD burner and hard drives bigger than 40M? They claim that artists will starve, seem to take it as a given that copyright is the glue that makes art possible. They're wrong. There are other ways to earn a living, such as crowdfunding. And it's not a new idea. Classical music was and still is mostly supported by patronage, not copyright.

The harm to us all is huge. Our public libraries should be a lot more digital than they are. Think of it: no more late returns, lost books, waiting for a copy to be returned because they're all checked out at the moment, and most of all, a much, much larger collection and searchability. If you've ever used a card catalog, one with actual little rectangles of cardboard with typing on them, you can see how much computer search surpasses that. Further, our education system relies far too much on private, for-profit printers. We should have a huge choice of excellent, open, online works available and used for basic education, We have some things. Wikipedia completely outstrips print encyclopedias, just no comparison between the two. We should have more, and we would if not for the evil known as extreme copyright,

Re:It figures

[Daetrin]

Clearly you've thought a lot about this, but please reference my original post. I was referring to people and groups that sell works online that they did not create themselves and do not have permission from the creator to sell. In some cases it's an "author" relabeling an ebook as having been written by them (plagiarism) and in other cases it's a store that claims to be an authorized distributor but is actually selling pirated copies (fraud.)

So yes, very definitely stealing. In both cases they are diverting sales _directly_ from the original author under false pretenses. This is in no ways similar to Burger King opening a store across the street from McDonald's and engaging in legitimate competition.

Since i argued that the police should be focusing on people who are actually committing plagiarism and fraud rather than people distributing properly attributed electronic copies for free i believe you may by responding to the wrong half of the discussion.

Re:It figures

[bzipitidoo]

Ah, so the problem that bothers you is piggybacking, so to speak. Using other's work to bring attention to ads and products that generate income.

On piggybacking, I feel our "mother may I" system is a serious drag. I don't like the idea that artists should have control over how their works are used. The artists should receive money somehow, but they shouldn't be able to dictate usage on some far fetched notion that lack of control might somehow negatively impact potential profits. I believe that's the rationale commonly used to justify such control. For an example of the trouble such control causes, consider the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album cover. They had to ask permission of each and every one of the hundred or so people they wanted on the cover, an expensive and time consuming project. For that reason, works like that album cover are quite rare.

It would be better if no permission was required, and artists whose work was used could simply apply for money from a publicly funded trust. Maybe don't even need to apply, perhaps the trust could actively work to discover such usages. Would have to be careful exactly how such a system was set up, as the potential for cheating is huge. I think it could be done and could work better than copyright.

Copying is in the hands of the masses now. The Internet is even more revolutionary than the Gutenberg printing press, which was perhaps the most revolutionary and life changing invention in the past 1000 years.

Re:It figures

[Daetrin]

No, you are not reading what I am saying. My problem is plagiarism and fraud. When someone lifts an author's work wholesale and either relabels it as their own (plagiarism) or claims that they have the right to sell it (as designated by the author or their representative) when they don't (fraud.)

That is entirely different from copying the whole work without altering it or making false claims ("pirating") or altering the work or making use of a subset of it in an open manner to accomplish some other purpose (free use or parody.)

In my opinion the items in the first paragraph are morally wrong while those in the second paragraph inhabit an area ranging through all the possible values of grey. You are certainly free to disagree with that, but please don't misrepresent what i'm saying.

Re:It figures

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you're similarly shrill about secondhand books, and even people lending them or giving them away after they've read them. Because I have a gigantic library of second books and books on loan, which means I've given authors pretty much nothing over the decades.

Oh, Please!

[RobotRunAmok]

He is not "making information available for free." He's putting authors' novels on the internet without being given the distribution rights.

Re:Oh, Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

And who defines the rights? The "Man"? Sorry, but I'm taking those books, because I'll do what I want!

Re:Oh, Please!

[wonkey_monkey]

He is not "making information available for free."

How is he not doing so?

Re:Oh, Please!

[penguinoid]

If it's not free, then how much does he charge? Illegal =/= Impossible

Re:Oh, Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, hold on here a second, are you suggesting that because it's illegal, it's not happening? That he didn't make the information contained in those books available for free because it's illegal?

Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that someone isn't driving drunk when they're caught at a roadside test.

Oh the memories...

[CODiNE]

This reminds me of the old days on BBS systems using dial-up modems. You needed references to get into them, and had to work your way up into the higher quality sites. It was all about maintaining that upload/download ratio. Heck you didn't even care what it was, Kai's Power Tools, Aldus Pagemaker or some old Autocad version... log in, check out new releases, grab something the other sites don't have yet, upload it there, repeat...

Waaaaay back when 0dayz meant Warez and not exploits. Oh man I need to dig out my old MOD files. The nostalgia is killing me. This username used to be all extended ASCII characters with a custom color scheme.

Back to the story...
Never be the top uploader.

Re:Oh the memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is that so many of the people reading your comment will have no idea what a MOD file is. Will never have used Protracker or its countless clones, or OctaMed. Will have no idea what a Demo is (in the old-school sense).
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to shake my fist and wave my walking stick at these darned annoying kids, and play tracks with names like RADREV.MOD, THEHELLI.MOD, WHOISELVIS.MOD and 8CHANNELDEMO.MED.
And anyone who doesn't recognize those can take it up with Paula, Agnus and Denise :)

Good job Spain!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you have solved terrorism, hunger, unemployment so you can now focus on this obvious menace to mankind.

Re: Good job Spain!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately (or not) people keep living their lives even though those crucial problems are not solved. This has been like this since humanity exists, I'm sorry you have to discover it this way ...

Meanwhile in Sweden...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can just pick up an eCopy of almost any eBook or audio book FOC at you local library.

Re:Meanwhile in Sweden...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't say it's like that in Spain but I'm guessing it's that way among most nations with an organized library system. The difference is that (at least in the US) the libraries have a set number of digital copies and when they're out, they're out until they're "returned." What this guy is doing is making unlimited copies available with no compensation to the creator. With that in mind, most of the arguments about free distribution fall by the wayside.

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition

[frambris]

It had to be said.

non-profit my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO), a non-profit association of authors and publishers of books, magazines, newspapers and sheet music

The association being legally non-profit is a sad joke. Their money hungry members that get the cash and control it are not. As their equivalents MPAA, RIAA et at.