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

Doing a lot of illegal reading, eh?

[HetMes]

Yeah, we can't have that.

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

[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: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?!

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.

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.