I find lots of books I would like to have in .pdf format are available out on the web as free downloads, but there is little to go on to indicate their status regarding copyright and intellectual property. I don’t want to steal them but can’t actually quite tell if I would be. Any good ways to tell? Or is it pretty likely that if the offerings look too good to be true, they are?
A couple of items:
- if they were published before 1923, they are out of copyright, and legal.
- if they were produced by the government, or people working for the government, they are not copyrighted, and so legal.
If it sounds too good to be free and it’s not a torrent, it’s probably an advertisment in disguise as a book or a piece of malware.
The Archive.Org has a lot of public domain material, I don’t know if that’d be of any interest, but you can look there. I live in Chicago which has a great library. If you live near a major city, you may be able to do a reciprical thing where you can borrow books online from them. A lot of those are Adobe Digital Editions but at least you’re sure they’re legal. And that is free with a library membership
I have to disagree with you, Mark. There are just a lot of eBook sites out there. They do give you the real book. eBooks are really easy to make and pirate–just like videos.
The easiest way I’ve found to tell if they are legit is if they have a disclaimer saying they don’t host the eBooks. That means they must at least think they are in danger of getting shut down–and why would they be scared of that if they were sure their books were legally obtained?
There is a lot of older, out of copyright, stuff available legally and for free on Google books and Project Guthenberg. Google’s pdf scans tend to be a bit cruddy though.
If a book is in copyright, and especially if it is also still in print (although plenty of books are in print but out of copyright), then I should think a free pdf of it is almost certainly going to be illegal. Still, unless you yourself pass it on to others, the chances of getting into any trouble for simply downloading and reading it are, surely, miniscule.
If the material doesn’t contain a license statement that allows you to use or share it, it is probably safest to assume that you aren’t allowed to do those things. I think that most of the recently written material that is out of copyright (stuff where the author/creator allows it to be distributed freely) contains such a statement - often one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Now, in the case of a book that I already purchased in paper form, I already paid for the right to read the content, correct? So me reading the same content in a different media form doesn’t infringe the author’s copyright, correct?
No.
If it helps, think of “copyright” literally: the right to copy. You don’t have the right to copy the authors words from page to PDF, nor the right to copy someone else’s PDF to your computer.
I’ve found a lot of academics release text books they’ve written online for free, either out of idealism, as an aide to students taking their classes or because they started writing the textbook hoping to publish it for money but then changed their minds for whatever reason.
Most academics usually have websites affiliated with their universities, though, so its relatively easy to figure out if they’re legit or not.
Correct. All you did was buy that physical copy of that book, not any additional forms.
Depends on the location. In Spain the answer would be “yes, you can do that so long as you don’t distribute copies”. Since you’re in the US, what Bricker said.
Ah! Well, that is different than what I was thinking. Thank you for straightening me out. I found some pdf’s for books I already owned, but have tracked down some faculty pages for the authors and while the books are referenced there I find nothing about making them available for free. So, I’m sticking with paper only!
I don’t doubt that you are right, but hasn’t it been established that people do have the right to rip music CDs to their computer? If so, how are books different?
You have the right to rip music CDs to your computer because the owners of music copyrights have voluntarily given you that right. The owners of book copyright haven’t.
-
Download from sites that research the copyright such as Project Gutenberg.
-
Go to the author’s site as they often have whatever they offer as free linked on their site.
-
Many stories are on electronic magazine sites and they paid the authors to run the story in their web magazine.
cite?
Sounds like acsenray is talking about space shifting.