Hi,
There are plenty of websites which are providing a lot of Free E-books to download in pdf or chm format. Providing all of these E-books Free is Legal ?
Thanks
yes
next question?
IF they have permission from the e-book authors.
Well, i donot think every website takes permission from the Authors because i have found plenty of websites providing this kind of services and to download the books visitors have to download from one of the free File hoster website likes Rapidshares etc…
well, there’s your answer
sometimes the e-books are pirated
so, no, it isn’t always legal
The question isn’t specific enough. In many countries, the downloading of material (even that which is under copyright) is totally legal. So if the question was “Is downloading free e-books legal”, the answer would probably lean towards “yes”, regardless of the legitimacy of the distributor.
Distribution of material under copyright without permission is illegal in most (but not all, and it will depend on the type and where it is asserted) countries, thus if the question was “Is distributing free e-books illegal”, then the answer would be “yes” if no copyright is held or permission has been granted and leaning towards “no” if the material is copyrighted.
It is worth noting that downloading with a filesharing program material that is under copyright will almost certainly be illegal (depending on country of download and many other factors) as you “distribute” as part of that process.
The legality of distributing certain ebooks can also vary between countries.
There was a recent situation with regard electronic copies of the books “Animal Farm” and “1984” which are now out of copyright in most parts of the world but are still subject to copyright in the USA. So whether the distributing of those books electronically from a web site would be legal or not would depend on where the person doing the distributing was located. Someone in a country where they were out of copyright legally uploaded them to Amazon but Amazon deleted them from their site because they are not allowed to distribute it because they are in the USA.
The combination I am not sure of is where the material is in the public domain in the country where the site owner lives but still covered by copyright in the country where they have their web hosting. They can legally distribute the work but their hosting provider can’t. The question then is whether or not the hosting provider is actually illegally distributing the work by allowing the site to distribute it where the site owner is legally able to do so.
Haha - minefield huh?
So if I torrented 1984 here (UK) and someone downloaded it in the US - they would be breaking the law by distributing it :injured:
Quite possibly yes.
The real question here by the OP seemed to be aimed towards e-books in general. The fact is that most e-books on the web (excluding torrent sites or other well known places of illegality) are provided by the authors either for promotional purposes or simply to boost their portfolio. There’s a lot of high quality content out there which is pretty much offered out freely to get some promotion. I wouldn’t underestimate the level of free stuff out there.