Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet

There are a couple of reasons to believe that this is not the case.

First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library.

Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account.

(The bookfreenow.com pages for each book all seem to be the same template with just the book info substituted. Even the comments on the each page are from the same people, at the same times, and say the exact same things except they have the correct book title on each page. They aren't even trying to make it look like the comments are legit).

[1] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/the-lm3900-a-new-current-di...

[2] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/essential-orthopaedics-by-j...

First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library.

Sounds like my personal library actually.

Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account.

Well that’s a lot harder to explain in charitable terms! So is this even piracy, or just some kind of scam based on the promise of piracy?

It's a scam. I was searching some ebook for free and there are many links like that. It's funny that scammers might be more successful saving paid books than copyright warriors :)

It's funny that scammers might be more successful saving paid books than copyright warriors

You'll never actually get the book, because they don't have it. It's a scam to try to trap people who are trying to find free downloads of ebooks rather than paying for them.

(It's also kind of a funny definition of "save" you have there. With all due respect, if you want to save paid books, you should -- crazy as this may sound -- pay for them.)

Saving is wrong word, I guess. I mean that someone who's trying to find a pirated book will just stop trying after few unsuccessful attempts. For example copyright owners are forcing Google to hide search results with pirated content. But may be polluting search results with fake content is better strategy.

You can find the same thing for movie piracy in video form on YouTube. And old Napster/Kazaa had it for music files. The medium is the scammessage :-)

probably the second one. at some point in the signup process it will offer a free trial and require a credit card. not sure what happens next because I've never proceeded, but I'm pretty sure they don't actually have the books they claim to have

Shady business tactics don't make it illegal, and doesn't warrant an hosting provider block. There is worst on the Internet.

The only thing "shady" going on here is this discussion's unquestioned acceptance of propaganda language -- "piracy"/"pirate" -- as a descriptive term for alleged copyright infringement; copyright infringement which nobody has proven occurred in the first place. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy for more on how "piracy" is propaganda.

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