Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Illegal Online Activity Funded By Major American Companies

Tehparadox is a file-sharing site. Its business model depends upon users posting copyrighted material which infringes the copyright owners' copyright. The TOS acknowledges that copyrighted material might be posted, and tehparadox disclaims knowledge and responsibility for this.

At the moment, the copyrights are apparently being violated for Harlequin books.

Here are some of the prominent companies in the business community who are displaying paid advertising (it has to be paid!) on this site. Please, if you have a moment, let these companies know how you feel about their funds making the "theft" of ebooks possible and profitable.

Citgo
AT&T
DeVry University
Universal Technical Institute
Keller School of Management
Equifax
Jeep
ESPN 3
Oreck (vacuum cleaners)
Vonage
Liberty Mutual



Are we all guilty of Misprision if we see these advertisements and fail to report them to the authorities? I seriously doubt it!

Under the US code and maybe under state codes, failure to report a felony is known as "misprision".

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/search/display.html?terms=misprision&url=/usc\
ode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000004----000-.html

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TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 1 > § 4
Prev | Next
§ 4. Misprision of felony

Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a
court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known
the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the
United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three
years, or both.
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Does anyone know if being an accessory before or after the fact of copyright infringement is a felony?

2 comments:

RowenaBCherry said...

Update on the file-sharing groups on Yahoo.

Yahoo cleaned house over the weekend. Many of the groups that were sharing Microsoft programmes no longer exist.

Kudos to Yahoo... although, it would be nice if Yahoo had responded to authors' complaints two years ago.

It would also be nice if Yahoo would add a Report This Group button on every groups' home page.

RowenaBCherry said...

How can Yahoo continue to allow this group?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebookstation/

"This is a group for sharing the best free ebooks like the Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings. We also have ebooks from best-selling authors
such as John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, C.S. Lewis,
Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Orson Scott Card, Mario Puzo, Paulo Coelho and more.
You can also request for ebooks."