If some user wishes to share a reference/link to a book download site that does not appear to be a legit source, can he post such links on MSE?
If sharing such sources is not allowed then don't we have a filter for such references?
If some user wishes to share a reference/link to a book download site that does not appear to be a legit source, can he post such links on MSE?
If sharing such sources is not allowed then don't we have a filter for such references?
I'd like to take the stand that we should discourage posting links to illegal/copyrighted/for-pay materials. I don't want MSE to become "the place for all your textbooks" in addition to its growing status as "the place for all your homework/take-home-test answers." (If this keeps up, soon, we'll be the place online for lazy students... ;)
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My viewpoint is:
If it is obvious the material is not legally obtained, we should remove the link and/or warn the user.
If it is plausible that the source is legal, then we should grant benefit of the doubt--after all, we are just users of a website, and not its admins.
Detailed tracking of all links posted here and their legal statuses would be an unreasonable request of us (that is, normal users). But, if it is blatant, we should take a stand to uphold the integrity of MSE.
I don't think we (the MSE user community) has any duty or obligation to try to unravel the very complex tangle that is copyright law.
Posting a .torrent link to a PDF of a textbook published last year? Probably illegal. What about a link to a .pdf of an old book that is in the public domain of some countries, but not others? A link to a preprint of an academic paper that the author is hosting on her own website, perhaps, or perhaps not, in contravention of her contract with that paper's publisher? Who knows??
If a PDF is available as a "naked" URL (no need to torrent or download anything to access it), I consider it fair game for linking. But even though I won't post more dubious links myself, I won't complain or flags others who do.