Books are horrible about copyright. There are many books tied up in copyright that are completely out of print, and if I wanted to buy a copy I would have to buy a used copy at an exorbitant price (due to scarcity).
At this point the author (or the publisher) is seeing NO money. Is there a real reason why I can't just take a copy of the book, put it to PDF and distribute it for free? The people that were involved in the production of the book have essentially abandoned it, but they will definitely jump out of the woodwork to try and cash in on it if someone were to 'make it profitable again' (which includes suing a person for distributing it).
I see these as the moral equivalent of submarine patents. (Patents where you wait until something becomes popular, and then pop out of the woodwork to sue the biggest companies that you can find for millions or billions of dollars)
At this point the author (or the publisher) is seeing NO money. Is there a real reason why I can't just take a copy of the book, put it to PDF and distribute it for free? The people that were involved in the production of the book have essentially abandoned it, but they will definitely jump out of the woodwork to try and cash in on it if someone were to 'make it profitable again' (which includes suing a person for distributing it).
I see these as the moral equivalent of submarine patents. (Patents where you wait until something becomes popular, and then pop out of the woodwork to sue the biggest companies that you can find for millions or billions of dollars)