From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2006-01-31T00:31:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange posting about ebooks

Jakub Hegenbart wrote:
>
> Ehm, this could be considered a FUD or at least an (uninformed) 
> exaggeration. Or at least, the legal state in some countries doesn't 
> just correspond to it. I'm not (!) questioning the morale, just the 
> "piracy" and "received illegally" parts. Where I live, it's just 
> nonsense and also it's the very rhetorics currently being used by 
> local recording companies to intimidate the people from using the 
> rights the copyright law explicitly grants to them. The "Prepared 
> for..." person also might have nothing to do with it. Tracking down 
> the culprit might be much more difficult than that.
>
>

The name is placed in the PDF by PragProg when they receive an order by 
the named individual and is presumably associated with some form of 
payment details. Proving that that person is responsible for the
distribution of the PDF is another matter. There are clues in the other 
documents but I suspect that these eBooks have been floating around for 
sometime and some fuckwit thought that the best way to promote Ruby was 
to send large spam (It works out to around 18Mb in my mailbox) to a list 
of people who are already actively engaged in Ruby.

And my wife wonders why I don't give up programming to become a 
technical writer :-(