Is O&#39;Reilly Media engaging in false advertising? Background: I own copies of several fairly expensive paper books published by O'Reilly Media. One of my primary reasons for buying these books instead of alternatives from competing publishers, was that inside the book, the following offer is advertised:* Get even more for your money Join the O'Reilly Community, and register the O'Reilly books you own. It's free, and you'll get: $4.99 ebook upgrade offer 40% upgrade offer on O'Reilly print books Membership discounts on books and events Free lifetime updates to ebooks and videos Multiple ebook formats, DRM FREE Participation in the O'Reilly community Newsletters Account management 100% Satisfaction Guarantee Signing up is easy: Go to: oreilly.com/go/register Create an O'Reilly login. Provide your address. Register your books. Note: English-language books only (An image of the same page, as it appeared in a different O'Reilly book from 2015, is shown below.) This gave me to understand that by buying the books, I was also buying the right to redeem this offer. I attempted, a few days ago, to take advantage of the "$4.99 ebook upgrade offer" for a couple of O'Reilly books of which I have paper copies. I have performed the steps above, except for the last one, because I could not find any option to register the books. Because of this difficulty, I contacted O'Reilly, who said, to my considerable surprise: Thanks for reaching out. We've recently discontinued the "Register Print Books" feature on the website, as well as the "$4.99 Ebook upgrade" deal tied with it. This feature was disabled because we've shuttered our online store and are no longer offering the direct sale of ebooks or print books. To me, this seems unacceptable, because: the offer has no expiry date; and O'Reilly appears to be a "going concern", so is presumably obliged to fulfil the written offers it has made to its customers; and books advertising the offer are still being widely sold in bookstores (new, not second-hand), so even today, customers could still be buying books on the basis of the offer. My question: Under English or US law, and given the above facts, is O'Reilly engaging in false advertising? Update: Image of a page showing the offer: * This wording is taken from an O'Reilly book published in 2015. Books from other years might have marginally different wording, but for all the books I have checked so far, the offer was essentially the same.
No (in almost all U.S. jurisdictions). Truth or falsity is evaluated when a statement is originally made and doesn't have to remain true forever. Also, generally the law treats an ad like that as an invitation for you to make any offer to them, not a binding offer to form a contract that is held open indefinitely. So you can't force them into a contract simply by accepting their offer. The default rule is that an ad is an invitation to make an offer rather than an offer that can be accepted. And, even if it really is an offer, when it does not state any termination date, the default rule is that it can be withdrawn at any time.
This sounds a bit far-fetched. There are laws against circumventing copy protection measures (DRM) but not against aimbotting (to the best of my knowledge). Thus, you cannot reasonably believe that a click-assist functionality would be used to break laws. It could definitely be used to break private contracts such as an EULA, but you are not a party to that contract and are not bound by its terms. Of course, when you use such click-assist tech in an online game, you might be breaking your contract with the game vendor or server provider. But this doesn't imply that a click-assist would be forbidden outside of that context. Note that assistive technologies sometimes have exceptions from laws, e.g. a permission to circumvent DRM if necessary for accessibility. In the US, the Librarian of Congress adopts exceptions for a duration of three years. While none of the current exceptions match your specific scenario involving video-games, it can be permissible to break DRM on e-books or videos for certain accessibility enhancements.
It should not surprise you that copyright protects the right to (among other things) make copies. There are limited exceptions that are considered &quot;fair use&quot;, like if you reproduce a limited amount of text for educational, reporting, or review purposes. Giving your friend a copy of a large portion of the text just because they want it would almost certainly violate copyright. Whether the book is available or out-of-print has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on who holds the copyright or whether your actions violate it. This is very different from giving your friend the book itself. The book itself is covered under the &quot;first sale doctrine&quot;, meaning that by buying a copy of the book, you buy the right to sell, transfer, or dispose of that particular copy, but it doesn't give you the right to make more copies. I will note that in practice, it is vanishingly unlikely that the copyright holder would ever learn of your isolated instance of limited infringement in the first place (especially since it's out of print), much less bring legal action against you for making a single copy that did not affect their bottom line.
Is that extortion? false advertising? or in any way illegal? Not at all. The owner of the site is simply exercising his right as outlined in the terms and conditions from when the user signed up. And giving users an option for continued use of the site (that is, for him not to exercise a right of which they were always aware) does not constitute extortion.
Under U.S. law, this is only actionable is you make this statement knowing that it would not "support the continued creation of X" and that instead, you had already completely abandoned that product and you were, for example, planning to change lines of work and become a lumberjack instead. Even in that case, common law fraud is hard to show, because you would need to show how that statement which related to how the profits will be used, rather than what you are actually receiving, could cause you damages in that narrow transaction. But, many states have deceptive trade practices acts that protect consumers by allowing the attorney general, local prosecutor, or a private individual or class of plaintiffs to sue if representations such as these are made when they are known to be false. Typically, these lawsuits provide for minimum statutory damages, attorneys' fees award, and when cases are brought by a public official, injunctive relief (ordering the advertising with that pitch to cease) are authorized. For example, saying this when it is false would be actionable in California and Colorado. A fairly common fact pattern is that someone will sell stuff at an above market price saying that "profits will help me pay for my cancer treatments" when in fact the person doesn't have cancer. This could even constitute criminal wire and mail fraud, for example. Sometimes, competitors can also sue you under the Lanham Act (which primarily governs federal trademarks), for false advertising about something that could unfairly undermine their sales if what you are saying isn't true and is causing their sales to drop. On the other hand, if you sincerely believe that what you are saying is true when you say it, and your belief is not so unreasonable that no reasonable person could believe that under the circumstances, then what you are saying is legal. Usually this is true, and if it is, ultimately, you will be fine. Although nothing can prevent you from being sued on a non-meritorious basis. In between are cases where this is true (you will be supported, but perhaps only get 5% of the profits while the rest are garnished for a lawsuit), but your statements were still misleading at the time you made them and you knew it. Those cases get resolved on a case by case basis. Outside U.S. law, your mileage may vary. Legal regulation of commercial speech varies significantly from one country to another. These statements might not be O.K. for example in a Communist regime on the Chinese or Korean model.
In the US, the author would be able to wind an infringement lawsuit against the re-publisher. Title 17, the US copyright law codified, grants the author the exclusive right to authorize republication, and does not require that a person use their real name. The argument "It was on the internet, it's in the public domain" is utterly without legal merit. The same goes for the assertion that a person loses his rights if he is uncontactable. The author has stated the terms of the license, so there isn't even a reasonable argument that the infringement is innocent (unknowing: "I thought it was with permission). There is no requirement that you have to allow a potential user to hassle you about the license terms. The one thing that is special regarding anonymous and pseudonymous works is that under 17 USC 302, "copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first". For a work whose author is identified, copyright "endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death". This assumes that the host site has not preempted author's license: Stack Exchange, for example, preempts an author's exclusive right, so you can copy stuff from here accorting to the SE terms of usage.
You are not supposed to "explain" anything. See this site: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-notice-targeting-your-content What you have to do is to state, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that your material was wrongly removed. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Google (or whoever the host is) doesn't care and shouldn't care about the actual copyright situation, only whether you supplied a counter notice where you state that your material was wrongly removed. Now Google should reinstate your app (however, since nobody can force them to host your app at all, I suspect they can remove it at any time for any reason), and whoever put in the DMCA claim can then go and sue you for copyright infringement. If they do, you can use as a defence that they could have and should have a DMCA notice to you. The whole DMCA is about your host, here: Google, to remove itself from any copyright infringement case. By following the rules for a proper notice and proper counter notice, they achieve that. And then the matter is between the complainant and you.
Hosting copyrighted material on your servers is probably a bad idea, but software that changes how such material is displayed is likely fine – and there already are tools doing similar things. For example, the news publisher Axel Springer sued adblocker maker Eyeo for copyright infringement in Germany in 2021, since the adblocker manipulates the contents of a web page. This was rejected by the court. (See summary by The Register which also provides US context, summary by Eyeo, actual ruling (in German)). Core argument in that case was that adblockers do not distribute protected works, and do not create derivate works of the website. They merely change how the website is interpreted by a browser. However, the details here are dependent on German copyright law and on the specific capabilities used by adblockers – it might not generalize to other scenarios. Some browsers (e.g. Safari, Firefox) offer a reading mode that strips out all website contents except the main content, and then displays it in a more legible fashion. This strips out all navigation, sidebars, ads, and so on. So far, I don't think this kind of functionality has been challenged. This existing reading mode sounds quite similar to the reformatting tool you're envisaging. There are similar tools available in many programming languages, such as the Arc90 readability project (software, archived website), which is in turn inspired by the Instapaper app. Read-it-later apps like Instapaper and Pocket do involve a bit of a grey zone though, since they involve server-side storage of articles.