Free Downloads of Office 365 for IT Pros Pop Up Around the Internet

Ever since electronic copies of books have existed, people have posted illegal copies of books on websites across the internet. The copies are illegal because they infringe the copyright holder’s rights and are not paid for. In the past, publishers took most of the loss caused by unpaid copies. With the gradual spread of self-publication, which is what we do for the Office 365 for IT Pros and the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBooks, the loss falls directly on authors.

Figure 1 shows a typical example of an illegal copy of the PDF for the 2023 edition available for download from a site called Dokumen.Pub, which is apparently based in Canada.

To some publishers, tolerating some illegal copies is part of the cost of doing business. To others, it’s an affront to the work done to create the content. We’re in the middle. We don’t have the time to expend a lot of effort searching for and attempting to remove illegal copies, but when we do, we like the administrators of the hosting sites to remove the illegal copies quickly.

Tracking Down Free Downloads of Office 365 for IT Pros

Most of the time, we are told about illegal copies. Occasionally, we search for illegal copies. Either way, when we find an illegal copy, we contact the site administrator and try to make a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notification to let the administrators know that infringing material exists on their site. Usually, sites make this process easy by providing an online form to allow a copyright holder to assert their ownership of content.

After that, it’s a matter of waiting. Some sites take copyright infringement very seriously. They respond within a day and take down the illegal copy without a quibble. In other cases, sites like Scribd.com refer the DMCA notification for review by an internal copyright abuse team, and the process takes much longer. It’s right and fair that complaints should be reviewed and dealt with fairly, but from our perspective, it seems like reviews could be completed faster. In any case, it is what it is. Figure 2 shows an illegal copy of the 2023 edition that was available for download on Scribd.com (now removed).

Just a word of warning: some download sites are vectors for malware. If you download files from these sites, you might receive more than you expect.

What Can Be Done About Illegal Downloads of Office 365 for IT Pros

The answer is precisely nothing. The internet has some dark corners where people do stuff that they shouldn’t. This is just a mild example. The best defense that we have is our monthly updates. Take the illegal PDF shown in Figure 2. The downloadable file is for update #86. The current version of the book is #116 and we are working on monthly update #117. A bunch of stuff has changed in Microsoft 365 over the last 30 months, none of which is covered in the illegal material. Another thing that’s noticeable is that none of the PDFs available online have the stamped email address of the original purchaser. This could be because the person who uploaded the file removed the stamped address, or it could be because Gumroad failed to stamp some PDFs in the past. As we noted last month, we believe that the issues with PDF stamping are now resolved. Whether the stamps will make any difference remains to be seen.

All we can do is ask anyone who’s considering uploading a PDF is to please reconsider and ask yourself why you propose to share intellectual material that doesn’t belong to you. It’s not like you help anyone. Some might learn something from outdated material, but the content will eventually age out or be taken down.

Keep Authors Interested

What those who upload book PDFs really do is remove the desire of the authors to continue working on a project. If our work is not respected and deemed essentially to be worth nothing, then we’ll stop producing our eBooks. If something is worthwhile, you should pay for it. And we think that there’s enough value in our books to justify a fair payment, especially considering our commitment to continually update the books to add new content, remove old material, and address any issues that people find.

We publish free information for all to learn from on this site and we share a bunch of PowerShell scripts in our GitHub repository to help people master PowerShell for Microsoft 365. But the site and the repository exist to support the books. If the book publishing project ceases, everything stops, and that would be a bad thing.

Don’t be a bad guy. Keep authors interested in generating great content by respecting copyright and intellectual property. Support us by subscribing to Office 365 for IT Pros and get two great books that are updated monthly! And if you come across any illegal downloads of Office 365 for IT Pros, please let us know (post a comment here), and we’ll take care of the paperwork.