What are the legal issues involved in creating a free e-books site such as www.free-ebooks.net and www.it-ebook.com? Are they legal? Any input would be highly appreciated.
It looks like it just links to the e-books author's sites. At the very least, I would guess that anything hosted on your server, you would need a licensing agreement from the author.
Thanks for the quick reply, Shawn! One more thing. If the site simply contains the URLs to those ebooks hosted on other domains, won't we have any legal issues then?
Deep linking to a page is generally considered ok, although I think it is still a bit of gray area legally. Deep linking to an image or a download file is dicier and is going to depend on the context. More to the point, if you look at the outbound links on the ebook sites, I think you will find that most of them are affiliate links, which are not only permitted but encouraged. I think most of these sites exist for the sake of the affiliate links.