Frankly, this thread sickens me. I am now seriously reconsidering whether I want to be involved in this community.
ahibba, xaarg, this isn't about the morality of copyright law, or about posting here information that could already be found elsewhere, or even about promoting CosCom's work. The argument posted earlier that making a copyrighted work freely available increases sales does not work here. That may be true of books and some video games. Reading a novel online is not the same as holding a paperback in your hands far away from any computer. Many video games need a legit product key to enable online play. These products sometimes see boosts in sales from piracy, because the pirated version does not live up to the original. Let me be clear: this is not the case here. For the people on this forum there is nothing to be gained from owning the books. In fact, even if you buy the books you need to do some work to make them usable with Anki. Thanks to the spreadsheets that work is minimal, but the fact remains that thanks to this thread there is absolutely no reason except charity for anyone to buy CosCom's product anymore. And charity is not enough.
This is not about respecting copyright. There's an old English adage, "don't bite the hand that feeds you." That's exactly what's going on here. CosCom took a chance at releasing the ebook for parts 1 and 2 in the format that they did. But honestly, how likely now do you think it is we will see an ebook for part 3 (if there will even be a part 3)? ahibba, xaarg, thanks to this thread we may never see a part 3 in any form. And good luck getting CosCom to cooperate in the future (don't think that they don't read this site!).
Fabrice, I am truly sorry that you have to deal with this bull****. I understand the position that you are coming from with the new guidelines. It should not be your role to police this site. But this isn't about copyright law. It's about poisonous actions that are harmful to the community as a whole. If threads like this are allowed to exist, then I'm not sure this is not a forum I want to be a part of.
I, and a lot of other people have some thinking to do.