The status of copyright of books - whether on the net or not - is quite clear. If a work is in the public domain, i.e. the copyright has lapsed or has been assigned to the public domain (i.e. the Gutenberg Project and similar schemes), then it can be made available on the net. If the work is still in copyright however, then publication of the book can only be made with the permission of the copyright holder.

The world-wide web is not a copyright-free, free-for-all market, contrary to what many people think. It may give that impression, but the impression is false. In the UK, many universities - particularly those who allow electronic submission of assignments - subscribe to internet plagiarism software. Assignments can be run through the software, which detects where information might have been lifted from. It's not that the information can't be used, but the students try to bypass the tiresome but necessary task of providing proper citations for the material, and try and pass it off as their own. The software isn't run against every assignment submitted, but random testing - with due publicity about the results - is a good deterrent.

This may sound a little off-topic, but the circumstances do arise because of similar beliefs that internet information is subject to different rules from printed information. To ask that material be withdrawn from a web site is not necessarily suppressing information - it may rightly be about a business protecting its commercial and financial interests.