Quote:
Originally Posted by glendalekid
Some years ago there was a company that wanted to publish e-books on a memory card type of arrangement and sell them through the bookstores. You would actually be buying a copy of the book. You could read it, lend it, and/or resell it. Just like any physical book.
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No, I'm sorry, but I think you are being too reasonable. Appeasing Hitler turned out to be a bad idea, and giving in to this Harper Collins bid to try to unilaterally rewrite the fair-use right-of-first-sale rules here in the U.S. would be an equally HUGE MISTAKE.
What Harper Collins is trying to do is a violation of current copyright law, which gives everyone here in the U.S. the right to re-sell or lend out their own copies of copyrighted works that they have legitimately purchased.
Bowing to the pressure from a computer software industry that had millions of dollars in bribes to spread around, our wonderful 'best government
money can buy' legislators did enact an exception to rights-of-first-sale rules for some kinds of software content, but ebooks were NOT listed, and in any case libraries were given an 'exemption to the exemption' that preserves their rights to lend out even these exempted computer software and CDs and DVDs.
Some of our greatest leaders in this country grew up in families of modest means reading books from public libraries, and it's VERY VERY VERY clear from the way that this law was written, that looking out for Libraries was an important component of the law. If Harper Collins thinks that they can turn this around and take on the libraries of America, THEY WILL LOOSE.
I think the real reason that Harper Collins is doing this is because their current business model is rapidly becoming about as viable as a buggy-whip maker's, and they are hemorrhaging cash as authors have started take their show on the road and
sell their ebooks directly. (notice that out of a total of FIVE bestselling authors listed as bypassing their publishers and opting for direct-release THREE were previously published by Harper Collins)