Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
You are buying the book, the retailers/Publishers have conned you into thinking all you're getting is a license. Then they use DRM to take away the rights that you're supposed to have according to copyright law.
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OK, I'm stepping into this discussion a bit late, but the legal rationale works as follows:
First, all the rights consumers have with respect to pbooks derive from the fact that you have purchased a physical item. For purposes of this discussion, a pbook actually consists of two parts -- the physical book, and the content. When you buy a book you are
not purchasing the content (ownership of which remains with the copyright holder), you are only purchasing the physical book. The problem is, in the case of a pbook the content is physically inseparable from the medium, necessitating the complex web of copyright laws in the US designed to balance the rights of the book's "co-owners".
On the one hand, because you own the physical part of the book, US law has developed the first sale doctrine (most countries have similar laws), which entitle the purchaser to do as he will with the physical book, and the copyrighted content goes along for the ride.
This by no means means the purchaser owns the content, however, which is why there are things you are
not allowed to do with the pbook you own -- such as photocopy its pages.
Now, keeping in mind the fact that your rights WRT a pbook derive from the physicality of the book and do
not extend to the content (save for things such as the first sale doctrine), let's take a look at ebooks.
Digital technology has made possible what wasn't before. Since it is now possible to distribute intellectual property directly, divorced from any physical medium, all those rights we had WRT the physical book, such as first-sale, do not apply.
Arguments such as "but I can give a pbook as a gift" miss this critical distinction. It is first-sale doctrine which entitles you to gift pbooks. Look up the history of the first-sale doctrine and you'll see that publishers and copyright owners fought it tooth and nail before it became law.
This is why ebooks are licensed, not sold. Because an ebook is pure intellectual property without a physical medium, content producers fear "selling" an ebook could be legally construed as a transfer of ownership of the IP itself.
Now, Amazon, B&N, Fictionwise, Apple, et alia, are trying to work out with copyright owners ways of getting intellectual content into your hands that don't imply legal transfer of ownership of the IP. Unlike computer software, in which a EULA is agreed to during installation, not purchase, there is at present no way to force the recipient of a gifted ebook to "sign" a legal agreement.
So imagine if Amazon allowed you to gift an ebook. Since the gift recipient did not enter into any legal agreement, he would presumably be legally free to do whatever he wants with the thing -- torrent it, send out copies to all his friends, whatever. Suddenly there's this legally unencumbered copy of someone's IP floating around the digital ether, with no way for the content owners to stuff the genie back in the bottle. Allowing people to send ebooks as gifts would create a huge loophole in the wall of legal protection content producers are trying to build around the content they own.
Yeah, I don't much like it either, which is why I don't buy DRM-encumbered ebooks. But I understand.