[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Nathanael

Are we talking about US law here?

In the US, you are only allowed to make copies of IP under the strictures of Fair Use as set forth in Sections 107 and 108 of US Copyright Law, which is where the well-known four tests come from. Rarely would fair use permit copying of an entire work even for personal use.

Four factors:
1) Purpose/nature of use: A home copy for annotation purposes leans toward fair use. It's not commercial, and is obviously related to review, might be educational (is at least related to intense personal study of the document), might be a preliminary step towards a published review or critique, which are fair uses. The fact that the copy might be significantly changed--a paperback blown up to letter-sized pages, for example, for easier reading, or a coffee-table sized book shrunk to letter sized--also leans toward fair use, as the copy is shifted in a way that's not otherwise available.

2) The nature of the copyrighted work--Published, meaning some level of copying is likely fair use; if the original work is fiction, fair use is less well-indicated.

3) The amount copied: "Whole thing" leans strongly against fair use. However, entire copies for personal use have been approved, in the matter of Sony vs Universal--you can copy a TV show to watch it later.

4) The effect of the use upon the potential market: Nil. A home copy for annotation has *no* affect on the market. Can't even claim it prevented the person from buying another print copy to mark up; part of the reason for copying might've been to include extra margins, or expand the text to large enough to make notes between the words visible.

Two measures strongly for fair use, one against, one mixed leaning towards against. But these aren't evaluated as binary yes/no traits with 1 point given to each and judges flipping a coin on ties. They're considered as a whole, and "whole book copied for study/markup purposes" leans very strongly toward fair use, even though it is the entire contents of the original.

In addition, you have the copyright notices found in the forematter of nearly any published book. Here are a couple of examples:

Meaningless. Those have no connection to what's legally usable. Some books say that *no* excerpts may be used without written permission from the publisher--they don't even mention reviews.

If you want to annotate the book without marking it up, buy a notebook.

The issue often isn't "without marking it up." Most book margins don't have enough space for detailed markup, and a separate notebook doesn't show at a glance how much more one has noted about one page than the next.

There's also the matter of "in print or not"--if the book's out of print, you can't just buy an extra copy to mark up.

First, because first-sale doctrine derives from the physical medium of a pbook.
You are entitled to do as you see fit with a pbook only because you own the physical book.

That's not what the law says. And as publishers have insisted on the right to treat ebooks (and software, and other intangibles) to the same business laws that control print books & IP, they're stuck dealing with the other side of those laws.

They want to sell ebooks as goods, not as services. They want to not be responsible for how they interact with the buyer's other property, like they would for books--if you buy a heavy book and it breaks your bookshelf, that's your problem; if you buy an ebook and its javascript crashes your computer, ditto. But possibly not, if you didn't buy a book, but a "right to read certain content under certain conditions"--if they're selling licenses-to-use, they're liable for a lot more returns and potential damages, if they didn't make clear what conditions that use could take place in. (Also, if they're selling a license-to-use, they may be required to make that use possible. They may not be able to get away with "only works on Windows computers with IE installed;" if they sold the right-to-read, they may be required to either provide a method for that reading, or a refund.)

Second, because you license ebooks, there is no sale, and thus no first-sale doctrine applies.

In the US, there is a sale, unless they have defined the terms to include a return date/return condition. Saying it's a license doesn't make it so; licenses-to-use are defined by the terms of their contract.

If the terms are, you hand me money, I hand you content, and we never speak again... I don't get to say how you can use the content, and you can resell it when you're done with it.