[niceboy]

Oh... I know that the OP wants to do is totally bogus... so did the OP. The saying goes that if you have to ask if something is okay you can be pretty certain it isn't.

First sale would apply to me selling a book I purchased to a used book store but not to them selling it to anyone else.

My question is why copy right violation (which is not theft or else it would be in the criminal codes as theft and would have put Bill Gates in prison for stealing the Apple OS that Apple had licensed from Bell.) is at the forefront of some people's minds when it comes to digital media but these people are not incensed when second-hand stores and churches sell used books, CDs, video tapes and designer clothing for that matter.

My confusion is over why new formats as opposed to new mediums develop fair practices different from precedent... would it have made much sense for laws and ethics to have been different for paperbacks then for hardcovers?

This is a new printing distribution system for an old media... it is not a new media. I feel that it is write to castigate the ethics of digital piracy but loss of income to authors is a red herring in that no author has lost money to digital piracy and no musician has lost money to digital piracy. Arguably and only arguably publishers and labels might claim to have lost money due to digital piracy but it doesn't hold up. Study after study shows that piracy and even counterfeits expend the market and increase legitimate sales.

Likewise DRM does not seriously impact piracy... the source of most blackmarket eBooks as I understand it is scanning and OCR not DRM cracking.

BTW libraries actually buy books at discount and do not enter formal agreements with copyright holders concern terms of lending.Smaller community libraries depend heavily on donated second-hand books in North America too.

I am not advocating piracy and theft... I am suggesting a more coherent legislation of digital media based on traditional media standards as opposed to software and industrial process standards which are not proper analogous.

The writer Charles Wolforth made a interesting point vis a vis the BP Oil Spill and the pathetic fallacy. He suggests that because corporations have successfully legislated in the United States the rights of individuals without any of the responsibilities or liabilities of individuals that the American public has come to identify with corporations and attribute human motivations to them while in fact they are legal/economic entities and in fact not people and thus can not be and should not be regulated according to the standards of people but must be treated in accordance to what they are... namely legal constructs or fictions fabricated for the purpose of obtaining and extorting special privileges.

An interesting thought experiment is to ask the average American if trade unions should be accorded the same rights and privileges, tax breaks and corporate welfare as corporations. The corporation is a legal construct that protects the interests of capital and the union one that protects the interests of organized labor... rather symmetrical... but somehow the American public views them is very different.

No problem to have your city saddle your children with hundreds of millions in debt for a sports stadium on behalf of an owner who claims 50% the box office, concessions and licensing but lo what wrath is heaped upon the player with possibly a five year career who fills the seats and wants a 5% or even 2% piece of the action in salary. Interesting stuff.