Quote:
Originally Posted by SensualPoet
This is an interesting point: what happens if a husband and wife have separate Amazon accounts (funded by his and hers credit cards), and one of them dies? or goes blind? Access to those ebooks disappears for the surviving spouse.
Part of the solution might be a mechanism which allows ALL the titles in an account (no cherry-picking) to be transferred to another account. In effect, one account is closed and all the goods appear, still fully DRMed, elsewhere.
|
Currently, none of the DRM'd ebook stores or publishers allow transfer of purchases, for any reason whatsoever. If they did, one person could buy ebooks and say, "cancel my account; transfer all contents to this new person"--which would entirely disrupt publishers intentions of locking digital purchases to a single consumer. (Theoretically, the original person would lose all access to the site, but it's not like it'd hard to make a new account with a different username & email, perhaps with a different credit card.)
There's no reason DRM couldn't allow transfer of content. No reason the "loan for two weeks, once," feature couldn't be "move this book to a different person's account permanently." Publishers are terrified that if they allow *any* transfer of digital content, books will be bought once, by one person, and shared all over the web, a library with an infinite waiting list. They'll claim that allowing transfer of a deceased's purchases to a spouse or other heir will be abused, that they'll be flooded with fake death certificates and lose out on thousands of purchases.
Lack of ability to share content with spouses on a different account, or share with children without giving them access to purchasing, is one of the objections to DRM. Lack of inheritability hasn't been addressed in court yet (AFAIK) but I expect it to show up in the next few years, and I expect Amazon to say "no, those aren't inheritable; the license ends when the purchaser dies," which I expect to be held up by at least a lower court, followed by a complaint to a higher court demanding access to the deceased's notes and bookmarks, if not the purchased content.
I wouldn't be surprised if an inheritance case became the first real test of the purchase-vs-license status of ebooks.