[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

1. "I bought this ebook, I own it, I should be able to do what I want with it". Er, no you didn't. I know making this observation is about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool, but according to the law, when you "bought" an ebook, you did not receive an absolute transfer of -title in an object in exchange of money: rather, you bought a license to access a copy of the digital file.

That depends on the terms of sale. Plenty of ebook stores don't say "buy a license to read this book;" they say "buy this book." And the difference between "sale" and "license" in the US isn't based on what words the seller uses; it's based on the terms--and if there's no time limit or terms of return, it's almost always a sale. Permanent permission to use is a sale, not a license.

Sales are known economic transactions; we have a huge body of law describing how those work. Licenses require the terms of the license to be spelled out in detail; attempting to hide some of the terms is fraud.

Saying "buy this book" when what they mean is "license use of this book under limited conditions" may well be grounds for a class-action lawsuit with refunds granted to every buyer ... or just a ruling that those books were actually bought, not licensed.

3." The use of DRM treats the buyer of ebooks like a criminal". I'm sorry but this is horse#### (to put it delicately). Storeowners have every right to take precautions to protect their goods.

As long as they own those goods, certainly. Store owners don't have the right to tell me how to use those goods once I've paid for them. Their right to protect their goods ends at the point of sale.

A landlord, who's renting me an apartment, has the right to protect his property while I'm using it--but there are extensive renters' rights; the landlord doesn't have the right to videotape actions inside my home (Amazon recording Kindle users' reading habits), nor to change the locks on the doors and charge me for new keys every few months (changing DRM servers; refusing to re-validate older purchases), nor to cancel the lease if I file complaints about the property not being up to code (canceling Kindle accounts of people who return defective items). And my renting has a 14-page contract with the exact terms & obligations spelled out.

Nor does it say that the terms can change at any time at the landlord's whim. License agreements are fixed at the point of purchase.

No ebook seller offers the terms of their license spelled out in detail, nor will they discuss them. Nor will they *honor* them... books purchased from Amazon are *not* always available later, and while they'll grant refunds if pressured enough, that's not what the contract says: it says if you buy it, you have unlimited license to use it, as many times as you want.

THe attitude of the digerati appears to be that publishers and boooksellers can take whatever precautions they like to protect their goods against theft, but no right to take measures to prevent the theft of ebooks,

They can take whatever measures they want to secure unpurchased ebooks. Secure servers, credit card authentication measures, downloads that don't work without the right passwords and permissions, and so on. The issue is how much control they're allowed to retain AFTER PURCHASE.

Now what could convince the PTB? Some ideas:
A. Some big time author puts his book out there without DRM and it becomes a best seller without large scale casualsharing/piracy.

Why, "without large scale piracy?" What difference does it make how pirated his book is, if it's a bestseller? There's no financial reward for not being pirated.

B. Lots of regular folk become incensed about DRM and stop buyiing books as a result. Right now, they're buying DRMED ebooks hand over fist, and seem OK with DRM .

Give it a couple of years. They're already muttering about not being able to transfer their Kindle books to Nooks; a couple of OS upgrades, and they'll be making more noise. When the shiny wears off the ebook industry, and people realize that they can't give the books they bought four years ago to their college-age kids because their kids have a different account, there'll be more yelling.

Or maybe before that, one of the Agency Six will decide its books can only be downloaded 4 times, and change the terms on existing books--and that'll trigger a lawsuit that kills the current "license" arrangement.

If you can think of some other ways, suggest them. The purist arguments (publishers ashould give up on DRM, because its somehow morally wrong or its against publishers' long term intersts in ways that that the publishers can't measure) aren't convincing.

I don't need to convince you. For that matter, I don't need to convince the Agency Six. I just need to convince enough authors & publishers that I'm kept in enjoyable reading material for the rest of my life, and my kids can find stuff to read when they want. That part's covered.

While I'll wince at the Agency Six's slow downfall, with the same kind of screaming the RIAA is doing, it's not going to affect my reading habits.

How do you imagine the DRM/Agency system is sustainable for the next couple of decades? What indication to you have that a seller's ability to lock customers away from their purchases is going to be acceptable for an entire industry for the next fifty years or more?

(And hey. In less than a decade, new non-gov't works start entering the public domain in the US. What about those ebooks--will publishers be offering DRM removal kits for the works that are now free to share?)