Quote:
Originally Posted by molman
@Harmon: I find this whole knowing possession of infringing works interesting. I'll have to look into it. I mean though not the same, if I was in possession of knowingly stolen goods I would imagine there’d some repercussion under the US legal system (beyond just removal).
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Yes, it is interesting. In the 19th century, what we would regard as a pirated pbook was not a stolen object merely because it was pirated. But one could steal a particular volume of a book, pirated or not.
So then we got the copyright laws, which addressed pirated books, and in some sense turned them into stolen objects, but not entirely. It was still not illegal to merely possess a pirated volume, in the sense that you could not be arrested or fined for having one. But I believe that a pirated volume could be repossessed from the person who possessed it, by the author or legitimate publisher, working through the courts.
In the US, you always have to take the First Amendment into account, and that probably underlies the situation, but I really don't know that to be true - it's just my sense of the law based on other things I know about how the First Amendment has worked. And to top it off, I still think that the concept of "intellectual property" is incoherent, and that the digitalization of books is demonstrating that. OTOH, it might just be that I don't really understand it.