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Originally Posted by HansTWN
You mentioned fair use exceptions -- not illegal downloads. I fully support these.
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There is no sharp definition of fair use. "Downloading without permission" was the topic. Illegal downloading is, of course, illegal (whether or not it is "theft"); the problem comes with trying to define legality by the location & activity of digital files rather than by the intent and activity of the people who are moving them around.
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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Actually, most of those things are considered okay by legal precedent of fair use. The one real flag is "sharing with friends:" In that situation, the ebook is treated like the cable "service," and those who receive that service are expected to pay for it.
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Cable service is intended to be social. It can be singular, but it's provided to a household, with the expectation that anyone in the physical vicinity will have access--*AND* that a person can record parts of it, and share those with others. Many people give their taped-from-TV collections to friends when they're no longer interested in those shows; I don't believe there's ever been a prosecution about this.
Pbooks are expected to be social. Many people loan them to family members, to friends, to co-workers; many people give them away or sell them when done.
Ebook publishers demand an entirely different legal and social arrangement. They're advertised like books but licensed like key-locked software. Publishers shouldn't be surprised when, after ad campaigns calling them "books! made out of electrons!" they're treated like either (1) books made out of paper or (2) entertainment packages made out of electrons, which the public has a lot more experience with than "software which only runs on licensed devices." (Except they want more control than that; some booksellers' terms claim you can't even loan the device to family members--that *any* loaning of their digital content is "copyright infringement" and illegal. This is, of course, false; I am unsurprised that so many people are comfortable violating copyright when stores & publishers are willing to demand rights they don't actually have.)
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It's true that the cable metaphors don't line up exactly. As I said, ebooks are like a comparable combination of cable service and software, a unique product that demands unique rules. But cable metaphors are still the best place to start.
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That may be. But publishers aren't lining up to agree that it's okay to share ebooks within a household, nor are bookstores arranging software to allow multiple purchases of the same book on the same account.
I've got a teenager with an ebook reader; she can't legally buy any ebooks because she has no credit cards & isn't eligible for most bookstores' TOS. (Not able to sign a contract in the US; not over 18.) According to most bookstores, I'm not allowed to buy books for her.
Until the licenses acknowledge that it's ridiculous to insist that they have a record-of-purchase from every reader, they're broken. Since publishers want to be able to insist on 1 purchse = 1 reader, they're not going to try to fix this; they're going to continue to look uncomfortable when it's brought up, agree *in person* that it's okay to loan ebooks within a family & okay to loan your device with books on it to a friend, but not amend the TOS to say that.
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Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse.
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In this specific case, the law requires *intent.* Lack of intent means this law has not been broken.
Copyright infringement is still copyright infringement, but it's not this law's type of felony theft if there was no intent to deprive anyone of value or use of the contents.
"Theft" is a crime of action; it can be defined by what physically happened. Grabbing someone else's suitcase at an airport, even accidentally, is theft. "Assault" is a crime of intent; it requires purpose. Falling off a ladder and landing on someone is not "assault."
This particular digital-theft law requires "intent to deprive." One doesn't have to be aware of this law, but if the action was done with the intent to help, this law wasn't broken.