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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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There has, however, been prosecutions for taping a show, duplicating it many times, and distributing it for sale OR free of charge to others. This is more analogous to the ebook situation than sharing of one-off copies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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It's the fact that they are not "copies," and that it is not easy to make copies, that is important.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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."...
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.
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Yes: Like the cable industry, the ebook industry has a lot of work in PR (and damage control) to get themselves and consumers on the same page about what they sell and what is okay to do with it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Until the licenses acknowledge that it's ridiculous to insist that they have a record-of-purchase from every reader, they're broken.
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Not necessarily. Sure, it's very different than the old physical product analogies... but, as viewed by software requirements, it's not unusual.
We must accept that we can't apply physical product analogies, laws and practices verbatim to ebooks. They require a new set of metaphors, because they are truly unique, and physical product metaphors are the wrong ones to use as a basis for new ones in this case. They are only similar to print books in the type of information access they provide; beyond that, we are comparing apples and radio waves.