Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
They buy licenses for limited use of intellectual property all the time.
They know that when they "BUY" a paperback they are not necessarily allowed to make copies and give them to all their friends, or when they "BUY" a DVD, then cannot necessarily allowed to stream the content over a public web site.
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However, with both of those cases, they know they're allowed to lend or sell the item to their friend if they wish.
The companies that sell ebooks alongside print books try very hard to convince customers that they're selling the same thing in different formats--hardcover, paperback, mobi--rather than selling two kinds of book and licensing the use of digital content in mobi format.
The Kindlebook pages say "Buy now" not "click here to buy a license to read this." The sellers are deliberately deceptive--they don't want to admit that the rights being purchased are very different from buy-a-book rights. (And publishers don't want this either, because many contracts have different royalty rates for usage licenses instead of book sales.) The terms of the license are written up in tiny grey text, are not easily available from the purchase page, and contradict some of the other features of the ebooks. (Kindlebooks are sold for "personal use only." But some of them can be loaned; the TOS makes no mention of exceptions.)
Knowing which parts of the TOS are intended to be followed, and which are not, is not clear. Knowing what *legal* rights a person has outside of the contract is also not clear. (If you transfer ownership of a public-domain Kindlebook, you may be in violation of the TOS and Amazon could cut off your account access. However, you're not in violation of copyright law.)
If the HarperCollins case actually goes to court instead of being settled, we may get an important precedent, because cases involving detailed consideration of how digital content works, are rare.