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Originally Posted by Sil_liS
Supply and demand doesn't work with monopolies, and copyright gives monopoly over books. With pbooks the libraries at least have another source for books: donations. With ebooks there is no such luck.
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A monopoly is significant control over a market, not a product. Otherwise the term is meaningless - i.e., Coca-Cola has a monopoly over Coke products; Pepsi has a monopoly over Peps products, Apple has a monopoly over Apple products, etc.
Copyright only gives you exclusive control over products, not markets. But brands always have monopoly power.
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Considering the last Apple vs. Motorola case I would say that it's imposed by courts.
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It's sort of complicated, so you are right and wrong.
If you have a patent, you have no general obligation to license it on FRAND terms, no matter how useful it is. But if you have a patent that you want to be used as a part of a "standard" - like IEEE 802.11n for wifi, or the "3G" standard for cell phones, the organization that creates the standard will require your patent to be offered on a FRAND basis if you want it to be part of the standard. (There are often several thousand patents in a standard). You are free to decline this and not be part of the standard. (Although the net result will be that the standard will use some other patent that agrees to be offered on a FRAND basis and you will be left out in the cold, since the market for wifi that doesn't comply with 802.11a/b/g/n is tiny, if it exists at all). And even though your FRAND license may be tiny, you do get to collect it on almost every wifi device sold - since they all want to comply with the standard).
More significantly, though - companies getting together and setting a standard for a particular device raises antitrust and monopoly issues. The companies holding the wifi patents do have monopoly power, and they got this by getting together with some other companies and fixing prices. This would be illegal *except* that there is an anti-trust exception for companies that use FRAND licensing.
This is what got Motorola in trouble - they have patents that they agreed to make part of the 3G cellphone standard. But they do not appear to be offering them on a FRAND basis to Apple. This means that the anti-trust exemption does not apply to them and thus they may have violated anti-trust laws.
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Libraries can't boycott publishers. Publishers don't want to sell books to libraries. They see it as a loss, not a source of revenue.
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Libraries can boycott publishers, although I'm not sure how effective it would be.
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It's not the public that decides the budget of the libraries.
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Not directly, although they do have influence - mismanagement of our library's expansion a few years ago led to the library board being replaced. And more generally, the board has to justify its budget to the city council, which they tend to do by showing the number of people using the library.
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This is what the publishers want the libraries to do. Giving in like this would just make publishers increase the prices of ebooks until it's impossible for the libraries to justify buying them.
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Most publishers don't make their e-books available to libraries at all, though. And of those that do, I think RH is the only one that makes its new releases available. So we're almost in a situation now where libraries won't have e-books. I'm not sure that there are any good choices, really.