Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Maybe this is all okay in today's world and I am totally behind the times. Still I think it is wrong to take a service, commodity etc. that is not clearly labeled as free without paying for it. If one thinks it is too expensive possibly there are alternatives. If one thinks it is worthless why bother.
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One of the issues is, who has the right to label it as free? If I buy a paperback, I can then declare it free and hand it to anyone. If I buy an ebook... it's a lot more complicated. Some vendors claim I'm not buying an ebook, but a "license to access" the content. However, their shopping carts all say "buy this book" not "license this content," and the supposed terms of the license tend to be buried in the middle of a long screed of general site rules, rather than spelled out carefully as a license. Other vendors have never updated their "how to buy and use our ebooks" sections--Fictionwise says you can't share ebooks but it doesn't say this is because you haven't actually bought a "book."
When I buy a pbook, chop the spine off, scan and OCR it... under what conditions can I share my efforts? If it's a matter of "no extra copies," then the answer would be "when I sell/give away the hard drive on which that work is stored." (I could scan books to a flash drive & do the conversion work there; I've done that before.) The idea of "you can't; anyone else who wants to read it that way will have to do the same conversion work themselves" is ridiculous. The author doesn't benefit from more people buying used books to destroy, nor by those people spending hours converting instead of reading books.
The insistence that only the author (or authorized agents, like the publisher) are allowed to declare a price on access to content flies against thousands of years of literary and other entertainment culture. Claiming that the new technology should change the way we think about books--*not* thinking of them as something that can be shared--because DRM can be applied, is no more reasonable than claiming that obviously, only one person should ever need to buy a book anymore.
We do need to find ways to pay authors in this new realm. But insisting that the right way to do that, is to allow them to redefine the concept of "book" so that it's one-reader-per-purchase isn't going to work. Authors have never been allowed to declare "only people who pay me can read my book," except by personally directly managing all copies.