Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
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But the fact is that broadcast has still worked out a lot of the problems we still debate here... adopting their guidelines would at least free us up to concentrate on the stickier issues.
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I think that you are mixing two very different legal issues with regards to the broadcast industry. The first issue is the thief of signal issue, i.e. getting decoders to receive satellite or cable signal you didn't pay for. This is no different than taping into a power line, or water main. That issue is a very different issue that recording something on your VCR and giving the tape to people, which is purely a copyright issue.
One thing to keep in mind is that copyright is simply a limited right to keep others from copying a given work. It's not really considered a tangible object per se. Copyright is written into the Constitution of the US as a trade off. Authors are given a limited right to control who can make copies of their work for a given amount of time (originally 14 years and was only 28 years prior to the 1978 Mickey Mouse standard, i.e. anything published since Mickey Mouse) as an encouragement to produce more. It was never considered a tangible property that can be stolen. Intellectual property is a term that was originally coined by a lawyer who was trying to persuade a jury to buy into the then novel legal theory that something was being stolen from his client.
My personal guess is that ebooks will more likely go in the direction of audio content (iTunes for music and audible.com for audio books), than it will in the direction of broadcast (radio and tv). Broadcast depends on advertising for it's review stream. Unless you think that advertising supported web sites will eventually offer ebooks for free, I'm not sure how ebooks fit in that mold.
I don't know if you have ever checked out audible, but both audible and itunes have shown how successful you can be if you make it easy for the customer to find, pay for and download content. I can very easily see Amazon being equally successful with ebooks once the ebook readers standardize on a format.