Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
But if you really want to get down into the nitty gritty of ownership of e-books, I don't think that trying to distinguish between "ownership" and "licensing" is very meaningful. For one thing, having a "license" for an e-book says nothing about what specific rights you have with respect to the e-book. Some licenses may be transferred themselves, and may give you the right to sell whatever is licensed, typically on the condition that the purchase accept the license and that you not keep a copy of the licensed property.
So saying that an e-book is "licensed" rather than "owned" doesn't clarify anything in the way that "rented" vs. "owned" might.
More importantly, though, is the fact that for most purposes, people "own" e-books; they just don't have the right to sell them.
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I think that's precisely why it is useful to distinguish between license and own. Or at least to not use the word "own".
Typically on MR when this comes up you get people saying they "own" their ebooks regardless of what Amazon or whoever may say. What they are really doing is arguing that they should be able to do a similar set of things with their ebooks as they can with their paper books - lend them out, resell them. People use the word "own" because it implies a set of rights/utilities that they want to claim. By deliberately not using that word we can try to highlight the very real differences - there are things you cannot do legally, even physically, with ebooks (and things you can that can't be done with paper ones).
You can make the argument that they are using the word "own" incorrectly but I don't think that gets us very far. People are still going to use own to mean that and unless you want to be misunderstood, or explain it everytime you use it, you'll probably want to too - at least some of the time.