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Originally Posted by HarryT
I agree with you, but the fact remains that the claim made by the original poster (or the source he's quoting), that "For the First Time, You Can Actually Own the Digital Comics You Buy" is utterly wrong and misleading.
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Though if you take it in legal-speak what is wrong with it is not the "own" aspect, it is the "first time" aspect. That is: You do actually own the rights given to you when you purchased the license - but since that has always been true so this can't be the first time. But as we agree, that is not the way most people will interpret the phrasing - which makes it wrong from the "own" perspective.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
That might be so. But that does not make your original argument valid. Just wanted to say that since it seemed in the thread that some people assumed that just because you do not agree that an argument is valid you cannot agree that the conclusion of the argument holds anyway.
But I do not understand why it is utterly wrong and misleading. Why do I not own the ebook file in the same way that I own a paper book? I can move the file around and I can destroy it which I can also do with a paper book and which are two properties that can be enough to define ownership.
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Strangely enough most people had the right idea about their paper book without ever really understanding it. They did/do own the paper and ink, the object they could see and touch, and most people appeared to understand that they weren't supposed to copy it - even if they never really understood the reasons.
The neat thing about the paper book was that most of the "licence" issues were implicitly managed in the packaging (hard to copy, could be shared one-at-a-time, and even resold - though the legality of that is open to question in some circles). The thing with ebooks is that there is no physical thing for the person to look at and say they own, and they transfer their previous ideals to the visible content displayed on their screens. But that is no longer helpful. Now copying is so easy that it happens without the user even knowing it (copied from disk to memory, portions at a time from memory to screen and so on). Now the user must be aware that of which copies are legal and which copies are not - a differentiation that is most commonly distinguished in the common vernacular as "licensing".
The difficulty in these conversions is finding the meeting place between the common use of these terms and the legal use of these terms. Your example of an entail (Fideicommiss) was a good demonstration of how the common understanding of ownership can become convoluted in the eyes of the law, and you only have to read some historical novels (Jane Austen springs immediately to mind) to see how such convolutions could work out.