Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
What you really want -- what we all want -- is better licensing terms. More rights to do certain stuff with the content. . . .
We just need to make it clear to publishers, and failing that, to legislators, that we demand them.
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Not all of us want it. I do not.
Allowing a long chain of resales, where the used item experiences no cosmetic or functional deterioration, would greatly decrease the income of the team of creative people (authors, editors, graphic artists, research assistants, translators, the better agents, the management structure that brings them all together, etc.) responsible for book creation. The team would quite properly try to recoup their income loss by raising book prices. As a result, people like myself who rarely re-read, and don't want to be bothered with reselling, would suffer. Personally, I almost always library borrow, so it would hurt me, money-wise, only a little. It would more hurt me reading-wise, since authors would have have less funds available for research and would pressured to write more quickly.
The proposed law would have to be complicated. Would there be an exception for sales to libraries? I suppose. What about highly restricted licenses now sold to consumers, such as with the Amazon's Kindle Lending Library? Aren't those licensing terms what you are against, except on steroids?
One possibility is to allow restrictive licenses to continue to be sold, but require that each title also be offered for sale with an unlimited transfer license. That takes away most of my objections. But I expect those licenses would be so expensive that hardly anyone here will buy them.