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Originally Posted by murg
When I buy a physical book from, let's say, Book Depository or Amazon, I don't pick a physical book and have it sent to me. If Schrodinger has taught us anything it's that the book doesn't exist until I open the box. At which point it substantiates and becomes a book.
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You've got Schroedinger exactly backwards I'm afraid. His whole point was that there is no uncertainty, the cat thought experiment was intended to show the ridiculousness, as he saw it, of quantum mechanics. And to do so he had to link an every day level object to a quantum level event - so there was a vial of poison in the box that was released on detection of a certain amount of radioactive decay.
A book, or a cat, on its own in the box is just an object in a box.
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A licence is just an attempt by the publisher/seller to control the book after the sale. This control is already in place in the copyright laws.
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The licence is part of copyright law. It goes - broadly - like this:
Either a work is in copyright or not.
If not anyone can copy it.
If it is then only the copyright owner can copy it, and those to whom she gives permission. We call this permission a license.
Under some circumstances, in some jurisdictions, exceptions to copyright are allowed e.g. "fair use" in the US. These allow copying of copyrighted work without a license provided some criteria are fulfilled (e.g. it's for parody or review)
So if you are legitimately copying a work either:
- it's not copyrighted.
- your use falls under fair use
- or you have a license.
When you click "buy" and download an ebook from Amazon, which do you think applies?