Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
How have I been whining?
I would like to say your statement was wrong, but it is actually less than complete.
You cannot assume in absolute terms that the ebook was licensed rather than sold because the assumption under US law is that a transaction is a sale, not a license. There are previous US Supreme Court decisions on this.
For a copyrighted work to be licensed but not sold, the fact that the transaction is not a sale needs to be made clear at the time it occurs. Last I checked, BoB does not do this.
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Not sure who posted that, but calling for boycotts and such is just whining in my opinion.
We can quibble about the terms - and the legal terms for that matter - but for me "sell" means you can "resell". If there is one quality about "owning" is being able to dispose your property as you wish under some minimal general constraints. The other is being able to enjoy your property at will, again under some minimal general constraints.
Ebooks fail on count 1, drm-ebooks on count 1 and 2.
A physical book is a container for a licensed work, but it's yours since you can resell it, you can read it at your pleasure. An ebook is just the licensed work, so it's not truly yours....If it's drm-ed, you cannot even read it at your pleasure, but only on licensed devices - unless you convert and then we go again in the grau area of the DCMA, fair use and all that...
Regarding "world rights" and such, the bottom line about Hachette is that they want to have e-books for the US and UK with different pricing - I think UK gets screwed in the process, though with the pound tanking who knows - and that's their reason.
BD/Amazon.uk sells UK print editions to anyone indifferent of location, and Amazon.com sells US books to UK residents happily too, so this notion of segregating content by region is moot for print, though some editors and publishers still rail against it
For digital though they are trying to enforce it, with region videos, region iTunes and all that and you wonder why people go p2p, irc ...