Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
They claim to have made 'sales' but at the same time in the tos they claim no sale was made? You can't have it both ways. And it sounds like they say they have the right to steal from you too. If I sell you something and then after getting your money take the item back I'd say I'd be guilty of theft. If i buy a copy of a DVD of say "Star Wars 7" at the store I expect that the store can't just walk into my home and take it back later. Granted an ebook has a lot less substance than a DVD which exists on physical media but I believe it would still be theft to take it back. If I buy a book from a seller I trust in their honor to not later deprive me of what I paid for.
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I think that's more about control of the medium and introducing friction to benefit the seller/rights holder. Rights-wise there's no difference between the two.
Say we were willing to purchase an ebook and agreed to have it delivered to us on a CD rather than as a download, then the transaction has essentially been reduced to one similar to purchasing a DVD from a shop.
The seller cannot then walk into our house and take back the CD containing the ebook; no more than they could walk in and take away a DVD movie. The only thing the seller/rights holder can do in practical terms is to point a stern finger at us and tell us that we're just purchasing the right to read the book or watch the movie, and that this is a non-transferable right. But they cannot prevent us from lending the CD or DVD to a friend. They might consider this a lost sale, but there's nothing they can do about it.
But if they change the medium to a digital download and introduce further friction by wrapping it in user-linked DRM, they convert some of those 'lost sales' into actual sales. They do this not only for ebooks, but also for movies.
From the point of view of a consumer who is not savvy enough to liberate and 'own' their purchases, a physical CD/DVD looks like a sale, while a digital download looks like a lease, whereas in legal terms they are both leases, as specified by the somewhat obscured terms of 'sale' to us.
In any case this is a digression from the topic at hand—which is whether these leases ought not to be considered sales in light of these shady accounting tricks by the publishers. This is of course, speaking from the point of view of a consumer who is interested in whether or not the obvious corollary exists to this argument between the authors and publishers.