Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Why do rights holders owe you something at the price you're willing to pay?
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I expect you intended this as a rhetorical question, but there is an important argument to be made that as a member of the social framework that benefits the creator in the first place, she
does owe something back to that society in the form of shared rights to the creation.
You're free to find your point anywhere on the continuum from absolute creator rights to absolute society rights, but I think the fact that most people choose a point somewhere in the middle is some evidence that authors and society
both have a reasonable (though not necessarily equal) stake in the rights to a creative work.
I think an interesting point is that at least
one US court has ruled that making any copy of a digital resource in computer memory (as part of opening a file, for example) is actually protected by copyright for the rights holder. That means that
any action that involves using the resource and that contravenes the license is a violation of copyright. Actions such as the removal of DRM or even unpacking a mobi or epub (reverse engineering) are forbidden by most licenses.
At least in certain jurisdictions, then, the rights holder doesn't even owe you the latitude to use licensed resources as you see fit once you've paid for them. Following the reasoning in the court case linked above, if an ebook is licensed specifically to you, then letting someone else even read your ebook on your own ereader infringes copyright unless the other person also has a license for the book.
Within that context, then, the question isn't whether the rights holder owes you anything, but what exactly it is that the rights holder
does owe you as part of a fair transaction.
[*] For reference, I just read through the
Amazon Device Terms of Use, the
Amazon Services Conditions of Use and
Kindle Store Terms of Use. The closest to authorizing another user is the clause that says that anyone under 18 must use the Service "with the involvement of a parent or guardian".