Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's certainly harmful for users, many of whom will become criminals by using this tool.
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One way unjust laws are overturned, is by people refusing to obey them.
Jury nullification is (in the U.S.) one of our legal ways of declaring "I don't care what legislators decided... I don't think this act should be punished."
If a law is consistently broken, and the courts can't get convictions for it, that indicates that society as a whole disagrees with the law, no matter how pretty its rhetoric, no matter how compelling businesses may find it.
And civil rights limitations are rarely fixed by changing laws; they are fixed by people refusing to abide by the restrictions placed on them by law. Free speech is a civil rights issue--copyright is not an ownership issue, but a monopoly-of-business issue. And while everyone I know agrees that authors/creators need some rights over their productions, that doesn't mean they agree on what those rights are, or that those rights include making the digital editions more limited than the physical ones.
Used books are a substantial market in the US. There's no reason used ebooks shouldn't also be permitted--or at least, that sharing them should not be permitted. There are technical issues involved in the copying--but those technical issues don't negate one's legal right to resell one's possessions. The focus should be on finding tech solutions to tech problems, not calling people "criminals" for doing what is legal with any other bit of their purchased property.
Format shifting, in the US, is legal. Slapping restrictions on that, and declaring that it's illegal to remove the restrictions, strikes most of us as ridiculous.
When laws are ridiculous, they are ignored, and eventually overturned.