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Originally Posted by Pizza_Cant_Read
That sounds about right for people manually scanning a book they own around the house (and hopefully keeping for evidence of ownership), but don't you think it would be another fight if one purchased an ebook book on Amazon and moved it to MOBI or PDF? The difference as I perceive it is physical books and media have a less restrictive license. Format shifting an ebook purchased from Amazon or a movie from iTunes would be really risky.
Assuming it is all the same though, this guy on Quora argues your hypothesis really well. I hope someone with the money one day takes it to court. Sooner rather than later as we know content licensing and the court system isn't getting any more liberal...
Quora link because the button is causing my page to freeze: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to...n-personal-use |
In general, the idea that you are licensing rather than purchasing something is a legal fiction to get around the first sale doctrine in the US. You can put anything you want into a click through license. The question is will it stand up in court. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It really seems to depend on the judge and how well that judge understands technology. (i.e. judges who don't understand technology seem to be more likely to uphold such licenses)
Scanning books for your own use is one of legal questions that hasn't been really answered in the US. The courts have ruled that scanning a book does not by itself violate copyright law. They determined that in the Google case. The next step is can you do it to format shift. It seems fairly straight forward to me that you can as long as it's purely personal use, but you never know what some judge is going to rule.
From a practical stand point, no one is going to charge you with copyright violation if you do so. Also from a practical stand point, very few people actual do this. There is a fair amount of work involved in doing so and it's not something most people would do. The issue is if you make the results of that scan available to others. That is a copyright violation.