[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

And how would the buyer read the book if it's drm'ed?

Which is one of the many issues with DRM: it restricts, and attempts to remove, a buyer's legal right to resell what she's bought.

And we are back at the physical medium issue anyway.

Some physical objects are only sell-able in conjunction with other physical objects. You can't sell gasoline without a container. It's untested whether you could (legally) arrange to transfer digital content in such a way that it's removed from the original location as it appears in the new one.

When people on the dark side argue that ebooks should be priced close to print because content is all that matters, this thread should be used to remind them that a physical book comes not only with the content but with inherent rights that simply do not exist in ebooks and those rights are worth a lot for me and again I bet lots of others. Those rights, not only the paper and the package

Those rights exist for ebooks as well. They are inherent in the act of purchasing. The company that sells you a product, has no legal right to remove them, nor even to impede them.

A computer seller might put a fingerprint lock on a laptop, but he can't prevent you from disabling that lock and selling the laptop to someone else. If books were sold with retina scanners, it would (at this point) be entirely legal to disable the scanner in order to sell it.

Disabling DRM for the purpose of resale is (IMHO) equally legal. The legal complexity comes in with the issue of "copying," because it may be impossible to remove DRM on the original file; most programs work by creating an unlocked copy. (OTOH, some PDF unlockers work by making a backup locked version, and editing the "main" file. So it's presumably at least possible to edit the original to remove DRM.)

And again that's why I am making an issue of this "license" vs "sell"

The courts have ruled that if you're not expected to return it, it's a sale--with all the rights that accompany sales, regardless of what the seller wanted. And most ebook sites don't say they "license" the books--they say "book is only authorized to be used by purchaser," or similar wording.

And that's not a limitation a seller can require. Once you've bought it (whatever "it" is), you're under no obligation to use it as the seller requested. They have the right to refuse to sell to you in the future if they don't like your usage habits, but there's no breach of contract if the terms of the contract were not legally enforceable to begin with.