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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
In the case of e-books, you know what you are buying, and you are told the stipulations of that sale. No court would overturn that unless the stipulations were intentionally concealed in order to convince you to buy.
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What you are overlooking is that the stipulations themselves are not binding, to the extent that they are contrary to public policy, or in situations where the contract is non-negotiable and the stipulations are manifestly unfair. And in my view, that is most of the time, certainly when we are talking about outfits like Amazon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Anyway, I don't want to argue the present legalities. I merely state that the laws as they stand should be amended to more accurately reflect the product in question, instead of being taken in whole cloth from another product type which is in fact not the same. The fact that there is so much legal ambiguity is a direct consequence of improperly applying laws from one product onto another inherently different product.
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The legal ambiguities have roots that go much deeper than you might think, because of the First Amendment. Basically, that Amendment means that products which would seem to be wildly different from each other - music, books, computer programs, movies - are all the same from the perspective of what contractual arrangements - and laws - are Constitutionally permissible.
Writers tend to think of the First Amendment and copyright as acting in tandem, protecting what they write, which is true enough. But they also protect what readers can read and how they can use previously created material. Up until we hit the electronic environment, we had achieved a balance of rights that were largely dictated by the costs of production & distribution.
These used to set up practical limits on what readers and other users of creative material could do with it once we bought it - we didn't use to be able to copy stuff very easily, nor could we print it. The balance in the paper based environment favored the sellers over the readers.
But in the electronic environment, those practical limits have disappeared. It seems to me that the previous contractual arrangements concerning books, in the paper environment, predicated on the production & distribution practicalities, are not sustainable in the electronic environment. Any new contractual arrangements might be less favorable to sellers than the old ones.
And that could explain why it is really the sellers, more than the readers, who are trying to sustain the old system of contractual arrangements.