Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
Again, if when you lent or copied your ebook YOU LOST YOUR COPY, then I would be fine with it, because it would be EXACTLY LIKE A PHYSICAL BOOK.
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Then it's a technical issue, not a moral one: we just need to establish a way to transfer files rather than copying them.
When I open two copies of Windows Explorer, one showing my C drive, and one showing my flash drive, I can move files between them either by copying, or by moving, which deletes the original.
You're saying it'd be just fine to give an ebook (movie, album, software program) to someone else, as long as you deleted it as part of the transfer. This is do-able. Difficult, because computers make it easy to copy data (it's what they do), and harder to remove it, especially removing all traces of it. But it's possible to do this.
I may have to try doing this: putting together a flash drive full of ebooks from Fictionwise that I'm done reading, deleting them from my hard drive, and selling them on eBay. Of course, I'd still have *access* to them on FW, but if I didn't actually re-download them, I wouldn't be making a copy I have no right to.
However, I suspect that many ebook publishers would not agree that this was reasonable, and believe that they have only licensed their books for use by one person--the purchaser--and that no additional transfers of the purchase are allowed. The RIAA's lawsuits used language that indicate they believe that proof of actual illegal copying is not necessary; availability of copying alone should be enough to prosecute. And since there's no way to prove "I didn't keep a copy somewhere," they would claim that of course any data that was transferred, was illegally copied.
But that's tangential.
The issue is: is the core moral right "the right to be paid for every COPY" or "the right to be paid for every READER?" The publishers would like to claim the right to be paid for every copy--but they don't have that; I have the right to copy my data onto a backup disc, move it to my laptop, copy it to my iPod, or do whatever else I want to do with it. (They don't even get guaranteed payment for every copy of a pbook; I can make copies for personal use, or for educational purposes.)
Amazon could surely make Whispernet work like PDA file transfers, where one person could send another a book through wireless, and it would move from one account to another.
But they don't want to be paid per copy. They want to be paid per reader. So they've tried to claim the right to payment-per-reader, a paradigm that has never existed for pbooks. They've avoided acknowledging or developing the concept of transferable copies.