Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Look at the terms and conditions of the site where you bought the books. I believe you'll find that on most - probably all - sites, the books are specifically stated to be "non transferrable" and those are the terms that you agreed to when you bought the books. You cannot, therefore, give them to anybody else.
|
That's certainly what those sites would like you to think.
But let's suppose you went to the JCPenny site and bought a t-shirt. And on the site, it says that you are the only person that can wear the t-shirt. Do you think for a minute that such a condition means that you can't give or sell the t-shirt to someone else to wear?
Of course it doesn't. If you buy it, you can transfer it. JCPenny cannot "sell" you a t-shirt on the one hand, and keep you from doing whatever you damn well please with it on the other.
And the same thing goes for ebooks or anything else you buy. If you pay for it, and do not agree to return it, you own it, and can do whatever you want to
with the specific file you have downloaded. You can't copy it and sell it while retaining the original, because there are specific laws against that. But you can give the original away, or sell it, or delete it, or compress the file, or put it on your Sony even though you bought it at Amazon, if you can figure out how to do it. Not illegal. Not a violation of the contract. Not immoral. Not fattening.
NOW - having said that, please note that the original question was about the situation in Germany, not in America. What I have written above is about the situation in America (except, incidentally, as regards real estate) and probable the same for any country where the legal system is derived from the English legal system.
It is
possible that in Germany, the law is different. But nobody who is not familiar with German law is in a position to say one way or another, and I doubt that you are any more familiar with German law than I am, we being good English cousins.
