Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Your "ownership" of a paper book is actually rather limited in terms of what you're allowed to do with it. You can re-sell it or give it away, yes, but you can't make copies of it and sell those; you can't read it aloud and charge people admission to come and listen to you do so. You own the physical object - the paper, ink, and glue - but you have no rights whatsoever to the "contents" of the book as intellectual property.
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You are overstating the matter.
You may quote portions of the book in an article you write yourself. You can photocopy portions of a book if you are a teacher and using it in the classroom. You can, using a description of a character in the book, paint a picture of the character and sell it, or copies of it. [edit: on reflection, I might be wrong about this one.] You can make a movie in which a character reads a page or two of the book out loud. The interesting thing is that you can do these things even if you do not own, and NEVER owned, the book itself.
As the owner of the physical book, you can cut it up, and frame separate pages, and sell them. You can probably photocopy a page, frame it, and sell multiple copies of it, although I have to say that this presents an interesting legal question that could go the other way.
So actually, the owner of a book, or even just the user of a book, has a degree of right to the intellectual content.