[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

To be fair, the law would be different depending on location. HarryT and I live in different countries, and are ruled by different copyright laws. And HarryT has no reason, other than an avocation for ebooks, for knowing anything about USAn copyright laws (or any other USAn laws), which are the ones that Amazon is under; there's certainly no reason he should be able to quote sections of them at people arguing on a forum.

To the contrary, that's all the more reason that he should identify what laws he is talking about when he claims that actions like copying ebook files are "illegal." Illegal where? Illegal under what circumstances? Illegal under what authority?

Harry and others seem to operate under the assumption that any claimed restriction by any publisher or seller of ebooks has the force and effect of the criminal law. Well, that simply ain't so, certainly in the US, and probably anywhere in the Western world. Shall we owners of ebooks docilely concede to these people that they can take our money and tell us what to do with what we've paid for? Shall we be our own prison guards? Harry seems to be volunteering for the job. I know better, at least in the US, because I've read the law.

I can't quote criminal law or statute that indicates it's illegal for someone to let the air out of my car's tires at night, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal. Can't quote the law that says they're not allowed to give my children knives to play with, either, but again... pretty sure there's a law somewhere.

Those aren't the same kind of thing that copyright law tends to be. Copyright law is grounded in statutory enactments intended to establish, govern or regulate copyright itself. Statutory law is easy to point to, even for a layman.

Most of our legal understanding is not based on knowing exact details of the laws. While I disagree with some of HarryT's interpretations of copyright laws, I don't believe he's mistaken about the details of them.

He doesn't know the details, and can't make any interpretations, because he doesn't know what the law actually says. He only knows what he thinks the law would be if he bothered to look it up. It might well be that in England, the copyright laws are so draconian that merely copying an ebook is illegal. I don't know that it isn't, but I do know that such is NOT the case in the US, and that laws tend to bleed across jurisdictional bounds, particularly within the legal systems based, historically, on English jurisprudence. So the likelihood is against what he asserts. But if he's right, it should be pretty easy for him to establish it based on something other than his say-so.

Copyright law is a MESS. A hideous, tangled mish-mash amalgam of author's rights, encouragement of creativity, and corporate greed; most aspects of the law were written before photocopies were possible, much less digital copying, and the laws are poorly adapted to modern circumstances.

Totally agree.

It's often impossible for a layman to determine if a particular act is against the law. (Which is, in the US, grounds for challenging the law itself, but nobody has the resources to do that just yet.) But that trouble doesn't mean it's impossible to note what is *probably* or *possibly* illegal, and decide to "play it safe" by following the broadest interpretation of the law, rather than the technical and more limited interpretation.

But that's not Harry's position. He's an absolutist on the subject, and seems to me to conflate moral positions with legal ones. He seems to think that because it is (arguably) immoral to violate a contract it is illegal to violate a contract.

As for "playing it safe," why then, at least the "broad interpretation" should be reasonable. It should be based on the actual language of the statute, not the assertions of an interested adverse party. The latter is not "playing it safe." It's giving up.