Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
No, it's most certainly not a "red herring", as you call it. Copyright law is all about the making of copies (by definition!), and if the ability to re-sell an ebook is dependent upon there being no other copies of that ebook held by the seller, it is very pertinent to ask to what lengths the seller has to go to in order to ensure that this is the case. I do not know what the answer to that question is.
|
Of course it is a red herring. While you own a pbook it's perfectly within your rights to copy that book, whether it's laborious or not.
If I were so inclined, I could also pay my 5yo nephew to stand at a copier all day and do it, or pay the local copy shop owner to do it, or even just scan the book myself, run it through OCR, and format shift it to smithereens. All this is legal.
And time issues aside, the "copying" is trivial (if boring). And if I subsequently decide to sell my original book, I still have the right to keep this copy, under current legislation. There is no difference in kind here.
Similarly, one might argue (for the legalistic heck of it) that a format-shifted title should be different enough from the original not to count as a
copy anymore, but as something akin to an unbound paper copy of a pbook.
Regardless, and summarizing most of your posts in this thread: you are presuming guilt, while in most democracies the legal system (mind you, this entity is still quite different from the RIAA etc.) presumes innocence. Furthermore, you live in a democracy (which, at other times, I suspect you're quite happy with), so I would suggest you learn to live with this presumption. Legislation written with the "fact" in mind that everyone really is a criminal waiting to happen, is legislation that presumes a police state, which is something I will pass on.