[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I'm really unsure about the idea that "the court has the right to order the destruction of copies" meaning "the person who purchased those copies, doesn't have legal ownership of them."

A court can order a building torn down for being unsafe, but that doesn't mean the court, or the county, owns the property. A court can order medication to be destroyed if it's causing health problems; that doesn't mean it's not owned by the people who bought it. Ownership rights can be infringed by various laws and rulings; that doesn't mean the legal state of ownership vanishes at that time.

You are right, of course. But most of the time, no single thing is determinative when you talk about these kinds of questions. You have to look for the pattern, and consider the implications. Law is not a science, nor an art, but a learned way of reasoning, in a context where certain things matter, and others don't. It's not entirely logical, although logic plays a role. It includes asking one of my law professors used to ask: "what's the reason for the rule?" Rules, standing by themselves, can sometimes take you in one direction, while when considered in the context of the reason for the rule, take you in another.

When I consider everything taken together, what I see is that anyone buying an unauthorized infringing work doesn't own the work. He has possession of it, and if the particular item is of no great value, then he owns it from a practical, everyday point of view. But if for some reason, the question of his ownership gets into court, I can't see how he prevails over the copyright owner. At a minimum, the item will be destroyed, whether he likes it or not, and the only thing he might be able to do about it all is sue the person who sold it to him. So for legal purposes, he doesn't own it.

Remember - the reason for copyright law is to protect, for a set period, the ownership rights of the creator. Copyright law specifically gives the creator the right to make all copies of a work, subject to various exceptions. If you have the sole right to make copies, certainly you own all the copies you make. The question is, who owns the copies other people make? Since the other people don't have the right to make those copies, how can they own them? So it seems to me that either the creator owns them, or the copies have no owner at all. In any event, the one person who, it seems to me, clearly doesn't own the copy in any legal sense is the buyer.

This, of course, is all sophistry. Amazon wants to claim that it doesn't sell ebooks at all; it licenses them. The fact that the button for "send us money to read this" is called "buy this book" not "license the use of this book" indicates that they know how well that argument would go over if they made it explicit.

I tend to agree with you about that, so long as we are talking about non-infringing ebooks. I think that the critical factor is that there's no provision for limiting the duration of the so-called license. A license to use something in perpetuity is closer to ownership than to rental. But if ebooks selfdestructed after a set period, say, six weeks, then things might be viewed differently. I believe that's how the downloaded movie business works...

I am, however, enjoying figuring out how ebooks can fit into the larger legal picture. And I am listening, even when I'm arguing. I understand that sometimes the law is going to be, from my perspective, wrong and stupid, but it's still the law.

I find it interesting, myself. I don't practice in the area, but for some reason, I find the legalities of the situation intriguing. Maybe I don't get out enough...