[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Harmon

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.

Thirty years of RPG experience here... lots of practice with "this particular rule exists for the sole purpose of making other rules make sense."

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.

I'm not sure what kind of difference there is between that "practical everyday" ownership, and legal ownership. If Honda starts selling clones of Toyotas, and the clones are ruled to be trademark & copyright infringement, the car owners won't be able to claim they don't have to pay to register them because they don't own the cars.

There are situations where ownership is a liability, and I don't think the infringing status of the contents limit those liabilities. And I don't believe any court would rule "you have all the drawbacks of ownership, but not the benefits."

But if for some reason, the question of his ownership gets into court, I can't see how he prevails over the copyright owner.

Actions of the copyright owner are not in question here; at no point did Kindle owners receive any instructions from the copyright owners. If Amazon was acting on their behalf, they didn't tell anyone.

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.

You can still own something if the law allows someone else to destroy it. You may not have full legal rights over it if its condition is basically illegal, but your ownership isn't transferred to whomever wishes to fix the core illegality.

For example: I have friends with bootleg movies on their hard drives. I can't appoint myself Avenger of Paramount, and delete those movies. And while Kindlers grant Amazon some rights by attaching to Whispernet, "delete any of my files you don't approve of" is not among those rights. (At least, that's not listed in the TOS.)

Remember - the reason for copyright law is to protect, for a set period, the ownership rights of the creator.

No! Copyright law protects the distribution rights of the creator! Ownership of the physical products is granted at point of sale.

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... if I don't have the right to make a bomb, and I make one anyway, I don't own it, and can't be held accountable for it?

I think we're using seriously different concepts of "ownership," here. I certainly don't agree that illegal content (of whatever sort) is not owned.

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.

And yet, some forgeries of master paintings are considered valuable art pieces in themselves. You seem to be saying that either anyone could take them away at any time, and the purchaser would have no legal recourse.

This is further muddied by derivative works, and other copyright infringements that aren't direct copies. Saying they belong to the original creator is ridiculous. (Does Salinger automatically own every copy of "Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" that may be brought to the US? Can he have them impounded at airports?)

I think the nature of digital content makes it easy to treat as somehow different from a physical possession, because I certainly don't think Amazon would think they have the right to send agents to customer's doors to demand the return of physical books they'd discovered to be infringing.