Just a point I want to make here, a large amount of PD books are translations of even older texts. (Think Beowulf) The translator gets his copyright on the work he did, when theoretically he didn't change a single word. (emphasis on theoretically) Is that not copyrighting of work done on a title without adding any new material?
I am really indifferent to most of this, 99 cents for a well formatted book is more than reasonable to me. I have a soy reader and am happy to swap between mine and my wife's readers. I don't have a large group of avid readers around me on a day to day basis to do that swapping. I would consider myself a typical run of the mill e-book consumer and as such the system works OK for me. (mind you I didn't say great) It is difficult to design things for the minority of users who have the loudest voice. i.e. MR people versus the average book a week reader. I am not the average reader as I read around a book every one to three days.
What I would really like to see is a more buffett style reader experience where I pay X amount of dollars a month for unlimited books and as long as I keep paying that X amount I will keep the ability to read those same books. It works well for me for music and I think it would be very advantageous to me for books. The ones I re-read I have hard copies of so it isn't a big deal.
One other thing I have noticed are that people that scream about DRM are the ones that enable the bootlegging of whatever it is the DRM is protecting. (I didn't say perpetuate, I said enable)
If you would remember back in the day when cable first came around the only way for the cable companies to protect their interests were to scramble channels not paid for. i.e. HBO. Now that is the same conceptual idea of DRM. Limit the use of the product to the people paying for it. Yes you could still hook up a vcr and record those programs and hand them out to friends, but you can also retype the DRM protected files and hand those out if you want. (Not legal I know, but neither was handing around those vcr or cassette tapes in the 80's and 90's)
NO ONE has the right to take and freely distribute a copyrighted item, NO ONE. Which includes B&N's version of the PD files, Those specific copies contain newly copyrighted material and those copies ARE protected therefore the file is protected. I have never heard of 10 pages being DRM'ed while the rest is left without. I am not even sure if they have that ability. There are copies of PD that are NOT copyrighted and those are free to distribute. This is not a complicated issue in the context of the article.
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Really, it gets my knickers in a twist when artists (and you are one, I believe) don't recognize when they're being used as a figleaf. Few artists retain their copyrights, they are sold for access to distribution, usually, or sold by their inheritors, or sold in financial straits. You have companies that do nothing but buy rights to artists creations.
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Hey guess what? That's the artists RIGHT to do what he pleases with his/her work.
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What you're really complaining about is that no one with any passion on the topic respects your moderation -- largely because moderates usually a) don't pay enough attention to have a valid insight, or b) constantly want to split the difference out of some misguided belief that we should all just get along. While one side uses force, lies and money to cheat the other. And so they keep splitting the difference, and splitting it again, moving closer and closer to the side that lies.
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If you keep splitting the difference wouldn't you still be in the middle? Moving to one side or the other is not "splitting the difference".
I'm sorry but the view you are taking about moderates is not actually moderates. More of the uneducated, would you consider an independent to be moderate? And any side or view can trample the rights of another if people are not careful to accept other viewpoints and listen rather than spouting off absurd generalizations about people they have never met or known. Think about the other side of the problem constructively and without bias before you come to the self-centered conclusion that your view is the only RIGHT one.