Quote:
Originally Posted by Pardoz
Your belief is incorrect, as it certainly read to me like you meant the owner of the book, given the context - the law is pretty clear that acquiring something for your own use without the consent of the copyright holder is perfectly legal after the point of first sale, after all. Regardless, my apologies for misreading your intent.
If we're going to owner of the copyright, authors get kicked to the curb again, as the owner of the copyright would be me. And you, and everybody else (except possibly Kenny), since the whole legal basis of copyright is that the owner (that would be us, society as a whole as represented by our agent the state) grants an individual (the author) a license to exploit something that belongs to us (the written work) for a limited time.
Sorry if this seems nitpicky, but a big part of the problem with copyright discussions is that a lot of terms have been pretty thoroughly Humptied (deliberately, in my opinion, in a cynical - and successful - attempt to muddy the waters).
|
(I like that term, "Humptied.")
You have an excellent point. One of the problems with this kind of discussion is exactly what you allude to: people assume that the creator owns something besides the specific physical object he has created. That's where the concept of Intellectual Property comes in.
But in point of fact, it's the other way around: the creator owns no such thing. Rather, he is granted, from society, a right to exploit not only the specific physical object, but anything derived from it, with limitations of time & fair use.
Unfortunately, the creators, particularly the corporate ones (or the corporate middlemen) are trying to change that limited right into an unlimited and exclusive one, hence "IP." They are leveraging off of DRM law to do this - the law doesn't directly give them the rights, but it gives them practical control of them.
"some will rob you with a six-gun
some with a fountain pen"
- Woody Guthrie