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Originally Posted by alvico
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Thanks for the link to an interesting article Alvico.
It seems to confirm many of the things that I found out when I tried to discover what our local laws really are concerning computer games. In that case in turned out that any local laws that might possibly apply had not yet been tested in local courts, with particular regard to game software. So any and all interpretations were purely speculative. The Law Society told me as much, but did kindly suggest that I might like to pay for a test case!
Some of the EULAs sounded almost reasonable, whilst others were obviously unsustainable bluff. The common denominator was that the terms that the licences tried to impose were widely ignored by both buyer and seller alike. But the bottom line was that the cops here weren’t remotely interested, and the only pressure from any quarter was commercial and internal. In other words most distributors didn’t care either way, but a handful did threaten to withdraw supply if a retailer didn’t toe their line.
The position here with books seems pretty similar, with a number of overlapping considerations, including:
THE LAW:
As the article points out, the legal position if often remarkable vague and difficult to pin down from state to state or country to country, as it hasn’t necessary been fully debated and framed let alone adequately tested in court yet. In the meantime, most people seem to operate on the basis of what they think ‘sounds legal’ or simply what they think they can get away with. If they think about it all, of course.
PERSONAL ETHICS:
Not everybody is keen to rip off whatever isn’t nailed down, locked up or protected in some way. But even those of us who are comfortable with paying taxes (after all, we use the services they pay for) and who prefer to pay our way, aren’t necessarily anal about making sure that every last cent in tax goes to the government. We’re also often perfectly happy to make our own judgements about what we’ll see as a reasonable demonstration sample and what is a blatant steal.
COMMERCIAL INTEREST:
In the real world this mostly where the ‘bottom line’ actually lives. In Australia the police are not interested in acting as unpaid referees and free nannies for everybody’s commercial arguments. Anybody who feels that their legitimate commercial rights have been infringed are free to attempt to take the alleged wrong-doer to court and thrash it out. In practice this is usually only done here where the trespass is seen as substantial, provable, and committed by somebody who can afford to pay both costs and damages.
Fortunately for me, I haven't yet been bothered too much either way by the current local e-book position. If I can’t find somebody who wants to sell me an e-book version then I’m usually happy to buy a printed version instead - or simply choose a different title. At this early stage of the game I’m not going to waste too much effort banging on about my alleged ‘rights’ because I think that they’re largely imaginary.
However, I think that some of the claimed ‘rights' of certain players in the piece are largely imaginary too. So if I could get a book from a US or UK site without too much fuss then I’d probably be happy to do so, unless I had a clear reason to believe that I was ripping somebody off.
Cheers,
Chris