Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's up to the publisher to determine if they wish to provide a mechanism to transfer the licence to somebody else or not. Doesn't affect the principle that with both paper books and eBooks you're just "buying" the medium, not the contents.
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Nicely confused, but you still proved me correct.
If I purchase something, I have certain rights. Among those rights are "First Sale" rights - meaning that I have the right to resell the item - and the publisher has no say in the matter.
As you have admitted, DRM trumps those rights, which implies that I did not purchase the eBook. Furthermore, if you actually read the agreement, you will see that you are paying for a license, not the eBook.
Therefore, an eBook "sale" is not a purchase. You are paying for a license to read the eBook on a particular device.
Since the format of a DRMed eBook is (by necessity) closed and proprietary, and since the license does not permit you to read the eBook with any other reader, you are, in effect, only licensed to read that eBook for a limited time (since your reader will at some point stop working for one reason or another).
Therefore, these eBook sites do not SELL eBooks - they lease them.