Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
Are you thinking of challenging the law? The EFF might help. I'd love to see this go to court.
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When you download an eBook, you buy it from a site which specifies the terms and conditions that it is selling it under. If you are made aware of those conditions before purchase, that's the end of the matter - if you buy the book, you are agreeing to those T&Cs. It's a contract, like any other.
The only basis on which this could be challenged would be to argue that it was an unreasonable contract (eg, in the UK the relevant law would be the "Unfair Contract Terms Act"). Are the licensing terms of sites like Connect, MobiPocket, or Fictionwise really "unreasonable" in a legal sense? I don't believe they are.
At the end of the day, if you can't accept the T&Cs then you shouldn't buy books from that site.
If somebody were to succeed in getting a court to rule that you did indeed "own" an eBook and could do whatever you wanted with it - give copies away to anyone you wanted, etc - the result would inevitably be that publishers would immediately stop selling eBooks. Does anybody really want that to happen?