Used bookstores, harbors of piracy?

[spindlegirl]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Well as the saying goes, if everyone read second hand books, authors would have no incentive to produce new works.

And the fact that I've read Anne of Green Gables at least 50 times in my life means that 50 authors have no incentive to produce new works. It's an honor to be so responsible for the downfall of literature as we know it

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by spindlegirl

It's an honor to be so responsible for the downfall of literature as we know it

Well, Giggleton sure is hard at work trying to destroy literature, too.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Well, Giggleton sure is hard at work trying to destroy literature, too.

No, what I am expecting is a flourishing of literature unlike anything our world has ever experienced. We are at the beginning.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Well as the saying goes, if everyone read second hand books, authors would have no incentive to produce new works.
....

I don't want to believe that the only incentive for an author to produce new works is to make money in the millions.

If it was, for the next centuries we won't reand anything than Twilight spin-offs.

[LuvReadin]

Originally Posted by leebase

Not so for ebooks. Every copy of an ebook is the same. There is no declining quality. There is no extra hassle. There's basically no incentive to buy a new ebook verses a pirated ebook in terms of the quality of the book (talking about cracked versions, not scans).

There's also the fact that if you sell a used pbook, you no longer have it in your possession. With pirating of ebooks, you can sell multiple copies and still have the original one.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Well, yes, and if everyone bought used cars, auto makers would have no incentive to make new cars. However, the chances of everyone buying used cars are zero, just as the chances of everyone reading used books is zero. In the real world, the question is not what would happen if the used market share was 100 percent (bad for authors but impossible), but rather what would happen if the used market was just a little bigger that today (arguably good for authors).

This was analysed a few years ago, and the conclusion drawn was that used books help rather than hinder the sale of new ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/te...erland&emc=rss

[LuvReadin]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

In most countries possession is nine, tenths of the law, well maybe eight anyway, so you would have to prove that you owned the contents of your trash can, with receipts etc

Not in the UK - the onus is upon you to prove that the rubbish isn't yours. Most councils will employ people to search fly-tipped (illegally dumped) rubbish, and if something - an addressed envelope, for instance - is found in that rubbish, that poor devil is fined, even though they might have had nothing whatsoever to do with it, and thought that their rubbish was being legitimately taken away and disposed.

I now never, ever put any paper into my bin without shredding it first (which means that because of the idiotic policies of my particular council, it won't be recycled, as they're 'unable to handle shredded paper'), and anything with personal information I burn.

[xg4bx]

i've taken to soaking my paperbacks in a bucket of paint before dumping them in the trash. i wouldn't want a garbage man or dumpster diver to accidentally steal knowledge with their eyes. no sir, i won't be a party to theft.

[spindlegirl]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i've taken to soaking my paperbacks in a bucket of paint before dumping them in the trash. i wouldn't want a garbage man or dumpster diver to accidentally steal knowledge with their eyes. no sir, i won't be a party to theft.

Dang

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to xg4bx again.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

Your comment made me google that. A very progressive system, that. Your entertainment industry must hate it.

When was the last time you saw a Swiss movie? Or read a Swiss book?
(The "Swiss Family Robinson" doesn't count!)

Originally Posted by JimKal

An interesting point Harry. But, I believe that in most jurisdictions in the US the law is different. Anyone is free to look in someone else's trash and take something because the "owner" has abandoned it. I would point to a well know situation here where a former candidate for President was involved in the making of a sex tape. A former employee claimed that he came into possession of the tape when the mistress discarded it. She later claimed that she had not discarded it, thus claiming it as her possession. In the US, for the most part, you want to be careful what you throw away. (Hence, the popularity of shredders.)

The rules are different from police, though, and vary a little from state to state depending on the constitution. Under the federal constitution, it's okay for police to look through your trash because you abandoned it and gave up any reasonable expectaion of privacy by setting it out on the curb for someone else to pick up.

Under the constitution of my state, police can't do that because it violates my state's constitutional requirement that police searches be "reasonable;" our supreme court held that it was unreasonable for police to go rooting through people's garbage.

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i've taken to soaking my paperbacks in a bucket of paint before dumping them in the trash. i wouldn't want a garbage man or dumpster diver to accidentally steal knowledge with their eyes. no sir, i won't be a party to theft.

Throwing away paint in ordinary trash may violate a hazardous waste ordinance...

[Giggleton]

Interesting stuff,

If I load up an ereader with "pirated" copies of books and then leave the ereader on the top of my trash bin, and then someone comes along, picks up the reader and begins reading, are they too a pirate?

[TimW]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Throwing away paint in ordinary trash may violate a hazardous waste ordinance...

As long as the paint-soaked tomes are allowed to thoroughly dry, it's perfectly alright.

[Rylon]

Interesting topic. I think it's the sort of thing that might be helped by going back to basics.

When a seller sells something that they own outright, they have two choices: they can sell the property and transfer to the buyer all the rights that they have, or they can transfer less than all the rights they have.

Lets say Steve owns a clock "outright" (i.e., he can do whatever he wants with it, so long as it's legal) that he wants to sell to Ben, who has expressed an interest in it. Ben can buy the clock and have all the rights Steve has. Once Ben owns the clock, he can hang it up, alter it, sell it, destroy it, or use it to tell time. It has to be a legal use, he can't hit someone over the head with the clock, for example. This covers a large number of transactions.

Alternatively, Steve can sell Ben the clock with restrictions. For example, Steve can sell Ben the clock with the condition that Ben give it to Tela when when Ben dies. Such a restriction would, obviously, require that Ben still have the clock when he dies so there would be other restrictions on what Ben could do with it.

Sellers often want to place restrictions on what buyers can do with their newly required property, and there is a universe of law out there to deal with these things. Contract law is incredibly important to this, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

For example, when Wally writes a book and sells it to a Patty, a publisher, he sells the the publisher various rights. One of those rights is the right to print physical books and sell them to readers who own the physical book, but not the right to print additional books.

So, Wally has all the property rights in his book. Patty, buys most of the rights to the book. In many such transactions, Wally will retain the copyright, but his contract will restrict who he can sell it to.

Patty prints the books and sells them to distributors and bookstores. They are buying the explicit right to re-sell the book. Readers then buy the book from the bookstores. What has the reader bought? The reader has bought the book with the same expectation that the people buy most chattel, that they can do what the please with the book, the same way Ben would expect to be able to do anything with his clock.

"But!" I hear someone say, "What about copyright?" Good question. There is a reason all books contain a copyright notice, so that readers are notified that their purchase of the book is subject to the restriction on copying the book. It's a contract. The reader agrees to buy the book on the condition that he or she won't make duplicates. It works like any other restriction on transferring property. The reader is, of course, welcome to negotiate with the copyright holder a different arrangement, but that's the way most books are sold.

That's why it's not unethical for people sell their books to used bookstores, because the readers bought the right to re-sell it when then they bought the book originally. The writer, publisher, distributor, and bookstore could have tried to sell readers books where they didn't have that right, but they chose not to.

Of course, there is such a thing as an "unreasonable restraint on alienation" alienation being the ability to sell property, but I've never heard of such a thing being applied to chattel. Also, it would only apply to contracts, not to statutes.

tl,dr version: you can sell someone a physical book with the restriction that they don't sell it to a used bookstore, but no one does that. That's why it's not unethical.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by Rylon

"But!" I hear someone say, "What about copyright?" Good question. There is a reason all books contain a copyright notice, so that readers are notified that their purchase of the book is subject to the restriction on copying the book. It's a contract. The reader agrees to buy the book on the condition that he or she won't make duplicates. It works like any other restriction on transferring property. The reader is, of course, welcome to negotiate with the copyright holder a different arrangement, but that's the way most books are sold.

But we don't need to copy books anymore... We just need to be able to access them.

It seems to me that buying an ereader and "legally" purchasing a number of books and then selling the reader with those legally purchased books on it, will be legal. No different than paper as far as I can see. The author is not compensated of course, which is the whole reason for copyright??

[Rylon]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

But we don't need to copy books anymore... We just need to be able to access them.

Not actually true. We call it access, but what we're actually talking about is copying. When an ebook resides on server, and a person wants to read it on a device that doesn't have a local copy, the person first has to download it to the device. There is absolutely no way around this unless we're talking about a dumb terminal, and no eReader I know of is a dumb terminal. Downloading makes a copy of the ebook that's on the server on the eReader.

So yes, copying is an important part of the process we talk about when we talk about access.

It seems to me that buying an ereader and "legally" purchasing a number of books and then selling the reader with those legally purchased books on it, will be legal. No different than paper as far as I can see. The author is not compensated of course, which is the whole reason for copyright??

Well, there may be a difference if you bought different rights. They don't, yet, have to sell you the right transfer your ownership.

But consider this: if you load an ebook up with books and then sell the ebook with the books loaded on them, fine. But if you go to re-download the books onto a different eReader, you are (as I explained above) copying the books. And now we're back at copyright. Because you likely didn't buy the right to make a copy and then sell that copy. Which is what you would have done in this hypothetical.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Buying used increases authors' incomes.

When I buy a used book, I go to bookfinder.com and get the cheapest one described as in good or better condition. After I buy it, the cheapest one left in the US used book marketplace is typically more expensive. This reduces the price difference between used and new so that:

a. The next person may buy new, since there isn't as much difference between new and used pricing.

b. More importantly, since me, and millions like me, have pushed used prices higher, publishers have room to set new book prices higher.

When you buy used, you bid up the price. When you buy new, you don't. In that way, it is better for authors that we buy used. I think there should be evidence given before assuming that buying new helps the author more, although I concede that buying new helps the author (or at least the publisher) more quickly.

That is a joke right? Most used bookstores won't even take a bestseller aftr=er a moth or two on the market because they have too many copies. And of course simple math will tell you that the author benefits more long term from selling his book at cover price new than by waiting for all the used books to be sold before buying the new one.

Helen