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#121 | |
Wizard
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#122 | |
Blue Captain
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American companies doing the whingeing is even more entertaining. |
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#123 |
Maratus speciosus butt
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Imagine if he had said that he was rooting for the home team...
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#124 | |
Which side are you on?
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Location: Variable, currently Czestochowa, Poland.
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Wasn't a total loss, though, I ran across a lovely quote from Teresa Nielsen Hayden: "Electronic piracy is a fight that’s still being waged. Like extended copyrights, proposed draconian laws prohibiting electronic piracy and other copyright infringement are being hailed as a defense of the rights of the little guy. You know what? They aren’t. They’re being pushed because the big entertainment combines are all twitchy at the thought of their content escaping into the wild." |
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#125 |
Data Privateer!
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Location: Fargo ND
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Well I just read this thread through from front to back.
The clearest point made in the whole tangled mess, in my opinion. Moejoe's post about the avatar picture. That to me sums up the whole ebook thing in a nutshell. Well said Moejoe! If I have a "camera" that can take a "picture" of a car, and go home and reproduce it, right down to the oil in the engine, and the gas in the tank. Is my taking a picture of your car hurting you? Mind you I said hurting YOU, not the car company's. The car company would in that analogy be doomed no matter what. A digital copy is just that, a copy. As valueless as an avatar, (you know anyone paying for avatars?) Yet with incredible potential power. Hence all the fuss. Traditional morality, and business methods will not work in dealing with it. The concepts just don't carry over, they are flawed. You will have to think outside of the box. Redefine how it works, and how it should work. To me that includes redefining copy-write law and intellectual property. I suspect it is going to be a long, bloody, and painful process for some. |
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#126 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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Location: Grass Valley, CA
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Dale |
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#127 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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Device: EB 1150, EZ Reader, Literati, iPad 2 & Air 2, iPhone 7
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#128 |
Maratus speciosus butt
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The physicist Max Planck once said that "science advances one funeral at a time"-- some old ideas cling on until all the people who believed them die off. The same goes for social changes. 100 years from now, all the old fogies that believed in using atom rules for electrons will be long dead, and all of their quaint old ideas with them. You can bet that future generations born immersed in electronic media won't think the way they do.
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#129 | |
fruminous edugeek
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The whole subject of "fair use" is a complicated gray area. There are books that consist of nothing but quotes, but these are usually principally from public domain sources. This again raises the issue of length of copyright term, however. For how long should restrictions on a modern translation of the Bible (for example) be in place? |
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#130 | ||
curmudgeon
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The "locus" of the sale is the place where the sale is legally considered to take place. For in-person retail purchases, this is easy to determine -- it's where you are when you hand over the cash (or credit card, or whatever) and walk away from the register with product in hand. For mail-order purchases, this is a bit more difficult. Does the sale take place at your home? At the headquarters of the company? The consensus answer appears to be that the sale takes place at the seller's loading dock. When we consider purchases over the internet of digital content, it's even more difficult. In addition to the possibilities listed above for mail-order, we now add to the list:
I'm not aware of specific legislation regarding this question. However, the current consensus standard appears to be that your current physical location (to the extent to which that location can be determined, consider the VPN case, for example) is considered to be the legal locus of the sale. One could certainly argue that this is neither a correct nor ideal choice (and I'd probably agree!), but it seems to be the current standard assumption. Thus, although you can use the net to purchase digital content from vendors worldwide, the legal location of the sale is your physical location at the time of purchase. With physical goods,* however, the First Sale Doctrine (FSD, hereafter) comes into play. The idea is that the contract between the creator of the item and the retailer of the item cannot restrict people who were never party to that contract. So (in the case of books), an author or his/her agent can sell geographically restricted rights (US-only, for example) to a publisher (straight-forward contract law). The publisher can, in turn, pass that "US-only" restriction on to a distributor and retailer (again via straight-forward contract law). In theory, the retailer could require you to sign a contract in order to purchase the book — in which case you would also be restricted to US-only sales. But in the real world, retail sales do not involve signing a contract! Without an explicit contract, the FSD says that the contractual restriction evaporates. So the retail purchaser gets the book free of the US-sales-only restriction. The retail purchaser can then take the book anywhere in the world, resell to anyone anywhere, etc. When it comes to physical goods, the FSD is your friend. Similarly, the locus of sale for physical goods via "mail order" is the loading dock (even when the "mail" is via the internet!), the bookseller can then ship the physical book to you regardless of your physical location. The sale took place before shipment, so the geographical restriction was satisfied, and your location no longer matters under the contract. Quote:
Let's consider the situation of a publisher (call them T) who wishes to sell, say, the eBook version of last decade's Giant Best Seller world-wide. It's probably got a decent-sized market in bits. Perhaps not so much as todays GBS2, but enough to spend some time and money on. So let's see where they stand. T purchased geographically-restricted rights back then; everyone did. But they were smart, and purchased digital rights as well. GREAT -- the digital edition is at least possible! But other publishers purchased similar rights in their respective regions. In order to legally sell GBS outside their region, T will have to acquire rights in the rest of the world. But... who can T purchase those rights from? Does T even know which publishers own which rights in various countries? Can T work a deal with them? To sell world-wide, T needs to get everybody who currently owns geo-restricted digital rights to agree. And that means negotiations and contracts. Are T's digital rights worth more or less than the other guys'? Who should pay whom? All this involves lawyers and billable hours. Ouch! Consider the author/agent who would dearly love to have GBS available for sale as an eBook to everyone in the world, regardless of location. They sold US rights (say) to T. And European rights to P. And Indian rights to someone else. And so on, for all the various regions around the world, because it was a great big seller. Now T comes by wanting to purchase world-wide digital rights. The author/agent can't sell those rights to T, because various subsets of the rights have already been sold elsewhere. At best, they can give T a list of all the publishers to contact for negotiations. Now multiply that mess by all the books that still have enough residual value that a digital edition is worth someone's time and energy to produce. It's a mess of extraordinary magnitude... and there's no single party who can fix it! ![]() The best we can hope for is for some country to legally define the locus of sale as the location of the server, or the location of the corporate headquarters, or something. And even that has problems, because the first thing they'll want is to collect sales taxes on all those luscious transactions. ![]() ![]() Xenophon (As always, I am moderately knowledgeable on this topic, but I AM NOT A LAWYER and THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE! If you require legal advice on which you may place reliance, consult an actual lawyer, NOT ME) *The FSD may well apply to digital goods after you've purchased them. But that doesn't help us for purposes of this discussion -- it only changes where you could legally re-sell the eBook, not where a retailer can sell it to you. Last edited by Xenophon; 01-28-2010 at 12:47 PM. Reason: Added disclaimer and footnote. |
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#131 | |
Banned
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I have a beef with some ebooks being listed for $25 or more but I have no problems buying (licensing?) quality ebooks at reasonable prices (<$10). It is simple, if you want books from professional writers, you should pay them, hence the term "professional". I don't expect quality writers, such as Grisham, Conroy, King, etc to sit at a word processor and write 10 hour/day and just give all of it away. I don't work for free and they shouldn't either. |
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#132 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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What we need is a ruling that establishes absolutely where an online sale takes place. Options include: 1) Where the webstore's server is physically located; 2) Where the seller's business legally resides; 3) Where the buyer's ISP's server is physically located; 4) Where the buyer legally resides; 5) Where the buyer is physically located at the time of purchase. Right now, sales of physical goods are counted as #2; sales of ebooks are somewhere between 3 & 4, with no official statements about what's legally preferred. To fix the geographic distribution idiocy, we just need a ruling that says "the store is selling from its location, and is bound by laws addressing that location, regardless of where the buyer is sitting at time of purchase." |
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#133 |
Grand Sorcerer
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And it all loops back to start of the thread. Great Best Seller of a decade ago rights cannot be sorted out, so no e-book can be produced and sold in all markets (or not at all). Pirate A wants a soft copy. So he/she scans a copy and after a week's work, releases it into the wild so other readers of GBS don't have to spend a weeks time per person to scan it themselves.
Meanwhile, the rightsholders of GBS, who can't sort out the issues, scream bloody murder at Pirate A, stating he/she is denying them a bazillion dollars in sales - while on the other side of the mouth saying there isn't enough money in that old GBS to pay the lawyers to sort out the rights. And the rights need to be extended so it never goes into the public domain, lest they lose a cent of a possible sale... |
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#134 | |
Connoisseur
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#135 | |
fruminous edugeek
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So let's all stop arguing on their behalf, ok? ![]() I could live with that. Even though it would likely mean I'd have to pay sales tax (unless the ebook stores all move their offices and servers to my home state of New Hampshire, which has no sales tax). |
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