Shrinkwrapped Books

NortWind writes "I just saw this in the InfoWorld paper, in the "The Gripe Line" by Ed Foster. It describes how a "...book arrived wrapped in plastic with a shrinkwrap license on the front". Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse..." I wrote an essay about this a year or two ago.

Comments

Hmmmmm.....

[GeneralEmergency]

The license was nontransferable and would "terminate immediately if the Licensee or his or her employer ceased to be an Omnicare customer." And although the Omnicare "Guidelines are intended only to provide guidance as to which pharmaceutical products Omnicare believes to be most effective" the "licensee" was nonetheless prohibited from disclosing any of the information in the book to third parties.

Wouldn't the Doctor's patients be considered "Third Parties" in this scenario?

Only logical.

[Skyshadow]

If you're going to make information an ownable commodity, this sort of thing is bound to happen over a long enough timeline.

The really insideous part of this is that, in order to protect strictly financial interests, copyright barrons like Disney and Microsoft and the politicians they (let's be honest) bribe with large campaign contributions have pushed us to a place where information and knowledge can be proprietary and restricted in a way that hasn't been feasible since the invention of the printing press.

To protect profits from Britney's new crappy CD, these companies have harkened in a world where information can be (at least in theory) totally controlled. Naturally, the fact that this is completely hostile to the basic presumptions of democracy is completely peripheral -- next we'll have printing of bills restricted, politicians suing to keep the gaffes in their public releases supressed under the auspices of the DMCA and an even more uninformed public.

Hopefully, this sort of thing will spur some sort of public outrage at it progresses, pushing the pendulum back the other way -- it'll happen eventually. The question is how far things will have to go before Joe and Jane Sixpack start to give a shit.

In the mean time, might I suggest a contribution to the ACLU or EFF? Remember that the RIAA, MPAA and other four-letter-orgs-'o-evil have to spend to overcome common sense, where those of us on the "right" side don't, so your $25 contribution means a lot.

So, here's how to screw them over

[wowbagger]

Mark the book "Refused - return to sender", and put it back in the mail box. The USPS will return the book to the sender and charge them for doing so, thus costing the sender more money. Plus, they now have all these books to get rid of.

Re:Great, there goes more of our freedom

[Rakarra]

Governments also side with big business because big business employs people. Maybe not as many as you want them to but there are still a lot of paychecks written out by big business.

And yet it's the small businesses that employ and drive our economy much more than the big businesses. Yet small businesses don't get much more say than individuals.