Slashdot Mirror
Harry Potter's 'Half Blood Prince' Leaked
darkonc writes "The CBC is reporting that about 15 copies of "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" were accidently sold at a 'Great Canadien Superstore' in a suburb of Vancouver BC. The Canadian Distributor, Raincoast Books managed to get
an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them and demanding that they return the books to Raincoast until Friday. To add a carrot to the stick, raincoast is offering various goodies including a signed bookplate."
Raincoast Books managed to get an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them and demanding that they return the books to Raincoast until Friday. To add a carrot to the stick, raincoast is offering various goodies including a signed bookplate.
Are they actually tracking people down or is this just a protective injection? TFI says "The Court Order also requires anyone who has a copy or copies of the book to return them to Raincoast immediately." That doesn't seem very enforceable.
Of course I'd return my copy for a signed bookplate in a heartbeat. Still the paranoid part of me thinks this is yet another reason to pay for everything with cash and ditch the debit card. I wonder what the legal/financial repercussions for the store will be? TFI/TFA didn't dwell on that. Will the store be sued for breach of contract or will Raincoast consider it an honest mistake? How many poor bastards will be fired by the store in an attempt to cover managements ass?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Somebody at the GameFAQs.com forum claims to already have the book, and has supposedly posted content from it.
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http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/genmessage.php?b
This leak would lend credence to his claims that he does already have access to the book.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
If they don't stack the deck in favor of the small stores they cut their own throats long-term.
how do you prohibit the sale or providing information about a book that you PURCHASED
Technically, nobody purchased those books. A sale only takes place if all parties involved intend for a sale to take place, and this was clearly a mistake on the part of the store in question.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
But its not really a Constitutional issue. The vast majority of the law isn't, really. Constitutional issues just engage law review writers and producers of Law and Order because they're a lot sexier than the law of torts and state definitions of what exactly constitutes a sale (sample controversy: Bob makes an oral agreement to Sue that he will give her his copy of Harry Potter after it comes out if she goes on a date with him on Thursday. On Friday, after the date, Bob takes delivery of Harry Potter from UPS a day earlier than it should have arrived, reads it, and is disgusted to find that he ordered the English edition and has extraneous u's all over his book. Forgetting his earlier agreement with Sue, he burns the book in disgust. Does Sue sue for breach of contract, non-delivery of goods, or damage to her property? Answer: go to law school.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I must have missed the memo, what makes a newfie not "kanuck" [sic]?
The way they always miss the memo.
Honest to god that's the first new newfie joke I've heard in 10 years, it's so wrong, oh I know it's so wrong to make those jokes (thank you public school), but that one (spelling included) made me laugh.
As a side note Newfoundland didn't join confederation til sometime around 1949. They fought in world war 2 as their own nation; mostly; they had fallen on hard times in the 30's and the British were really running the show.
brief synopsis of events
It took 2 hard fought referendums before they decided to join, but they were broke without the mini boom the war had given them, so it was either Canada or Great Britain to take over, and we were closer. (Horrible minimalization of events that split communities and even families. Religion, politics, language, all was involved.) Perhaps this is why they are the butt of so many jokes up here, being the latecomers to the country, though if Quebec leaves us then I'm sure we could appropriately reword all of the good Newfie jokes.
And damn it, it's "The Real Canadian Superstore" (or Atlantic Superstore on the east.) It may be Canadien in Montreal, but certainly not in Vancouver, French is like the 4th or 5th most spoken language there. (insert opening for hongkouver joke, god I love a cultural mosaic.)
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
By its actions clearly the bookstore intended a sale to take place. The customers didn't steal the books.
It's a stretch, but by breaching the contract, it could be argued the store sold "stolen" goods. The consumer then would have no right to such goods even if purchased in good faith. The publisher can require the book to be returned, or at least have a temporary injunction issued until the legal status of the books can be determined.
Of course there is absolutely no argument for the courts to prevent somebody from talking about the book. I'm a believer in copyrights, but there are limits when it comes to restricting free speech. The court should not be in a position of prior restriant. At best the publisher can sue for libel later on and have the burden of proof to show that the person's words had a quantifiable and unfounded (almost impossible to prove) impact on sales.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
It might be a trick by the marketers to maximize press coverage this week. Why did not this happen in a small-town bookstore in GB you believe? ;)
"If the series has such a high sales growth trend do you really believe a few advance copies would destroy that?"
Here's the problem: Define "few"
The concept of the universal release date is there to protect the small vendors indirectly and the publishers directly. Right now, the publisher has exclusive rights to the book and, if you want to sell the book, you have to come to them. This way the publisher has the ability to not only name the terms of the sale, but also to ensure the widest distribution available.
Once you start allowing stores to sell a book as soon as they get it as opposed to a universal release date, this will give an advantage to the larger distributers, the ones who have their own supply chains, because they will "have" the books first. People will go to the larger distributers to get their next Harry Potter fix and you end up with a situation where it's the major stores that dictate the terms of selling the book. "If you want anybody to see your book on a store shelf anywhere, you have to play by our terms."
This can already be seen to some extent in the music industry, where publishers have to cowtow to Wal-Mart's sense of morality.
So then you have the problem where, if 15 books is OK to let slip out, how about 16? 17? 1800? Where does the line get drawn?
There's also the issue of scalping and price gouging. If you have one of those books, they could go for a lot of money on eBay. Good for the seller, but the publisher sees no benefit from this (legal, yes, but there's also no reason to allow it if they can avoid it), it also reflects poorly on the publisher. People will start to whisper whether or not this really happened without the publisher's involvement, and whether or not this was really some cheap marketing scheme to drum up support for the book. A publisher's reputation can effect whether or not a profitable writer chooses to publish with them over a "more reputable" competitor.
Probably the greater danger is unscrupulous parents trying to make a few thousand out of it by stealing the book from the kid and offering it for sale to the highest bidder. It is my guess that this is actually what the injunction is trying to stop, as that's detectable and tracable,
AND PERFECTLY LEGAL. I wouldn't hesitate to put it up on ebay. If the publisher wants to keep it off the market, all they have to do is be the highest bidder.
Witness the other side of the coin of free markets. While they create wealth and provide incentives for creativity and business sense, they also create some artifical and nonsensical rules. Time-to-market is one of those. We've seen it in the warez scene 15 years ago, when 0-day cracks were magically more valued even though the usual communication channels (disks copied on the school yard) were too slow to make an actual difference between a 0-day and a +3-day. And due to availability and timezones, it wasn't much of an indicator for skill, either (not to mention that a good portion of the 0-day cracks sucked and needed to be fixed with a later release).
Forward to 2005. Movie release dates have been crucial for a few years already, even though for all practical purposes it makes no difference. Now book release dates enter the picture. Again, no difference except for the marketing pressure that the free market has created, where immediacy is somehow a value, even where it has no actual usefulness.
So why does it matter? Because the market says it does. No other reason at all. If the king doesn't like red then you don't dress in red. If the market says (via marketing people, its inofficial spokespersons) that it's important, then you obey and the ridiculousness of it all will not become aparent until the king has fallen and our children all wonder why their ancestors didn't see that he wasn't really a god.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Leaked copies of a book doesn't make a difference in book sales. Of those 15 copies, what odds do you have of someone actually reading the whole thing (remember the thing is mainly targeted at young readers and likely multiple readers per copy) in those 4 days? It's not anything like the movie analogy you gave because a movie is a fixed amount of time and seeing it early does make a difference. You see a movie and invest a whole 2-3 hours and you're done. Four days early would be a huge difference for the theaters that get stiffed. If you start selling books a couple days early, you run out a couple days early and people go elsewhere. It happens all the time: Item A goes on sale at store B and sells out. People start saying "They have it over at store C" rinse, lather, repeat. I say sell it when you get it, pay more for faster shipping, get bigger profits if you can manage to keep the thing on your shelves. Power to the smart people, not just to the ones playing in the artificially level playing field.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
The Slashdot summary, with its delightful spelling innovations, asserts that the books were sold from a Real Canadian Superstore, which is a giant Loblaws with Wal*Martian asperations.
If that's true, then the person stocking the bookshelves had probably just finished stocking the cookies and crackers aisle: a mistake is plausible.
Mind the Gap
Despite the tremendous lockdown effots, these books got into the wild. To quote one of the people in Jurassic Park: "Life found a way."
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.