Why Your e-Books Are No Longer Yours

Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the question: when you "buy" "content" for Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying a book? If the latter, then the first sale doctrine, which lets you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay, would apply. Some law students at Columbia took a swing at the question and Gizmodo reprints the "surprisingly readable" legal summary. Short answer: those restrictive licenses may very well be legal, and even if you had rights under the first sale doctrine, you might only be able to resell or give away your Kindle — not a copy of the work.

Comments

The Madness Continues

[Whuffo]

Copyright was intended to provide a compromise between the needs of those creating works, and the needs of the public. The deal was that we'd give the authors a monopoly for a limited time in exchange for them releasing their works to the public domain.

What's happened since is that the creators sold out to corporations and the corporations have been throwing their weight around with our lawmakers. The term of copyright has been extended and re-extended to the point where virtually nothing is entering the public domain anymore. They've even filed (and received) copyrights on things that were previously in the public domain.

Not satisfied with their greedy taking of the public domain, they decided to move on to getting paid multiple times for the same thing. Enter "digital rights management" and such travesties as the DMCA. That effectively puts an end to the first sale doctrine and completes the process of locking up all "intellectual property" (interesting phrase, isn't it?) and completely eliminates any possibility of anything entering the public domain.

The deal was that we'd give them a exclusive right over the works for a limited time in exchange for them releasing the works to the public domain. Our corporate government has eliminated the need for the rights holders to release their works to the public domain, so the deal is broken. They don't deserve their exclusive right over the work either; the deal is broken, remember?

This will all work out in the long term, our corporate masters will do their utmost to spin this into something that's supposedly good for us. But we're not fooled, are we?