Want To Resell Your Ebooks? You'd Better Act Fast

Nate the greatest (2261802) writes "Here in the US it is legal to resell your MP3s on Redigi, and thanks to the UsedSoft decision you can resell downloaded software in Europe. But if you want to resell your ebooks you had better act fast. Tom Kabinet launched last week in the Netherlands to offer a marketplace for used ebooks, and it is already getting legal threats. The Dutch Trade Publishers Association (GAU) says that the site is committing piracy and if it doesn't shut down the GAU plans to take it to court. Citing a ruling from a German court, secretary general of the GAU Martijn David said that the question of legality had already been settled. Would anyone care to place a bet on whether the site is still in operation in 6 months?"

Comments

The right to read.

[scum-e-bag]

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment—for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (Ten percent of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Dan conclud

Re:The right to read.

[Anonymous Coward]

I still find it fucking hilarious that people think they have a right to control information.

Copy right is a temporary privilege created by a pragmatic government. Today it's been corrupted almost beyond recognition. No author may be compelled to produce work, so any author who thinks they are entitled by moral right to payment for the creation of copies of their work is welcome to fuck off and find another job - there are 7 billion other people in the world who aren't so whiny.

Re:The right to read.

[mwvdlee]

We're not talking about breaking into an author's house, stealing a transscript and copying it many times. We're talking about buying a legitimate copy from the author and passing that single, original medium along to somebody else.

Authors have right to be paid for their work. They do not have a right to be paid for paying customers selling the customers' property.

Re:The right to read.

[Richard_at_work]

Authors have right to be paid for their work. They do not have a right to be paid for paying customers selling the customers' property.

Not entirely applicable here due to the type of property being resold, but the European Union disagrees with you under the 2001 Resale Rights Directive 2001/84/EC which entitles artists to receive a royalty on the resale of their original or limited works up to a total of 12,500 Euros. The directive sets out a sliding scale of royalty levels, from 4% up to a resale price of 50,000 Euros, to 0.25% for greater than 500,000 Euros.

This right is seen as an inalienable right of the artist.

Re:The right to read.

[Corwyn_123]

No, not true. Back in the day (20th century), writers sold their work to the publishing house for a fee, and that's all they got for it, the publisher was now the owner and made the royalties. Then, it came that the writers didn't like this arrangement and changed it, demanding a fee (smaller than before), and royalties for each first time sold book (retail). After that, they got no additional royalties, the book buyer could read the book any number of times, loan it to friends, donate it to libraries or other charities, or, at least with paperback books, rip off the front cover and resell them, without paying royalty fees to the publishers/authors.

Now, in the 21st century, the rights to everything have gone from the buyer to the creator/seller, you never really own anything, you just rent it/pay a license fee to use it. Once you're done with something, a house, a car, a book, a record, tape, or CD (oops mp3's), you aren't permitted to sell them, or if you are, through only authorized houses/websites, you have to pay the original creator/author/producer Royalty fees, so they can continue to make money on something years or decades after it was first written, published and sold for the first time.

I thought, at least in US copyright law, there was a provision for first sale, which states (paraphrased), the creator/seller receives royalties for the first sale of a work, and nothing thereafter.

What has come of our world? What's come of our countries, with PAC and other such Trade agreements between countries, they're trying to align all copyright, patents, and trademarks, so it's the same all over the world. We are moving into a world that the original story of this thread, will come true. It's up to us the people, to do something about it, before it's too late. But, that'll never happen, because people are too pacified by the system, too apathetic, and too cowed, to believe they have the ability to do anything.

Welcome to the future, we've created it, now we have to live in it. It was foretold, and we did nothing about it when we heard the prophecies, our children and our children's children will be the inheritors of our creation (maybe we can make some royalties from them).

Re:The right to read.

[currently_awake]

You are looking at the difference between purchase and rental. The IP companies want to "Rent" you movies/books/software/music. People want to "Buy" their stuff. The IP companies are using their money to move the laws so they can "Sell" you a rental license instead of buying a copy.

Re:The right to read.

[RabidReindeer]

I thought I bought a book yesterday.

Turns out what I bought was a downloadable 500-byte Adobe key that on certain selected devices (not even the majority of my book-reader devices) so long as certain seller infrastructure remains intact and the owners of that infrastructure feel willing will allow me to read the books using selected software. It will not allow me to excerpt the book, lend out the book, read using a reader program with superior features, print even the smallest part of the book or do anything that the "sellers of this book" don't want me to do.

It's a cookbook, so that means that if I need a copy of a recipe in the kitchen, I have to hand-copy it from the display screen.

For about $1.50 more I could have bought a physical copy of that book. I still wouldn't be able to print it, but at least I could have photocopied a page when I needed a recipe instead of copying it out longhand.

I'm not "buying any more e-books" via that channel. I'll stick to the channels that actually present me with usable copies of the books. In other words, sell me the book not a minimally-useful key that costs as much as the actual flamin' book itself!

Re:The right to read.

[spire3661]

Authors have a right to live, they DONT have a right to FORCE licensing on 7 billion people. Copyright is a SOCIAL BARGAIN and copyright maximalists have pushed too far. Its time to push back.

Re:The right to read.

[St.Creed]

Fortunately, in the EU it's been slapped down hard. If you want to have a rental license, it means recurring payments and the right to cancel the license (why do you think Microsoft is focusing so hard on Office365 with its monthly payments?). If it's a sale, you get one payment but afterwards First Sale doctrine applies and the rights of the original seller are exhausted.

Sanest decision in years, IMO.

Resell them?

[Runaway1956]

I get most of my books from qbittorrent. I didn't realize they might have a resell value. A lot of my other books come from Kindle Cloud. I knew that I could loan a book out, but I had no idea that I could "resell" it.

This is why I like dead tree books. I can do with it what I want. Hell, I can even shred it, roll it, and smoke it if I want.

The site does not commit piracy ...

[Alain Williams]

it is just a market place. ''the site operates on an honor basis.'' it expects that once you have sold your e-book that you delete it from your machines. If you do not then it is you who commits piracy. It is an issue of trust: the book publisher/author knows that it is all too easy for someone to sell a book once they have read it but still keep the copy. But just because it is easy does not mean that everyone will keep a copy. I do have to admit that many will sell and keep.

I do not know what the answer it, shutting down a market place or wrapping the book in DRM are not the answers.

Re: The site does not commit piracy ...

[Alain Williams]

Who reads a book twice?

You might not want to read a novel more than once, but many books are not story books. Eg: an academic text book; a reference book - these you might read and want to keep so that you can look up points of detail later.

Having said that:: I have read 'Lord of the Rings' 3 times.

Re: The site does not commit piracy ...

[Alain Williams]

That is the whole point -- with an e-book you can sell it and still have/keep a copy to use, something that you cannot do with a paper book. This is what the publishers want to stop.

Re: The site does not commit piracy ...

[koreanbabykilla]

i feel bad for you. You have really never read a book that you again want to read years or decades later? There are many thousands of books i have read many times. You are either young, or base your reasoning on only having read what you can get from the magazine section of the grocery store.

Re:Fortunately, it will be banned!

[kurkosdr]

"Banning has already eradicated many other invisible activities..." They 'll just sell you a computer with Secure Boots on steroids (always enabled, allowing only fully "certified" images to run) which also is glued-shut and has glued-on components, so you can't open it without destroying it. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow... Good luck with installing a custom OS on that. I hope I am wrong, but soon some Hollywood Legislator will ban devices with unlocked bootloaders like Nexus devices and mandate always-enabled secure boots on all devices (phones, tablets, laptops etc).

Re:Wait, what ?

[mwvdlee]

The ruling is a German ruling, not a European ruling (Europe has it's own court).
German rulings do not apply to Europe or any part of Europe other than Germany.

Re:Fortunately, it will be banned!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Damn! If only it were possible to build a computer on your own using generic circuitry...