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Future of Books: Do you own your ebook?
Gizmodo is reporting on the changing nature of book ownership. In particular, the way that ebook purchases are less a process of buying a book and rather one of leasing a book. In the post, “Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours,” Gizmodo looks at the work of
Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
In the past, once you bought a book, you could take that physical book and loan it to a friend to read, you could sell it to someone else, you could leave it on the shelf and read it whenever you want. However, with ebooks, the process is different, and you can only read the book yourself, unless you sell you Sony Reader or you Amazon Kindle.
What’s more, there is also almost certainly going to be issues about moving your library with you if you want to upgrade your reader after a few years.
The Gizmodo article, “Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours” reproduces the legal summary, so if you’re curious about what your rights are to those books you’ve bought (or are thinking of buying), you might want to check it out. What are your thoughts? No big deal to lease a book versus owning it? Should we be able to buy a book, and then resell it (i.e. sell it once to one person and remove the local copy)? It certainly raises questions about the line between physical property and intellectual property and what it means to actually own something.
via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing who is less than happy:
Books that you own can be loaned, re-sold and given away, and the ongoing health of the book trade and reading itself relies on this—how many of your favorite writers did you discover at a used bookstore, or when a friend passed you a copy of a book?It’s funny that in the name of protecting “intellectual property,” big media companies are willing to do such violence to the idea of real property—arguing that since everything we own, from our t-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.
— michael | March 24, 2008 11:37 AM | Something to think about
