Re: Re: Amazon remotely deletes 1984

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 2:45 PM, joseph harris<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> And since they are repackaged there is also the question of counterfeiting.

That's a headache that nobody's thinking about yet. (There have been
cases of ebook retailers that had the wrong contents in a book title;
usually, they get refunded/replaced after complaints. However, many
purchasers may not know how to complain, especially at the Kindle
store, where they promote the idea that you don't need to be
computer/web-savvy to use the technology.)

AFAIK, nobody's been selling Harry Potter books with the title "Boy
Wizard And the Magic Rock" because people wouldn't know how to find
it. But it's certainly possible that bootleg ebooks are not only
floating around in the torrent networks, but being sold openly at
Amazon as user-uploaded texts and sitting at Scribd, with just the
titles being shared in private emails and on closed forums.

> It is the responsiblity for what they put in the window and on the digital shelves that is most lacking here.
> Positive confirmation of rights works in all business law as I understand it. The idea of not checking stock
> is validly offered is not business, but fencing!

Yes. I'm not buying this "oh, but Amazon is so BIG! They couldn't
POSSIBLY check all of their stock for legality!" Erm... certainly,
WalMart has an obligation not be selling marijuana alongside its
oregano packets, and nobody thinks that having thousands of outlets
exempts them from this. Nobody would accept "well, the package said
Super Healing Herbs, and the ingredient list was in very tiny type, so
we didn't bother checking it. We sell so *many* cooking herbs; we
can't possibly look at them all before we stock the shelves."

>> Not "retailers." Publishers. Amazon is acting as a publishing house,
>> not a reseller. Amazon is taking raw content, formatting it for
>
> I am not sure you are right. This is more a matter of repackaging. Since the outlet is limited to a 'membership'
> it might equate to a book club. But in the round sense of publishing it is at best a sub-publisher [if there is such a thing].

I admit I'm a bit blurry on the definition of "publisher." I'd love to
know if there's an official, legal definition. Especially since a good
deal of copyright law hinges on "publication date."

But I suspect that whatever laws deal with publishers, as separate
from distributors, they apply to Amazon's ebooks. (The 65% commission
Amazon demands certainly seems high for a distributor.)

>And I am sure it is more correct to say no one else has the legal right to make a Kindle-DRM [give any geek a challenge...];
> but that is more akin to a specialist printer and a patented system.

Nobody can currently make Kindle-DRM books. This possibly could be
circumvented, but I expect it won't; geeks aren't looking for ways to
inflict machine-limited DRM on files. Kindle DRM has been cracked, and
can be removed. This is apparently a simpler process than putting it
on the books in the first place. (Removing DRM is always easier than
inflicting it, because the end user needs both the locked version and
the key. Easier to unlock than to re-create the lock itself.)

> My reason for being concerned about this is the importance of not blurring understanding of publishing.
> The definition of publisher may have to be more tightly defined as the new technology makes more
> demands on past methods and contractual approaches.

"More tightly" defined? Do we have a definition for publisher? (I've
been looking for this for a while now, trying to figure out where some
documents fall under copyright law. Are masters' theses, with a dozen
copies made at Kinko's and bound with a spiral binding, "published?"
Is it only published after an ISBN is assigned--and if so, is anyone
who releases that version for sale a "publisher?" Gah. It's a mess.)

> The efforts of those who want to take as much as they can out of the industry while putting little or
> nothing back is making for a real fight over the way business is conducted in the future. Both big
> gorillas and pirates are hoping confusions caused by new technology will let them control the future.

I suspect a lot of the piracy would go away if publishers would figure
out a legal, convenient way for people to transfer ownership of
digital files from one person to another. A lot of people don't mind
giving up their copy to someone else when they're done with it--but
they want the same freedom with ebooks that they have with physical
books: "hey, I liked this, let me hand it to you so you can read &
enjoy it too."

With ebooks, it's easy to keep a copy while doing that--AND a lot of
the publishers are insisting that it's not okay to transfer ownership
at all. Publishers are trying to promote a "one purchase=one reader"
model--which is not how most of us learned to love books. Some people
resent being told they can't share books with their friends; some
believe that all filesharing is exactly the same as literal theft.

So on one side, we get publishers and those persuaded by them
screeching that ebooks are drastically different from physical
purchases, in that you're not allowed to loan or resell them at all,
and on the other, we get hackers gleefully torrenting megabites of
random digital content as fast as they can strip the DRM from it.

-- 
"I follow Eris blindly in all things. That She is the Goddess of Chaos
simplifies this immensely."  -- Christian the Pagan


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