Re: Re: Amazon remotely deletes 1984

From: "Erica Frank" 
> 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. .........But it's certainly possible that bootleg ebooks are not only
> floating around in the torrent networks, but being sold openly at
> Amazon .......> 
............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
.......
> 
> I admit I'm a bit blurry on the definition of "publisher." I'd love to
> know if there's an official, legal definition. 

See below.

Especially since a good
> deal of copyright law hinges on "publication date."

Not so sure about this. There are complications in the US because of past copyright being so at variance with Berne. But new copyright since 1978 in the US is now all life plus.

> 
> 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.)

I take it that's the Kindle figure. Amazon is taking full advantage of the print book chain costings, where the mark up covers distribution and retail business needs.

On the other hand it may be the old razor marketing ruse - give away the stem and charge highly for the blades; though Amazon also charges highly for the Kindle hardware.

..........
> 
>> 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.)

Even the concise OED of half a  century ago has trouble with this. Publishing is to issue copies for sale to the public, while a publisher produces copies and distributes them to booksellers or public. No mention of sale in the noun definition.

Comparison with newspapers brings a further twist in this. The editor is legally responsible for the content of the journal, while the publisher may or may not be! [Lots of cases, in the UK anyway, that make one wonder.] Back to books: when the case over Lady Chatterly's Lover was brought it was against the publisher [Penguin, I think]. 

Broadly I think the publisher is the one responsible for preparing the work for issue. But confusion is worse confounded by the printer originally being the issuer. Indeed in the UK the monopoly broken by the act of Queen Anne [1710] was held by the Stationer's Company.

And modern technology has opened up the issuing to so many that the range of those who publish seems endless. As Kent suggests in another post it is important to recognise the work put in by a publisher, so the definition ought to include the stage between the original work and preparing the work for issue.

And your question is then whether making Kindle-ready is 'preparing the work for issue'. Since it is a technical process [whatever problems it throws up] it fails any test of literary involvement. And that brings another criteria! Especially as a publisher is usually involved also in the editing process.

In sound and video the editing and preparation stand separate from the choices of 'wrapping' - disc, stick, downloaded file [and some older systems]. Otherwise 'pirates' would become publishers too! And this seems to put Google in the Pirate bay! ;-)

.......
> 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. 

My impression is that most ebooks now are sold without any DRM, and people are put on their honour to do the right thing. But they have to be told what the right thing is, as that was thrown out with the bathwater of the financail system that has just collapsed [several metaphors fighting in there possibly ;-)].

 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.

These are the tensions that do need resolving I agree. As in so many businesses I am reluctantly convinced that the secret lies in marketing.

Joseph

Joseph Harris  -  Debt Control Man
author: Control Your Debt Crisis on Your Own Terms
blog: http://debtcontrolman.wordpress.com
http://www.controlyourdebtcrisis.co.uk
debt dictionary: http://www.controlyourdebtcrisis.co.uk/debtwiki/


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