Re: NY Times Ethicist Condones Ripping Off E-books

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Beth Young <[email protected]> wrote:

> Chris, it seems to me that your argument is based on the premise that
> consumers are buying content, not physical form.  If I buy a hardback novel,
> I buy the story; how I choose to read the story is up to me.  I could ask my
> sweetheart to read it out loud to me, I could read it silently to myself, I
> could photocopy it and read the photocopy in the tub, I could scan it and
> read it on my phone.  As support for this view, you mention the court
> decision about music--same principle, different physical form.

That's correct. It should be noted that even if the RIAA vs. Diamond
Multimedia court decision specifies digital files, it uses as
precedent the MPAA vs. Sony case, which was about videotaping (that
is, *copying* from broadcast format to Betamax format) TV shows and
had nothing to do with CDs or MP3s but showed a similar philosophy in
terms of what consumers had the right to do with media content they
consumed ("shifting" it in time, whereas the RIAA vs. Diamond case was
about "shifting" in space).

While I'm admittedly not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that both
precedents would be taken into account if the issue of scanning books
ever came up in court. Hence, two strong precedents in US case law
dealing with rights to copy media suggest that customers *do* have the
right to copy media as long as it's for their own personal
non-commercial use. (This is only trumped by the DMCA in that breaking
DRM is disallowed even if it is for purposes of making an otherwise
explicitly legal use of the material. But then, anyone trying to argue
that ink on paper constitutes "DRM" would probably be laughed right
out of court.)

It's not surprising there are a lot of misconceptions about copyright.
It's grown dense and tangled over the years, until it's practically an
arcane and mystic art. Even some copyright lawyers are calling for it
to be reformed and simplified:

http://www.teleread.org/2010/03/22/jessica-litman-calls-for-copyright-reform/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/cleaning-the-barnacles-from-the-ss-copyright.ars
-- 
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