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martyf Smack-Fu Master, in training
15y
63
You can't buy digital content.
You can only buy physical goods.
You never bought the digital content.
I think it should be illegal to use the word "buy" for a digital content license.
Why can't you buy digital content? Well, I read over the comments, and I was very surprised to see that nobody here has mentioned the fact that "First Sale Doctrine" does not apply to digital media. (Wikipedia).
In simplest terms, if you buy a copyrighted work in physical form, you can sell the physical form, rent it, loan it, whatever, all you want. You just can't make and sell a copy of the work that the form conveys.
The first sale doctrine does not apply to digital content (media and software) unless the seller of the digital content specifically grants you a license to sell the digital content (and, with some exceptions for software resellers, nobody does this.)
A streaming media company like Redbox, Amazon, Apple, whatever, rarely/never owns all the content they "sell" - they have a contract to be allowed to sell licenses to the content they have licensed in large and expensive deals. It's licenses all the way down.
At no time are the intellectual property rights to the content sold in this chain of sales.
When you "buy" digital content, you are buying nothing more than a license for unlimited replay of a media item, using technologies the seller deems appropriate for the replay of their content. That is all you're buying. A license. And the license may or may not transfer to another party in a bankruptcy. And the license may be revoked as a result of a dispute between the holder of the intellectual property rights and the distributor of the playback licenses.
But there is no good answer to this problem that conforms to the notion of copyright law as it is. Ultraviolet gave it a try, but it got so convoluted that it collapsed under the weight of it's own terms and conditions.
The economics of digital content are broken. The best we seem to come up with are advertising and subscriptions, sales are not really possible. Pirating and Streaming work really well at everything but getting the people who made the content paid.
Pirating content - that is obtaining a copyrighted work without the authorization of the copyright holder is, under numerous laws, theft. You can't just declare, "they didn't sell it to me, so I can just take it" and pretend there was no violation of the laws.
But, to be clear, I think that using the terminology of a sales transaction - specifically the word "Buy" - for streaming content is, put simply, fraudulent, misleading, etc etc...
Yes, in legal terms, I have "bought" a "right" that can be revoked - for example, I can buy a fishing license, but that license can be taken away for various reasons - but I think that most normal people do not see the purchase of a movie for their kids as something that can be taken away.
I'm not sure what the answer is here. An optical disc does not cost the rights holder or distributor anything once the physical object is sold; it does not matter if the seller goes out of business. Streaming media has perpetual costs that rise. If revenue does not offset the costs of the petabytes of storage and bandwidth needed to operate a well-rounded media library, it just vanishes. Even transferring it to the public domain isn't economically viable because of the costs needed to keep the media online.
In Star Trek, they allude to the huge economic disruptions caused to society by free energy, we're having a similar, smaller disruption to the "media" sector.
Appeals court decision potentially reversing publishers' suit may come this fall. //
The Internet Archive (IA) went before a three-judge panel Friday to defend its open library's controlled digital lending (CDL) practices after book publishers last year won a lawsuit claiming that the archive's lending violated copyright law. //
"It's not unlawful for a library to lend a book it owns to one patron at a time," Gratz said IA told the court. "And the advent of digital technology doesn't change that result. That's lawful. And that's what librarians do." //
IA has argued that because copyright law is intended to provide equal access to knowledge, copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it. They're hoping the judges will decide that CDL is fair use, reversing the lower court's decision and restoring access to books recently removed from the open library. //
dogbertat Smack-Fu Master, in training
9y
66
Subscriptor++
chilldude22 said:
I’ve never thought or heard of this copyright interpretation before. How accurate is this description, both in law and intent? I always just assumed we’re in America and any rules benefit the powerful by default.
I think it's accurate, although I think the pendulum has swung to far toward commercial interests in the last 50 years so it isn't always apparent. Copyright is intended to serve the commonweal, not specifically the creator, by establishing the right for a limited time monopoly on works in order to incentivize creation. "The utilitarian aim of the Intellectual Property Clause is to maximize scientific and artistic progress. It does so by attempting to balance the incentives it provides for innovation, against the chilling effects that limiting access to writings and discoveries may have on novel thought." (Cornell Legal Information Institute)//
Tempus --)------- Ars Tribunus Militum
20y
2,675
Subscriptor++
BrianB_NY said:
Internet Archive wants you to believe that they can buy one copy and then "lend" it to everyone around the world, and that this is just like a library. But that isn't a fair analogy. In the tangible book arena, libraries buy many copies of books, creating sales of the books for the publisher. So people get the benefit of borrowing and both the author and publisher get paid for their work, so they can create new books.
You seem to be under the impression that other libraries don’t do lending of digital works and e-books, and that the internet archive policies allow lending a given work to more people at a time than they have purchased copies. Neither of those things are true. //
dogbertat Smack-Fu Master, in training
9y
66
Subscriptor++
BrianB_NY said:
Internet Archive wants you to believe that they can buy one copy and then "lend" it to everyone around the world, and that this is just like a library. But that isn't a fair analogy. In the tangible book arena, libraries buy many copies of books, creating sales of the books for the publisher. So people get the benefit of borrowing and both the author and publisher get paid for their work, so they can create new books.
But that's not how the Internet Archive works. They practice what is called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). They take a physical copy, scan that particular copy, then make it available for checkout. While it is checked out, no one else can borrow it, just like a physical library. So while the title is available to everyone to try to check out, only that one copy can be (i.e., one physical book; one digital lending available). If you see multiple titles, it's because multiple physical copies of that book are held by the Internet Archives.
Libraries don't have to buy specially licensed physical books. They can (and sometime do) buy it off Amazon and put it on the shelf (although they usually use other suppliers). For some reason, the publishers think that libraries need specially licensed digital books. These cost much more than the digital copy you would get from Amazon or elsewhere. And they can't even buy the digital book in perpetuity like you can, but only for a limited number checkouts. So the Internet Archive is testing this saying, 'Hey, I can scan the book I own and lend it so long as I don't lend more than the copies I own.". //
The only reason the publishers are fighting this is that library-licensed-ebooks are WAY MORE PROFITABLE than the normal ebook (or book!), for absolutely no reason, other than that the whole "license, not ownership" thing that's happened over the last couple decades allows the publishers to do it.
That part is spot on. Since the law treats eBooks as computer programs, suddenly all of the things that publishers could not do with physical copies (such as sell books with "licenses" forbidding resale) can now be done. So publishers can limit the number of copies that can be purchased, and have the licenses expire after a certain number of circulations and/or certain time periods, and, oh, by the way, hold back sales of "library edition" eBooks until months after publication of their physical and other eBook copies. That is why CDL is such a threat to the publishing model.
Creative works may not have intellectual property protections for a number of reasons. In most cases, the rights have expired or have been forfeited. Basically, no one holds the exclusive rights to these works, meaning that living artists today can sample and build off those works legally without asking anyone’s permission to do so.
That’s why the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.
The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
But corporate mega-publishers want purchasing a book to be like renting a movie or streaming an album. //
Buying a book should be no different from buying an apple. When you buy an apple, the farmer can’t show up in your kitchen later and decide your time is up, and you’ve got to pay for it again. It’s yours forever—to eat, or paint in a still life, or cut up for a kid’s snack. And thanks to the first sale doctrine of copyright law, codified by Congress in 1909, the books on your shelves are yours forever, too, in exactly the same way your apple is; you’re free to read them (or not), loan them to friends, or sell them to a used bookshop, without restriction. Copyright law balances the public good—our collective right to access information—with the rights it grants to authors and inventors.
Publishers can’t demand more money for the paper books you’ve already bought, but the technology for copying and distributing books has evolved a lot since 1909. So four titanic corporate publishers are currently in court, insisting on the effective right to barge in and demand multiple, recurring payments for digital books–like they do for digital movies, music, and software–and they want to exercise that same power over the books in libraries.
This threat to the ownership of books is what makes the ongoing publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive politically dangerous, and in an altogether different way from earlier challenges and amendments to copyright law. At a time of increasing book bannings and attacks on libraries, public schools and universities, it is not safe for democracy, or for our cultural posterity, to leave an “on/off” switch for library books in the hands of corporate publishers. //
As I’ve argued before, the lawsuit hinges on the question of whether ebooks are books, subject to the existing laws governing the sale of books, or whether the publishers can redefine ebooks as temporary, rental-only media–a new class of unownable goods, like streaming-only films from Disney or subscription-only software from Microsoft. But libraries must have the option to buy and own their books–all their books, including ebooks–and own them absolutely, like an apple. //
In the summer of 2020, Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley accused the Internet Archive of “mass-scale copyright infringement” because of the way the Internet Archive’s Open Library loans its ebooks to patrons. Instead of renting their ebooks from publishers, the Internet Archive scans them from the paper books it owns, stores the paper originals, and loans each scan out to only one patron at a time, a common library practice known as Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Following the reasoning of expert copyright lawyers and library scholars over the last twelve years, the Internet Archive, along with hundreds of other libraries and archival institutions, maintains that CDL is a fair and logical way to preserve traditional library practices for the digital world. //
The publishers’ objective had been to forbid the Open Library to loan any of their in-copyright books as ebooks. That was the explicit request in the original complaint. But not even this industry-friendly judge was willing to go that far; he sided with the Internet Archive’s interpretation of the decision instead. For now, the Open Library will have to stop loaning only those ebooks for which the publishers are offering their own “competing” ebooks for license. In other words, the order relies solely on the argument that the Open Library is harming the publishers’ revenues from ebooks, a distinction that seems to go to the heart of the dispute. //
The publishers shouldn’t be able to pick and choose the bits of copyright law they want to abide by; as we’ve noted, copyright law balances the public good with commercial rights. If publishers’ ebook revenues are protected by the extant provisions of copyright law protecting rights holders, then, presumably, readers and libraries should also be protected. The Internet Archive, and all libraries, should have the same protections under the first sale doctrine that have always allowed them to preserve and lend books to readers.
The Amazon Kindle is an ebook reading computer that poses very serious dangers to society. When you purchase a Kindle, you are subject to Amazon's Digital Restriction Management (DRM), a system designed to take away rights you would typically have when reading a book.
Your basic rights to share, sell, or donate a book are subject to fights with Amazon over the legal and technological restrictions they try to impose. If you try to exercise these rights anyway, you might be violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- which could bring severe criminal penalties -- and Amazon can try to revoke your ability to use all the books you've bought.
After you read a physical book, you can give it to a friend or sell it. Not so with a Kindle book. You can donate a physical book to a library -- an institution whose purpose is to continue sharing it for as long as possible. The Kindle's DRM, however, is designed explicitly to prevent sharing and the public benefit that institutions like libraries provide.[1]
Amazon has a web page about e-book lending, which explains that only certain "lendable" books ("lendability" being determined by the publisher) can be lent at most one time, only within the United States, for a period of exactly 14 days. That's a pathetic (and failed) attempt to replicate what was always a very natural aspect of printed books.
Internet reader's rights
Some people think that every Internet user is a copyright violator. Downloading a document means making a copy of it, they say; and copying generally isn't legal without the author's permission. They argue about whether making material available through FTP or HTTP or USENET grants some sort of ``implied license'' to download the material---or whether an author can demand payment for the reader's copies.
Other people advocate a much simpler theory. When an author tells his FTP server to send a document to anyone who asks, he is the one making copies. In legal jargon, the author's command to the computer is the ``proximate cause'' of the copying. The reader is merely requesting a copy, not making it.
I don't know which of these theories will succeed in court. I also don't think you should have to care. So I promise I won't sue you for copyright violation for downloading documents from my server.
Does it bother you that this should even be an issue? Check out Richard Stallman's essay on The Right to Read.