13 ms·

Whatever happened to the idea of legal peer-to-peer lending? If I buy a book, it's my property to give away or resell. Why is it any different with an ebook?

coldpie 2y ago
Because you aren't buying an ebook, you are licensing a copy of it. The terms of the license you agreed to were that you will not distribute or re-assign ownership of the material you are licensing. If you want that to change, you'll need to get congress to do something about it (lol).
- thescriptkiddie 2y ago
  We as a society very urgently need to ban the practice of "selling" licenses, but in the meantime we as individuals can and should practice civil disobedience.
criddell 2y ago
DRM (if any) is one difference. Circumventing copyright controls can open you up to civil and criminal penalties. Not all digital books are DRM protected. I recently listened to Cory Doctorow’s audiobook The Bezzel and at the end he tells you that you have the right to loan or sell your copy of the audiobook.
tombert 2y ago
While I don't really agree with US copyright law, I think the issue is that it's relatively easy to make infinite copies of ebooks. It's basically impossible to guarantee that if I sell you my digital copy of The Colour of Magic that I don't have it anymore. With a physical book, that's much easier; I simply don't have the book anymore. I could technically photocopy the entire myself and have the book as backup, but that's a pretty time-consuming process that most people aren't going to bother with. The "solution" to this could be some kind of DRM, but of course that has its own can of horrible and problematic worms, not the least of which the fact that central signing servers suck. I had an idea years ago of trying to have some kind of blockchain-based DRM but I never really figured out how to even get started with it so I never did anything with it. Still, I think it could be worth someone giving it a go.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  In general breaking digital DRM is trivial. Or only mildly challenging as in the end you can get projector and camera... With text OCR and some automated editing should be good enough. And LLMs might make it even simpler.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > I think the issue is that it's relatively easy to make infinite copies of ebooks. That's the case regardless of any DRM or even what the source material is. You can OCR a physical book or type the contents into your computer once from any source you can read with your eyes and then make infinite copies thereafter. The thing that prevents this is that making unlimited permanent copies is copyright infringement, the same as it ever was. Making the unlimited copies is now cheaper than it was a century ago, but that has nothing to do with where or how the infringer gets the first copy. Never mind breaking DRM, there are services that will OCR a book for around $15. For most books it would cost less to OCR than to buy a single physical copy, from which an infringer could make an unlimited number. Putting this out as some kind of significant distinction between physical and digital copies is just looking for an excuse for a money grab against the new technology.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Wait, no, you do not just get to claim OCR is as easy as "right click copy, right click paste". Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it. Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back. It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      None of that matters when the number of copies you can subsequently make is unlimited. The amortized cost of the one-time scan is entirely negligible. This is the same reason DRM doesn't prevent everything from being on The Pirate Bay. It's not that breaking it is always trivial, it's that you only need one person to do it once. It doesn't matter if it costs one cent or a thousand dollars because neither of those is enough to be a deterrent.
pessimizer 2y ago
The right to copy is what copyright deals with. You never had the right to buy a book, copy it, and give away or resell the copy. edit: the "right" we have to copy them from device to device I think is just granted by the official interpretation of current law by Library of Congress lawyers. It would be entirely consistent to say that when I sell you an ebook, you get to download it to one machine once, and that copying it to a different machine is a violation.

coldpie 2y ago

Because you aren't buying an ebook, you are licensing a copy of it. The terms of the license you agreed to were that you will not distribute or re-assign ownership of the material you are licensing. If you want that to change, you'll need to get congress to do something about it (lol).

thescriptkiddie 2y ago
We as a society very urgently need to ban the practice of "selling" licenses, but in the meantime we as individuals can and should practice civil disobedience.

criddell 2y ago

DRM (if any) is one difference. Circumventing copyright controls can open you up to civil and criminal penalties. Not all digital books are DRM protected. I recently listened to Cory Doctorow’s audiobook The Bezzel and at the end he tells you that you have the right to loan or sell your copy of the audiobook.

tombert 2y ago

While I don't really agree with US copyright law, I think the issue is that it's relatively easy to make infinite copies of ebooks. It's basically impossible to guarantee that if I sell you my digital copy of The Colour of Magic that I don't have it anymore. With a physical book, that's much easier; I simply don't have the book anymore. I could technically photocopy the entire myself and have the book as backup, but that's a pretty time-consuming process that most people aren't going to bother with. The "solution" to this could be some kind of DRM, but of course that has its own can of horrible and problematic worms, not the least of which the fact that central signing servers suck. I had an idea years ago of trying to have some kind of blockchain-based DRM but I never really figured out how to even get started with it so I never did anything with it. Still, I think it could be worth someone giving it a go.

Ekaros 2y ago
In general breaking digital DRM is trivial. Or only mildly challenging as in the end you can get projector and camera... With text OCR and some automated editing should be good enough. And LLMs might make it even simpler.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> I think the issue is that it's relatively easy to make infinite copies of ebooks. That's the case regardless of any DRM or even what the source material is. You can OCR a physical book or type the contents into your computer once from any source you can read with your eyes and then make infinite copies thereafter. The thing that prevents this is that making unlimited permanent copies is copyright infringement, the same as it ever was. Making the unlimited copies is now cheaper than it was a century ago, but that has nothing to do with where or how the infringer gets the first copy. Never mind breaking DRM, there are services that will OCR a book for around $15. For most books it would cost less to OCR than to buy a single physical copy, from which an infringer could make an unlimited number. Putting this out as some kind of significant distinction between physical and digital copies is just looking for an excuse for a money grab against the new technology.
- tombert 2y ago
  Wait, no, you do not just get to claim OCR is as easy as "right click copy, right click paste". Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it. Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back. It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    None of that matters when the number of copies you can subsequently make is unlimited. The amortized cost of the one-time scan is entirely negligible. This is the same reason DRM doesn't prevent everything from being on The Pirate Bay. It's not that breaking it is always trivial, it's that you only need one person to do it once. It doesn't matter if it costs one cent or a thousand dollars because neither of those is enough to be a deterrent.

pessimizer 2y ago

The right to copy is what copyright deals with. You never had the right to buy a book, copy it, and give away or resell the copy. edit: the "right" we have to copy them from device to device I think is just granted by the official interpretation of current law by Library of Congress lawyers. It would be entirely consistent to say that when I sell you an ebook, you get to download it to one machine once, and that copying it to a different machine is a violation.