A Wired.com report says that a recent appeals court decision in the US suggests that “software makers can use shrink-wrap and click-wrap licenses to forbid the transfer or resale of their wares.” What that implies is that just because you bought it, it does not mean you own it. How does this apply on a book? When you buy a physical book (that is, the dead tree variety), you own it, right? You can resell it as a second-hand copy, or a collector’s item (if it is rare or a first edition), put it in a library where people can borrow it, or even sell it at ‘remaindered’ bookshop. For one thing, a certain amount of physical deterioration is taken for granted, and collectors are known to spend an enormous amount of money to acquire rare books.
But in the case of ebooks, who owns it? Can one resell it? College students who can ill afford the price of new text books thrive on the used book trade. Often it does not matter if it is not the current edition. Will they be allowed to borrow them from libraries?
Says Greg Beck, the defense attorney in the case who represented an eBay seller sued by Autodesk, “The other ramification, there is no reason a similar license could not be put into the cover of a book. It wouldn’t be difficult for everybody to implement this.”
Not surprisingly, the American Library Association argued against it saying, “It feared that the software industry’s licensing practices could be adopted by other copyright owners, including book publishers, record labels and movie studios.”
Scary, isn’t it?
Wired.com
