Copyright

This is a quite excellent piece by Cory Doctorow about copyright law and e-books and how preventing people from owning sharing their e-books is a stupid thing for publishers to be doing.  An excerpt:

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

Comments

[PG]

I don't quite follow the connection between his romanticization of physical print (books and magazines), which is one I share and which is why I continue to buy paper versions of books and magazines, with his criticism of DRM and the like. The existence of e-books already has expanded my library even if I only get one copy/license at a time to share, because it makes it possible to share without having to move any physical object. If I buy an e-book of an author that my sister and I both like, I don't have to remember to bring my copy home with me at Thanksgiving to pass off to her; I can do so as soon as I've finished reading the e-book myself. That I can't then also share it simultaneously with my friend Debbie or decide to re-read it myself before my sister has finished it doesn't strike me as all that outrageous.

[RES]

Frankly, I think Doctorow's piece is nonsense. If I buy a paper-and-ink book, I buy and own *that physical object*, and I have the right to gift it or resell it. ONCE. It doesn't give me the right to distribute multiple copies of the book, or to photocopy it and distribute the copies. That he sees no distinction between that and someone buying an e-book and (say) emailing it to a hundred of their closest friends or selling it online over a bit-torrent site is rather disturbing.