The difference between owning a copy and getting a license is WHO exactly writes the limitations on your ability to use it. When you own a copy, those limitations are spelled out by copyright law, as interpreted by courts. Even with the degree of regulatory capture that big media has, they still have to buy up a bunch of congressmen to change the law. And there ARE many limitations on the rights granted to copyright holders…first sale, fair use etc. But when you sign a license there are very few limits on the conditions that the copyright holder can impose upon you as a condition for use. Just as there is a difference between buying a house and renting one.
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You’re wrong, and the courts have said you’re wrong. See first sale doctrine on Wikipedia. The most recent case was UMG vs Augusto, where the courts confirmed in 2011 that even if you are sent the CD for free, you nevertheless own it and the copy of the music that’s on it, and you can resell the disc and the copy of the music, even if the supposed “license agreement” on the CD says otherwise.
So far the courts have ruled that there’s no first sale right with respect to purely digital copies. This is an important distinction between physical delivery of music, books and movies, versus pure digital distribution. You are losing rights when you opt for pure digital.
That’s why, as I already mentioned, I feel vendors shouldn’t be allowed to say that you are “buying” a book when it’s a digital file you can’t resell; they should have to be up front about the fact that you are renting or licensing it.
It’s also a problem for the content producers, I think. If they can only rent me digital content, I’m only willing to pay rental prices for it, and they need to factor that into their pricing strategy. Typically they don’t, which is why I mostly still buy video games on disc.
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Not a great deal of use if you’re travelling, and are sans internet and maybe want to read a book or something?
The only fair solution is to force readers of paper books to hand them over to be pulped at customs. The TSA could handle it, maybe. Plus, you could make a killing with a concession selling ‘international certified’ copies the other side of the gate. Way I see it, publishers ought to be lobbying for laws like that.
So if I take a file off a disc and throw the disc away, I can sell the file on its own?
I’m not arguing with your suggestion by the way, seems sensible to me. For some reason not raging about copyright has painted me as some kind of corporate shill. Come on guys.
And in the end, they failed in those efforts because they are unable to unilaterally alter the rights of the legal owner of a thing. On the other hand, they can pretty much write whatever LICENSE terms that they wish. But you have to agree to that license. So license terms are generally MUCH more restrictive and in favor of the copyright owner.
You bought the disc. You are allowed in most countries to make a new copy for personal use. You may sell the original CD, but not sell the copies that you made.
You see, the kicker is that you do not take off a song from a CD, the song is still there. You make a copy. It is an extension of a right that goes back to hand-copying texts from a book, or photocopying it for personal use, and so on.
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No, because it’s a different copy. You can only sell the copy you purchased on the disc.
“You see, the kicker is that you do not take off a song from a CD, the song is still there. You make a copy. It is an extension of a right that goes back to hand-copying texts from a book, or photocopying it for personal use, and so on.”
Which is why I made the point of saying that if I threw away the CD, could I sell the file on its own.
And I couldn’t. Which tells me that I don’t own the file, in any meaningful way (this bit was important, not incidental).
If you commission me to create a PDF document for you, and I deliver it on a USB key, you can remove it from the key as you own that file. You might not be able to make copies (that’s down to our contract), but if I told you that it had to stay on that USB key forever, and removing it constituted piracy, I think you might start to question your ownership over that file.
Once again, you conflate making a copy with moving a physical object. No. The file is not akin to a book or a vinyl record, it is a message. When you “move” a file, then you are modifying one media to contain the same information. It is not like taking a page out of a binder and putting it into a new one, it is photocopying that page and putting the new copy into the binder. The original is still there. It can still be used.
Never mind that your example is absurd, as any commission for work does include all rights to make copies. Or is it that absurd? I ran into an example similar to yours was a play script, where the publisher wanted to force any acting group performing that piece to buy a script for every actor. Sheet music is much the same, where publishers make dire threats to anyone caught photocopying the song instead of buying a copy for every choir member. Not much different from your USB example, really.
“Once again, you conflate making a copy with moving a physical object. No. The file is not akin to a book or a vinyl record, it is a message. When you “move” a file, then you are modifying one media to contain the same information. It is not like taking a page out of a binder and putting it into a new one, it is photocopying that page and putting the new copy into the binder. The original is still there. It can still be used.”
To be fair it’s a complex discussion. But I still don’t think I’m using the anaology you’re proposing. ‘Practically’ it’s a copy, but it doesn’t have to be. If I move a file from one storage medium to another and delete the original, I have, for all intensive purposes, moved it and not copied it.
“Never mind that your example is absurd, as any commission for work does include all rights to make copies. Or is it that absurd?”
I’ll concede that it was a crap example, but no, it’s not necessarily absurd. If I have a clause in our contract that says “No copyright is transfered on handover, you cannot make copies of this”, then you cannot make copies of it. Not all commissioned work involves the transfer of copyright, code being a very common example (oftentimes the copyright of the markup is retained, for a few reasons).
Y’all are debating about the definition of “own” rather than the nature of the limitations placed on one. Certainly the law often places limitations of what one can do with property that one owns. You can own or rent a car. A rental agreement can limit who else can let drive a car that you have rented, if you own it you can lend it to a friend. If you own your house and HAVEN’T signed a HOA agreement, you can do MANY more things than if you rent, but you are still subject to zoning laws. But if you rent, your landlord can impose MANY MANY more limitations on what you can do with his property. And there is a real and important difference between the limitations that copyright law places upon what you can do with a CD and the limitations that can be placed when you only license content. To say that “I don’t own it” because there ARE some legal limitations is to blur that important line. And make no mistake, as stupid and onerous as copyright law can be, it is nowhere near as restrictive as licenses can be or as bad as big media WISHES and tries to make it.
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