4 ms·

When I buy a book, the publisher has no say in whether I use it for personal enjoyment, or for class discussion, or to write a (potentially negative) review, or

When I buy a book, the publisher has no say in whether I use it for personal enjoyment, or for class discussion, or to write a (potentially negative) review, or to feed my fireplace. They have some control over wholesale reproduction via copyright law, not arbitrary power to decide what I do with it like, say, a restaurant that says I can only use my seat at the table to eat their food for a reasonable amount of time. Why would bytes on the wire be any different from printed words on the page here?

nostrademons 7y ago
There's a distinction between the physical pages of the book and the text contained within the book. You own the physical pages of the book; you can use it as a paperweight, coaster, toilet paper, fireplace fuel, whatever. You do not own the copyright on the words of the book, and in many of the cases you list, the publisher does have a say in that. If you want to put on a school play based on the book, you need to get permission from the author. (My high school put on an in-house adaptation of Out of the Dust, and we had to write Karen Hesse and get her okay to do so.) If you put the entirety of the book on your website so that readers of your negative review can refer back to it, the publisher can come after you with a cease & desist or, if you ignore it, a lawsuit. If you write fanfiction based on the characters in the book, the publisher can come after you with a C&D. If you want to make a movie based on that book, you need to buy the film rights. (There's currently an interesting situation with Game of Thrones where HBO owns the film rights to the world of Westeros, but the film rights to the characters & story of Dunk & Egg are still owned by GRRM, so if the film rights to the earlier Dunk & Egg stories were ever bought by a studio other than HBO, they would have to be scrubbed of mentions of Targaryens, the Iron Throne, King's Landing, etc.) In the pre-Internet days, the chance of enforcement was next to nil for many of these cases, because the big studios and publishers all got licenses for any IP, while class discussions, high school plays, and hobbyists never got a wide audience for their work and so the original publisher would probably never know (unless you did something really stupid like send it to them). The Internet's blurred a lot of these boundaries.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Copyright forbids specific actions (reproduction), it doesn’t let the publisher set arbitrary terms on my consumption and use of the text.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    It's more that copyright defines certain rights (hence the name) that are owned initially by the author of the work and then may be transferred or granted to other parties for compensation. The exact rights specified are defined by statute, and then case law provides specific precedent for what it means. So again, consult a lawyer. But for a concrete example - one of the exclusive rights bestowed by copyright is the right of reproduction. (It's not the only one, BTW: performance is another one specific enumerated, as is distribution, as is creating derivative works.) What does that mean? Well, courts have ruled that if you take an exact digital copy of a work, as sold to the public, and publish it for free on a torrent site, that's infringement. They've also ruled that there are various "fair use" exceptions that give implicit rights to the general public even when a work is under copyright. If you quote a sentence from a 300-page book to support a point in an academic paper, that's not infringing. Where's the boundary? Consult a lawyer, because there's lots of case law. I remember that when I was at Google, there was a big debate over how big the snippets (the little summaries of text on the results page could be). 2 sentences was fine. A paragraph was dodgy. Showing the entire page was a big no-no. Showing the entire page when the user clicks on "cached" was okay when I was there (I don't remember what the justification was for that), but that option has since disappeared, so I wonder if they ran into problems. They got around it with AMP, which requires explicit opt-in from publishers and so has an explicit consent. It's not all that different from regular property rights in that regard. You own land. What does that mean? Well, normally it means that you can build a house on it - but not if you have a conservation easement on the land, or if local zoning codes forbid the type of dwelling you want. It normally means you have the right to keep other people off your land - except that if your property completely surrounds somebody else's property and cuts them off from a public street, you're required to grant them an easement so that they can cross your land to get to their dwelling. There are other sorts of easements you can grant, too, which are all ways of either granting other people some of the rights associated with your property (but not all of them) or restricting yourself from having some of those rights.

nostrademons 7y ago

There's a distinction between the physical pages of the book and the text contained within the book. You own the physical pages of the book; you can use it as a paperweight, coaster, toilet paper, fireplace fuel, whatever. You do not own the copyright on the words of the book, and in many of the cases you list, the publisher does have a say in that. If you want to put on a school play based on the book, you need to get permission from the author. (My high school put on an in-house adaptation of Out of the Dust, and we had to write Karen Hesse and get her okay to do so.) If you put the entirety of the book on your website so that readers of your negative review can refer back to it, the publisher can come after you with a cease & desist or, if you ignore it, a lawsuit. If you write fanfiction based on the characters in the book, the publisher can come after you with a C&D. If you want to make a movie based on that book, you need to buy the film rights. (There's currently an interesting situation with Game of Thrones where HBO owns the film rights to the world of Westeros, but the film rights to the characters & story of Dunk & Egg are still owned by GRRM, so if the film rights to the earlier Dunk & Egg stories were ever bought by a studio other than HBO, they would have to be scrubbed of mentions of Targaryens, the Iron Throne, King's Landing, etc.) In the pre-Internet days, the chance of enforcement was next to nil for many of these cases, because the big studios and publishers all got licenses for any IP, while class discussions, high school plays, and hobbyists never got a wide audience for their work and so the original publisher would probably never know (unless you did something really stupid like send it to them). The Internet's blurred a lot of these boundaries.

closeparen 7y ago
Copyright forbids specific actions (reproduction), it doesn’t let the publisher set arbitrary terms on my consumption and use of the text.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  It's more that copyright defines certain rights (hence the name) that are owned initially by the author of the work and then may be transferred or granted to other parties for compensation. The exact rights specified are defined by statute, and then case law provides specific precedent for what it means. So again, consult a lawyer. But for a concrete example - one of the exclusive rights bestowed by copyright is the right of reproduction. (It's not the only one, BTW: performance is another one specific enumerated, as is distribution, as is creating derivative works.) What does that mean? Well, courts have ruled that if you take an exact digital copy of a work, as sold to the public, and publish it for free on a torrent site, that's infringement. They've also ruled that there are various "fair use" exceptions that give implicit rights to the general public even when a work is under copyright. If you quote a sentence from a 300-page book to support a point in an academic paper, that's not infringing. Where's the boundary? Consult a lawyer, because there's lots of case law. I remember that when I was at Google, there was a big debate over how big the snippets (the little summaries of text on the results page could be). 2 sentences was fine. A paragraph was dodgy. Showing the entire page was a big no-no. Showing the entire page when the user clicks on "cached" was okay when I was there (I don't remember what the justification was for that), but that option has since disappeared, so I wonder if they ran into problems. They got around it with AMP, which requires explicit opt-in from publishers and so has an explicit consent. It's not all that different from regular property rights in that regard. You own land. What does that mean? Well, normally it means that you can build a house on it - but not if you have a conservation easement on the land, or if local zoning codes forbid the type of dwelling you want. It normally means you have the right to keep other people off your land - except that if your property completely surrounds somebody else's property and cuts them off from a public street, you're required to grant them an easement so that they can cross your land to get to their dwelling. There are other sorts of easements you can grant, too, which are all ways of either granting other people some of the rights associated with your property (but not all of them) or restricting yourself from having some of those rights.