An interesting story on the BBC Web site concerning legal proceedings which are starting in the
United States regarding the legitimacy of sites providing a market place for
the resale of on-line media. With the seemingly inexorable growth in the
numbers of legitimate audio visual web sites and that of e-books we are moving
towards a situation where physical products constitute a minority of sales.
But what can purchasers do when they have viewed
a film or read a book enough times . I should declare some sort of interest. We
have recently (at my wife’s instigation, engaged in major de-cluttering at home and large quantities of
books have been sent to charity shops and DVDs offered for sale on eBay.
These second hand markets are to a considerable
extent distinct from the original sales environment. A second handbook will not
have the crisp, pristine feeling of a new copy whilst a well used DVD
(especially when exposed to the hanks and nails of our children) is susceptible
to minor blemishes.
As a family we are moving more to the digital
environment. I cannot remember the last time I bought a book in a bookstore but
my collection of e-books – all legitimately acquired - is expanding steadily. What though, about
resale? I suspect it has always been the case that 95% of the books I read I
never return to but as has been said, ‘books do furnish a room’. I like the
well filled bookcases in my office even if I seldom consult them. I don’t feel
the same attachment to my e-books – or indeed the films that I have downloaded on Apple TV.
But what can/may/should I do? Models that
worked in the old analogue world do not apply to the digital one. If I resell
my e-book or the file of a film or sound track, it will be as perfect as the
day I purchased it. Why should it sell for less that the original price? But
there is also the issue of the copyright owner’s legitimated need for
protection. As we all know, a wide range of sites offer access to illegal
copies of works. If I sell my second hand book, I more or less unequivocally
lose possession of the work. I think the interesting aspect of the current US
litigation is that the site which is planning to offer a second hand market
place for digital works is planning to incorporate mechanisms to check that a
seller has removed it from his/her computer.
There are, of course, a number of issue. We
have around 10 computers, iPads, iPods and iPhones in our house. With the
emergence of cloud computing, it seems to my technologically challenged mind that it would be very
difficult to establish that all copies had been removed. Perhaps we need more
of a shift from models involving sale of works to rental for a specified period
after which the work self – destructs?
This certainly is interesting, particularly in the light of the Usedsoft ruling. It's a shame it's in the US and not the EU, because it would be interesting to see whether the provisions which apply to computer programs would be held to apply to other combinations of ones and zeros too.
ReplyDeleteIt stretches beyond just sale, too — I can lend you my hard copy of a book without getting into the realm of copyright too much, but I cannot lend you my ebook without being wholly in the realm of copyright. If copyright is still about broadening education and learning, perhaps rights of lending in a digital age need to be better protected against claims of infringement?
It is not as if the situation works particularly well in an analogue world, though — you may sell the DVD on which a film was distributed, and you clearly no longer have possession of that particular data carrier, but the triviality with which the content of that DVD were ripped to a hard drive, transcoded and put on your iPad would mean that, whilst the rightsholders could be sure that you no longer had possession of that DVD, they could not be at all sure that you had not retained a copy of the content.
I rather suspect that Blockbusters and the like only exist still because people rent a new release, rip it, and then take the DVD back to the shop...
There was a practice which was common in the early days of PCs. You (not me, obviously :-))might buy a game - then often stored on a cassette, copy it and sabotage the orignal. Cue a return to the shop with the claim 'it doesn't work'.
ReplyDeleteSuch practices tended to happen on a fairly small scale and the Internet clearly creates much greater vulnerabilities. Somehow, though, there needs to be a solution to avoid the situation where many of us have hundred's of pounds worth of music on our computers and cannot sell it on.
ReplyDeleteYou (not me, obviously :-))might buy a game - then often stored on a cassette, copy it and sabotage the orignal. Cue a return to the shop with the claim 'it doesn't work'.
The sad corollary of this is that, when a computer game does not work on a particular system, returning it for a refund can be a real challenge. I helped a friend a few years back, who was trying to return a game to a supermarket — the game kept on bringing up error screens on his computer. Sainsbury's insisted that copyright law prevented them from refunding him, on the basis that he could have copied the game — he could only have another copy (which, given the programming, would not make the slightest difference in whether it worked or not), and keep bringing it back until he was fed up of doing so. Not really the customer service one might have expected, and certainly not a reasonable interpretation of any provision of copyright law, but I would expect that this kind of challenge, returning genuinely faulty digital products, to just get worse.
Somehow, though, there needs to be a solution to avoid the situation where many of us have hundred's of pounds worth of music on our computers and cannot sell it on.
The cynic in me might see the future being more akin to LoveFilm or Spotify — a monthly subscription, allowing you to stream, perhaps even download, as much as you like, but it all gets revoked when you stop paying. Make the model far less like today, in which people, not entirely unreasonably, think that they are purchasing "the music" rather than merely obtaining a personal licence for certain acts, by making it clear it's being rented. DVDs, CDs and vinyl will be relics, associated with the time when companies foolishly distributed their content in a way which effectively relinquished their control over it.
It can go too far, of course. The library kindly ordered a copy of a book I was looking to read, and I'd asked for a digital copy, the plan being to read it on my iPad. The publisher has supplied a copy which can be read online, not marked up or annotated, or else permits the printing / downloading of 10 pages at a time — for a book with over 400 pages in it. This rather infuriates me, and makes me think that finding a copy somewhere on the web would not be such a bad thing after all...