Why Your e-Books Are No Longer Yours

Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the question: when you "buy" "content" for Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying a book? If the latter, then the first sale doctrine, which lets you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay, would apply. Some law students at Columbia took a swing at the question and Gizmodo reprints the "surprisingly readable" legal summary. Short answer: those restrictive licenses may very well be legal, and even if you had rights under the first sale doctrine, you might only be able to resell or give away your Kindle — not a copy of the work.

Give it time

[Anonymous Coward]

"Surprisingly readable" because the authors ain't actually lawyers yet.

Re:I got a better lawyer^Widea

[popo]

Until someone develops an AdBlock for eBooks.

I just removed AdBlock from my system for exactly this reason. One can't bitch about draconian efforts to extract money from consumers, and then circumvent the one last option left to content producers: ad revenue.

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