From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Fri Jan 03 2003 - 23:17:59 GMT-3
At 7:29 PM -0600 1/3/03, Michael Snyder wrote:
>When I take classes, the college book store sells me used, and buys back
>the same text books that year.
>
>I believe the laws on printed material are very clear on this subject.
Actually, no. The doctrines of "fair use" are complex enough to begin
with, and there is no universal sales contract for intellectual
property. What you describe is what is customary in the textbook
business.
>
>Otherwise imagine the college book publishers if they thought that they
>could license per student per year.
>
If you look at the entertainment/music business, they have some very
different theories. When they are demanding royalties for Boy Scouts
singing from the music publisher's book, even though the copyright on
the song itself may have expired, it's a rather cutthroat environment.
There are cases of professional sports leagues going after
neighborhood bars for showing the game-of-the-week and tying it to
some sort of "half price when the home team scores" deal. (I doubt
this would work for basketball. If you got a half-price beer for any
time the team scored, you'd not be awake to see the final score).
I happen to be extremely concerned about the attempts by the
entertainment industry to implement brute-force protections that may
hobble legitimate technology---the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is
a bad, bad piece of law. Yet it isn't enough for some -- there have
been serious proposals to have analog-to-digital converters stop
converting when they hear background noise that contains copyrighted
music, and the ADC's haven't been fed the license.
Training workbooks are small-volume items. Yes, the profit margin on
an individual sale is quite good, but the market is limited. While I
don't sell any such material, I can very well see the logic of the
training vendors in having tight use restrictions, comparable to
licensed software.
.
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