Re:Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live
by DanielBMarkham on Thursday December 30, 2010 @05:16PM
(#2053753)
Here's what I think, for what it's worth.
There's an entire democratic process to change what people expect out of their relationship to government. It involves political parties, speeches, elections, debates, making compromises with the opposing party, and finally resolution.
What we find over and over again is that when folks try to just use the courts and the legal system to implement change, it always results in a lot of friction. There are still people mad in the States about Roe v. Wade, and that was many decades ago.
So the way things change makes a difference. Perhaps the lawyers can browbeat the society into changing. I kind of doubt it -- especially for something this big.
Theoretically yes, anything is possible. We could easily live in a world where publishers charge many times for the same material based on all sorts of random factors like format, time of use, etc. But in reality I just don't see a change of the magnitude taking place without all of the political paraphernalia associated with such changes, no matter how many people they stick in jail or sue.
It's a shame, because just like in the net neutrality issue, the companies could have avoided this by using common sense in their licensing and distribution policies, instead of fixating on the letter of the law (which nobody cared about anyway until mp3s came along)
The minute my grandma can't treat an ebook like she did her old paperbacks the publishers have lost the game. It might be another hundred years (so it wouldn't matter to the publishers and probably be considered by them a "win"), but the laws will eventually catch up to where the people are.
I imagine this will play out like pot legalization -- long and difficult, with a generation of politicians having to pass from the scene before the posturing stops and common sense takes hold.
There's an entire democratic process to change what people expect out of their relationship to government. It involves political parties, speeches, elections, debates, making compromises with the opposing party, and finally resolution.
What we find over and over again is that when folks try to just use the courts and the legal system to implement change, it always results in a lot of friction. There are still people mad in the States about Roe v. Wade, and that was many decades ago.
So the way things change makes a difference. Perhaps the lawyers can browbeat the society into changing. I kind of doubt it -- especially for something this big.
Theoretically yes, anything is possible. We could easily live in a world where publishers charge many times for the same material based on all sorts of random factors like format, time of use, etc. But in reality I just don't see a change of the magnitude taking place without all of the political paraphernalia associated with such changes, no matter how many people they stick in jail or sue.
It's a shame, because just like in the net neutrality issue, the companies could have avoided this by using common sense in their licensing and distribution policies, instead of fixating on the letter of the law (which nobody cared about anyway until mp3s came along)
The minute my grandma can't treat an ebook like she did her old paperbacks the publishers have lost the game. It might be another hundred years (so it wouldn't matter to the publishers and probably be considered by them a "win"), but the laws will eventually catch up to where the people are.
I imagine this will play out like pot legalization -- long and difficult, with a generation of politicians having to pass from the scene before the posturing stops and common sense takes hold.