News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Right to Read (1997). Parent comment

Re:The Right to Read (1997) by est31 on Friday October 23, 2020 @06:03PM (#24874772)
That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Right to Read (1997) by titanomachy on Friday October 23, 2020 @07:08PM (#24875342)
Makes sense. Copyright before digital goods seemed to strike a pretty acceptable balance. I can't mass-produce and sell a textbook that someone else owns the copyright to, but I can give it to my friend who's taking the class after me. The author makes a living, and purchasers gain a reasonable set of rights.

How do we get to a digital analogue of this? The physical-book copyright system probably wouldn't work well if everyone had a printing press and unlimited free paper, which is effectively what computers have given us.

Or maybe it would work fine. It's trivially easy (although maybe not legal) for me to download DRM-free copies of most ebooks that I want to read, and I still pay for them. Maybe enough people think that way that authors would still make a living.

[ Parent | on HN ]