Hacker News Reader

Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

It’s not the mass that matters. It’s the medium. You only own the medium, not the content.

This was true of physical media (books, phonographs, etc.) and is true of downloaded media. You might own a paper copy of your favorite book, but you don’t own its words, and the law prohibits you from making a copy without the owner’s permission. You can transfer the medium to someone else, but you can’t preserve the content for yourself. If the book is destroyed in a fire, you must buy a new copy.

Similarly, you might own your Kindle, but you don’t own the content in it. You can read the content, but you can’t copy it.But there’s a minor advantage of a digital license: if your Kindle is destroyed in a fire, the publisher allows you to read-download the content to a new device.

View on HN

> the law prohibits you from making a copy without the owner’s permission. You can transfer the medium to someone else, but you can’t preserve the content for yourself.

In theory, the law only applies to distribution. Also, fair use and fair dealing exist in multiple jurisdictions, which includes personal-only usage. A company would have a hard time achieving a legal judgement against you for the mere act of copying a book. Distributing it? Sure.

Copyright law explicitly allows for backups, at least in the US, which is where most of the companies exhibiting this anti-ownership behavior are located and thus bound by US law, especially when the consumer is also US.

Owning a license means nothing when the other party to the license can revoke it at any time without further consideration.

As someone who holds an IP certificate and JD diploma from a respected law school, I can tell you that most of what you’re saying is utterly false. There are some exceptions carved out by the Library of Congress to the DMCA, but I would advise you to educate yourself before posting further on the subject. You’re right that violation doesn’t necessarily lead to prosecution and liability—people break the law all the time without being prosecuted for it—but nevertheless, you risk getting yourself into hot water if you violate another’s rights.

If you extract a transcript of a youtube video and save that file for use later is that a copyright violation?

Quite honestly and frankly, I don't consider the DMCA to be just law. Regardless of that view, personal backups are absolutely allowed under copyright law. The DMCA only criminalizes the cracking of "effective" access control, as far as I know.

It's one thing to believe a law to be unjust. It's another to make false claims about what the law is.

> Regardless of that view, personal backups are absolutely allowed under copyright law

Under which section of the Copyright Act? Under which court ruling?

Keep in mind that "fair use" is a legal doctrine that is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not an absolute shield a defendant can raise as an impenetrable defense. No court has ever held that a licensee can, without exception, make a copy of a protected work as a backup.

Where are you getting this bogus information from?

Personal backups are at least allowed for software, per 17 USC 117, and I'm not aware that the DMCA altered that, it only added the nonsense about "effective access control" which can legally be as weak as ROT13. Perhaps not for non-software media. Copyright has been broken for decades, however. It's tilted away from the average person and towards big moneyed copyright holders, who vacuum up every IP they can.

Yes, they are allowed for software. But not for e-books--which are the subject of this conversation--or for other copyrighted works.

Personally, I'd love to see the jury that would convict someone when all they did was remove DRM for their own personal use/backup and never distributed it.

Oh, I don’t think that would actually happen. People violate the law all the time and nothing happens.

Regardless, people should be aware of what the law is. It’s a different choice to decide to violate the law and take one’s chances than it is to rest comfortably knowing that something is entirely within their rights.

How are ebooks not “software”, in the sense that they’re bits that instruct a computer to display particular information, when interpreted by something that understands them? If ePub or the Kindle format were defined in hardware-the same way that certain video or audio codecs are-no one could realistically argue that they’re not software, since after all the CPU literally knows how to process them.

And-also-yes, the copyright scam is pretty much over. The marginal cost of another copy is zero, “for a limited time” means “forever minus a day”, and our culture is being stolen from us via inability to preserve it, use it later if we did acquire it “legitimately” but someone no longer feels like running their “permission to have that” servers later, and by being dynamically retconned such that “bad things” are dynamically edited out and, if you remember that they existed, you’re wrong (and getting gaslit over it).

It was basically a “social contract” that, while not everyone agreed with, they mostly admitted “existed”. Not so much now.

If you actually tried this in court, a judge would go “uh huh...anyway...” and move on. A judge is highly unlikely to create a novel interpretation of an ebook as a software program for exceptional purposes—even if it has instructions in it—because acting as a typical software program is not its primary purpose.

Also, the right of first sale exists for physical copies. This means for a physical book you are actually allowed to distribute the content as long as you do not retain a copy yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com