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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

How long until books come with TOS, then?

Damn now im looking forward to the day when books end up like physical game disks, where somehow you're not buying the book just a license to it, what a boring dystopia this is lol

As usual, Stallman already predicted this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Darryl W. Perry predicted this: https://www.c-span.org/clip/road-to-the-white-house-2016/use...

Have you ever heard of Amazon? Kindle?

Common for college textbooks to have some digital-only component accessed with a one-time key inside the cover. Sometimes time-limited to a single semester.

Many of them do already and have for decades

Can you please provide a specific example?

Pick up nearly any published book. Turn to the ~3rd page. There will be either a whole page, or sometimes the second half of a page, dedicated to a copyright notice. Very nearly every published book I've ever seen has that identical page. This isn't a recent thing. I grabbed my copy of Diaspora by Greg Egan and opposite the table of contents is a page that starts like this:

First Night Shade Books edition 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, blah blah (it felt very ironic to transcribe that bit in particular to make this point)

This is what I meant.

Standard copyright boilerplate. Not terms of service distinct from copyright, which is the subject of this thread.

If you read the whole copyright page of a book and come away with the conclusion that it's anything but terms of use for the book, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

The thread is about terms of use separate from copyright law. It is the whole premise.

You do not have a contract with the publishers of the book. They are visibly asserting their copyright to deter any defense of ignorance or implied grant of rights to an infringer; but that's not a contract, you did not agree to it before purchasing, there are no contractual terms (scope, duration, faults and compensation, resolution etc.) and nothing in it exceeds the limits the copyright law already sets.

For example, never will you see printed in a book something like "this book is for the exclusive use of the purchaser and you cannot lend, resale or otherwise make available to other parties" - if such a thing was possible, like most software EULAs do, publishers would be all over it.

I suspect first-sale doctrine doesn’t allow such.

However, if content is “licensed” instead of “sold” …

They kind of do. There's usually a big scary notice on the imprint page scolding you for even thinking about piracy

We are talking of TOS independent of copyright law.

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