Companies should have the term "buying" forbidden if DRM is involved.
(This page http://www.jmanga.com/hoshi-no-samidare-the-lucifer-and-bisc... is filled with "buy" this and that)
(This page http://www.jmanga.com/hoshi-no-samidare-the-lucifer-and-bisc... is filled with "buy" this and that)
Before you derisively dismiss this, you might want to take a look at their response to the cellphone unlocking petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-unlocking-cel...
That being said, I don't view the cellphone response as particularly progressive. The way it parses for me is "we think your phone should be unlocked if you don't have a contract." It didn't address the criminalization of unlocking cellphones while under a contract. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'd love to hear if I am, but I've read it a few times and I can't find another way to read the response.
How about class-action lawsuits for fraudulent misrepresentations for businesses that use the word "buy" in deliberately deceptive ways?
And then one or two judges declare it "OK", and that's it.
And if it was likely to happen, wouldn't it happen anyway, even if there were new legislation involved?
In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.
At that point, you have to go after their backers. In this case its 10s of Japanese publishers, few of whom have US presences. Don't know the law there, but unless the publishers' lawyers were incompetent their liability is limited. I.e. an obvious way is to arrange a package deal to keep transaction costs low for jmanga to buy limited rights to publish derivative works as they did. On the other hand, if the publishers engaged in serious control over jmanga.com's operations there could be openings.
Given the foreign country aspect, Japan Inc. being very unfriendly towards lawsuits, and I suspect relatively small sales (their MVP wasn't particularly viable, and lots of people recognized the trap) I wouldn't expect anyone to try in this case. But I do wonder why no one has in previous cases like this, aside from avoiding going after behemoths like Microsoft when the potential payoff was probably very small (and e.g. Microsoft did offer a path to keep your songs, albeit at some quality loss ... and I can imagine a Microsoft lawyer asking a plaintiff "And you kept the volume turned up to 11? Let's get your hearing tested" :-).
After all, it's efforts that fail in the marketplace that are most likely to shut down; we probably need to wait until a big and for a while successful one goes down in flames....
But perhaps the court could at least issue an injuction requiring them to unlock the DRM, or find some alternative way of ensuring continued access to the goods they paid for irrespective of whether or not the company stays in business.
Going beyond that would be difficult and expensive. Certainly jmanga.com's licenses don't allow them to publish the content in other ways that would be accessible and yet limited and then there's practical matters, e.g. Amazon wouldn't likely play ball.
And then we come to the original problem I cited: there's no money to speak of to fund such difficult litigation. We're probably talking 8 figures minimum with all the expert witnesses needed, new case law to be forged, the foreign company angle, etc.
The one that clearly says they won't support unlocking cellphones under contract, and doesn't even address the outrage over criminal penalties?
"...neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation."
You could effectively ban DRM that depends on active servers or schemes like this where the content is always kept on theirs' by requiring them to post a bond sufficient to refund the customers who've been screwed. Not the full amount, but enough to compensate for value promised but not delivered. It would be essentially declaring it is not in the public interest to allow companies to play these games, but here's a mechanism if you're really determined.
Liability of some sort really needs to be established, and it would be wise for the companies playing these games to do something intelligent before extreme DRM becomes too toxic.
I don't think that matters. They're not in good faith selling ownership, because they're not selling ownership.
If ownership has changed hands, then the previous owner should not be allowed to retain control over the product. DRM, withholding of root passwords, forced updates, it really shouldn't matter. The owner should be the person of total control, and anyone interfering with that should be sent to court as a thief or intruder. This was after all the economic model in USA before DRM was invented.
It makes a weird kind of sense. I can sell the license to my physical copy of _Neuromancer_, but I cannot sell the contents (or claim to be the author) of _Neuromancer_.
1) Some books include a legal trick by adding a shrink wrap around the book. The claim is that by breaking such "seal", the owner of the book agrees to a legal binding contract (confusingly called a "License Agreement") with the book publisher. Such practice has a long history of being non-enforceable outside the United States, and a sketchy history within.
But you only have a limited licence to the contents. You can read them, under the Fair Use doctrine you could photocopy or otherwise use a few small excerpts to teach a class or use in your own writing, etc. etc., but you most certainly do not gain a licence to copy the whole book and give or sell copies of it, or to use this example, do the same with a derivative work like a translation.