Objections Overruled

[Crabcake Johnny]

No consent is needed. If I want to sell 20 CDs in Ebay that's perfectly legal. There is no action any of those artists can take.

That's different, however, than what Napster was doing. There is indeed a line but it's a gray one.

Technically it's illegal for me to purchase a PPV sporting event and invite 10 friends over, but let's get real.

 

[VolAgent]

Technically it's illegal for me to purchase a PPV sporting event and invite 10 friends over, but let's get real.

I thought the line was when you started charging them to come over, or sold them drinks and food while they were there?

 

[somarco]

Technically it's illegal for me to purchase a PPV sporting event and invite 10 friends over,

I believe there is nothing wrong unless you are charging them to watch along with you.

Same would apply if you invited friends over to view the Playboy Channel.

 

[arnguy]

Are we not supposed to go to the library and check out music CDs and download them to out iPods?
Good thing I didn't do that a bunch of times.

You're lucky, Scott. There are at least two instances where people downloading music were hit with enormous judgments! The industry did that to make examples of them to discourage the practice.

 

[Newby]

You're lucky, Scott. There are at least two instances where people downloading music were hit with enormous judgments! The industry did that to make examples of them to discourage the practice.

You are talking about Internet file sharing sites. I'm talking about checking out CDs at the library. I don't burn those CDs to my iPod because that would be wrong.

 

[arnguy]

Yep, you're right, Scott. My bad.

 

[Guest]

It's not 1908 any longer and this is the latest:

No publication or registration in the Copyright Office is required to secure copyright. Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created in a fixed or tangible form (notated or recorded). In other words, anything written in a fixed form such as an ebook is automatically copyrighted.

However, ownership of an ebook does not give the possessor the ebook copyright. For example if you download an ebook, you do not have the ebook copyright. Only the author of that book or someone who has been given rights by the author has that ebook copyright.

Wikipedia is not a reliable or trusted source, just ask schools if they allow students to use it for research.

It's covered under the "First-Sale Doctine of 1908" under the United States Code (17 USC 109) which was codified in 1976.

Rick is correct, once he has purchased a copy, the copyright of the author is transferred to the buyer of the copy and the buyer may freely distribute his copy(s).

Copyright owners right to control the "change of ownership" of a particular copy ends once the ownership of that copy has passed to someone else, as long as the copy itself is not an infringed copy.

First-sale doctrine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PS - this thread sucks!

@ AL:

That's incorrect Al, this is the digital domain we're talking about and you cannot resell or redistribute any materials without the rights to do so. And "fair use" is up to 5% of the book, that's exactly what allows Google to post up a chapter of any book without consent.

Also you cannot sell your copy of MS Office legally, that's why they have password protection to where you can only use it for up to three computers, to prevent reselling or redistributing their product because they lose money that way.

[quote=al3;364840]Rick owns a copy of the book (in PDF format.) He can loan it out, give it away, or sell his copy to anyone he wishes.

He can't make multiple copies and loan, give, or sell them.

Under the so-called "fair use" provisions, Rick can even publish part of the book... but "fair use" is a very murky area of law and has basically been applied to using quotations of a work for review purposes or for inclusion in other works as a reference.

The big issue in copyright law now is Google's insistence that they can publish any part of a book without permission under the "fair use" provision. I've not kept up with the latest court rulings. One issue is that Google claimed the publishers have to opt OUT while publishers claim that they must opt IN. I'm not sure where the issue stands now.

Most small publishers like myself don't spend much time on the issue. This is more of a concern to the larger NY houses.

Al
My publishing website (rather dormant the past 2 years)[/quote]

@Somarco:

Yes two people can sing the same song but they must pay royalties if it is NOT in the public domain. For example you can record "happy birthday" and sell it and keep all of the money for yourself, however, if you want to do a cover version of Frank Sinatra's My Way, you can do that BUT you'll have to pay a portion of the profits to the Paul Anka (who bought the rights and rewrote it) because he still owns the rights to it.

Then two people can't sing the same song at the same time without being in violation.
.

The bottom line is this:

I still sell the book and I own the rights to it therefore if I wanted to pursue an infringement lawsuit I can, based on what would be categorized below.

Damages: Actual and Statutory

The remedy of choice for most aggrieved copyright holders is money. Courts can go about awarding monetary damages in two ways: actual or statutory.

Actual Damages
Actual damages are on losses actually incurred such as lost sales, lost value of the copyright and so forth. You must prove you incurred them. This can be messy, since if you knew what they were, they wouldn't be "lost."

Statutory Damages
Statutory damages need not be specifically proved. Section 504 of the 1976 Copyright Act provides:

F]or all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $500 or more than $20,000 as the court considers just.

 

[VolAgent]

Rob, you're confused about what copyright is, and you're mixing up various concepts.

Copyright gives the author permission to control the copying of the material. And you are right, the mere act of publishing establishes the copyright. Also, you are correct in that the copyright does not transfer with a sell of a copy.

Also, most of the examples you are using are items covered by a license that is controlling, not the copyright. When you purchase MS Office, you are purchasing a license to use the product. That is what prevents reselling an existing copy. Also, with electronic media, it is basically impossible to transfer an existing copy. Instead, a new copy is generally created in the process. That is why licenses are needed to control intellectual property in electronic media, copyright is better suited for physical media. Otherwise I could buy a copy of MS Office and use it to my heart's content. Once I got tired of it, I could then freely resell it. I would be required to delete any other copies, but who is to say that happened?

So, if I have a physical copy of your book, I can lend it to whom ever I wish, or I can resell that copy whenever, to whom ever, and for whatever price I wish. I have not violated your copyright. If it is an electronic copy, then there is probably a license that dictates how I can use, share or resell the product.

Next time you think you can control the resell of a physical copy of your book, stop into a used bookstore. Do you really think publishers would allow these shops to exist if they could stop it?

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

I can go to Ebay and see countless thousands of books, cd, dvd's, etc...being sold. If copyright was an issue then those kinds of auctions would have been shut down.

Ebay's a pretty good example of what you can and can't sell and they follow the laws pretty rigorously. Try to post an illegal item for auction. So the bottom line is if reselling a book was not allowed, it would be a TOS violation on Ebay.

More to the point here, look at the Huffington Post. I'd read this recently scathing article regarding how Bill Keller regrading the "aggregation" of journalism. All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate - NYTimes.com

If you don't know, most of what Huffington does is re-post the work of other journalists. What that does is drive traffic...and ultimately ad revenue away from the sites of origin and redirects it to Huffington.

Illegal? Nope. Fair use. Huffington can take any article written anywhere on the net and re-post it on her site as long as the author is given full credit.

"Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model."

 

[STIBROKER]

Tell me......try to sell a few body parts and they get all uppity....

Ebay's a pretty good example of what you can and can't sell and they follow the laws pretty rigorously.