Monday, June 21, 2010

Ebooks

If you cant tell by multiple posts in a single day, im at uni and avoiding actual work.

Ebooks, i've been looking up book piracy and people are talking about availability and cost and ease of piracy. they talk about how piracy is a bad thing.

i think the issue lies in IP (intelectual property). the concept that something physical should be paid for (wouldnt steal a handbag) but non-physical can be got for free(movie piracy is stealing (something that im not sure i agree with)).

I can borrow any book from my local library (yes any book, if they dont have it i can request they purchase it) for free.

so its hard to imagine piracy is something different. EXCEPT... Libraries pay for their book. so someone has paid for the IP.

What happens if my memory is VERY good (its good, just not photographi) and i could reproduce the work verbatim? is the reproduction piracy? The NGV seems to think so, your not allowed to take photo's of the works, or sketch them either (i had a project from a uni subject where i was supposed to do that but got told off in the gallery).

Who owns my experiance of someone elses IP? if i experiance it, then attempt to reproduce it, its my interpretation of their IP?

What happens when its a technological reproduction? is it different? there is no interpretation in that case. its plagerism if you copy word for word, an assignment if you reword it...

1 comment:

Fodder said...

I think if you reproduce something from memory it isn't strictly piracy until you distribute it. Or something like that. You have to have paid for the original in the first place. Kinda like if you make a copy of a game you already have, it's OK (for back-up purposes), but if you copy games to distribute, then it's piracy.

I guess that's why patents have to be so specific. It's entirely possible (but extremely unlikely) that someone could come up with the Harry Potter series entirely on their own, and that's not piracy (so long as they can prove they had no exposure to the original Harry Potter books). Although in that case, they'd still make no money, since even if it wasn't a direct copy, people would still think it's a rip-off, so what's the point?