Ruben Leote Mendes skrev: The directive doesn't mention anything about reverse engineering, so it should still be legal.The way I see it you can reverse engineer, for instance,the Adobe e-book format and write your own program that _creates_copy protected e-books (*). What you cannot do is write a program to remove the copy protection.
Quoting Anders Lindback anders@igiro.se:
You cant make a competing product using GPL. If you make a viewer you are then in violation and will have to spend time in jail. The only way for you to view the e-book is by buying the e-book viewer.
By controlling the format they would get a monopoly in the market.
Yes but only in the maket of "their own copyright ebooks". Anyone reading one of these books without a license is breaking existing copyright law. The new law makes helping somebodyelse to do so, an offence.
The real solution is FDL/GPL ebooks. Thats why we have the Nupedia free-encyclopedia in the GNU project, see www.nupedia.com
One good starting point for free-ebooks is to get many schools and universities to collaborate in producing teaching notes under the FDL. Nupedia provides a framework and a team to help do this. I urge those of you at universities to look for accademics of all disciplines willing to do this. It would take a very small percentage of accademics in each discipline to produce a set of texts better than could be written in any single institution.
When it comes to network communication protocols incorporating "licence verification"/"intelectual property management" do we want or need to help people disregard copyright? Surely if someone wishes to use a non-free program they must accept the consequences of doing so. If a prorietary software company tries to use this as an excuse to prevent networking with free operating systems then they are in breach of monopoly law.
Rather we should use this tightening of the copyright noose to emphasise the importance of freedom and copyleft for the general public.
Nick Hockings
Nick Hockings
Nick Hockings s96121272@op.up.ac.za schrieb/wrote:
Yes but only in the maket of "their own copyright ebooks". Anyone reading one of these books without a license is breaking existing copyright law.
Huh? Reading a book is typically none of the author's exclusive rights, you I don't need a license to read it.
What you need a license for is creating verbatim copies and offering/selling it to the public (unless there is an exception granted by Copyright law).
Claus
Huh? Reading a book is typically none of the author's exclusive rights, you I don't need a license to read it.
That's what I thought until I tried selling a book to a secondhand book shop once. They told me the edition I had was still being sold new, so they would not be allowed to sell it. (This was a secondhand only shop.)
I have several times seen books with notices that expressedly forbid selling them onwards, and video cassettes often carry a notice that prohibits showing them "in public" citing clubs, schools, and places of work as "in public".
This aspect of copyright is often disregarded by the public and vendors who have nothing to gain from it, but then many copies of MS products are used without licenses.
Nick Hockings
s96121272@op.up.ac.za, s96121272@tuks.co.za, nickh@nupedia.com
Huh? Reading a book is typically none of the author's exclusive rights, you I don't need a license to read it.
Nick Hockings:
That's what I thought until I tried selling a book to a secondhand book shop once. They told me the edition I had was still being sold new, so they would not be allowed to sell it. (This was a secondhand only shop.)
Probably this is part of their commercial license. Like bakers can't sell computers because they are not authorized to. It is not a matter of copyright, fair use, or whatever. It's probabily just a local rule to "prevent massive damage to the publishers". You can still resell you book, but no commercial organization is allowed to help you doing so.
I have several times seen books with notices that expressedly forbid selling them onwards, and video cassettes often carry a notice that prohibits showing them "in public" citing clubs, schools, and places of work as "in public".
That's part of copyright law. Public performance is an exclusive right of the author and you need authorization to do that. At least according to Italian law.
/alessandro, not a lawyer