No such thing as ownership when it's an e-book

No such thing as ownership when it's an e-book

Date

The Sydney Morning Herald, November 3, 2012

Linda Morris

Features write

BUYERS of e-books may have no more legal rights than ''tenant farmers'', it has emerged, following the case of a Kindle user whose digital library was wiped by Amazon.

The fine print in online agreements inserted at the behest of publishers to protect authors' copyright licenses readers to the digital files but does not grant ''tangible'' ownership, as with any hard copy book.

These conditional e-book licences are policed and can be revoked at the discretion of the e-book retailer as a Norwegian Kindle customer discovered when in October they allegedly violated Amazon's terms and conditions and had their digital library deleted, then reinstated.

No right to read ... Amazon removed George Orwell'sAnimal Farm from their customer's kindles.

Readers are also physically prevented from transferring content to friends and immediate family or between devices by encryption software called Digital Rights Management, devised to protect a creator's copyright from piracy and prevent buyers from on-selling the digital file for profit.

Advertisement

The case of ''repossession'' has been seized on by the copyright activist and Canadian science writer Cory Doctorow, who sells DMR-free copies of his own books to argue for unshackled ownership of e-books. 

On his blog spot Boing Boing, Doctorow said digital licensing deals circumvented the right for books to be transferred, sold or bequeathed to another person, rendering the reader a mere ''tenant farmer''.

Readers' limited rights are one of the main pitfalls with e-books as sold by some retailers, the president of the Australian Booksellers Association, Jon Page, said.

''This is not the first time Amazon has done something like this. They famously removed George Orwell's 1984 from everybody's Kindles when they discovered they didn't have the rights to sell the e-book. This is very easy for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google to do because they force their customers to store e-book purchases in their walled garden or cloud through their devices and apps."

Retailers like Kobo and ReadCloud make it easier for customers to download e-book files to their computer so they can keep a copy of the digital file on their own system, Page said. ''But it does highlight the fact that e-books are software and that you are purchasing a licence to read - a licence that can be revoked.''

''The inability to legally on-sell or on-distribute digital products may be something which consumers consider in determining whether to purchase a hard copy or a digital product - this will apply to books, but also to products such as CDs.''

Ultimately the convenience of digital reading outweighed most people's concerns, said Joel Naoum, the publisher of the Australian digital-only imprint Momentum.