Interesting Links for 08-06-2015

[andrewducker]

• Some Gluten-free products recalled by Asda, Sainsbury's and Waitrose
  • (tags: gluten viaJackie )
• A guide to actor who appear in borh Game of Thrones and Doctor Who
  • (tags: drwho gameofthrones actors )
• The Independent’s anti-vaccine scaremongering
  • (tags: vaccination media newspapers )
• The Sad Puppies in Their Own Words
  • (tags: fandom )
• What's really going

Comments

[kalimac]

The profoundly incorrect statement in the e-book dilemma discussion is the comment that goes, "had I scanned and OCR’d my own physical copies, then the e-books I created would be the result of format shifting, which has been formally recognised as legal in the UK. Given that the copies I downloaded are essentially the same as the ones I would have made in this scenario, it would ridiculous to say that everyone who wants an e-book copy of a book they own has to go through the time-consuming process of making their own copy, duplicating work that has already been done."

No, actually, the work involved is precisely the point. Prior to e-books and photocopiers, if you wanted an extra copy of a book without acquiring one you had to type (or, earlier, hand-write) the entire thing out yourself. (And people did that!) But the effort involved meant there wasn't much of it, and copyright law is based on the assumption that this is so. Which is why first photocopiers, and now e-books have thrown the law for such a loop.

Article on the rise and fall of the Bee Gees is very interesting, despite the fact that, at least from the titles, I recognize precisely zero of the songs. There was a band called Hootie and the Blowfish which seems to have gone through something similar. At one point they were exceedingly popular, then suddenly it was the to court social death to admit that you liked them or ever had. Or such is the impression I got from reading about it.

[naath]

I have two different e-book moral dillemas:

With a physical book I can lend it to people (and I *do*) without them buying a copy. With an ecopy I can't do that really, that seems sad. (Of course if I lend a physical copy *I don't have it* while it is lent, but since I rarely re-read anything that's not much of a question)

With a physical book I can IMPORT US EDITIONS. I can't import US ebooks, not even if I WENT TO THE USA and BOUGHT A KINDLE and BOUGHT THE EBOOKS WHILST THERE because I do not have a US billing address on my credit card. Personally this makes me want to smack the publishing industry upside the head.

[simont]

No, actually, the work involved is precisely the point.

Well, sort of. That's a pragmatic point about enforcement tactics: as long as a given infringement is prohibitively hard work, there's no need for the government or any other interested party to put much effort into stopping people from doing it.

But it doesn't affect the question of whether it's right - a copyright infringement that cost you a lot of hard work is still illegal (even if practically speaking unlikely to be prosecuted), and a protected action (such as, under UK law, format-shifting) is still legal even if it was easy. There's no situation in which any action in this general area becomes right, either legally or morally, just because it was hard work. (Unless you count writing your own novel vs copying someone else's, I suppose! But that's not really in the same space.)