hello, i had a question. in the real world with physical books, i thought it is not illegal to sell a book you don't have copyright to but that you bought and it is also legal to give your friends the book if you don't want it anymore. ex: you bought a book for college study, finished the class then sell the book. So my question is this. Are e-books treated differently? what if you bought the Rich Jerk and finished reading it, then sent it to your friend, you sent him your only version and didn't ever copy the rich jerk content on your hard drive. that doesn't seem too different from the real life example. are e-books and real books treated differently?
Interesting question, did you agree to anything when you bought the book? If not it would seem that you own one right to the book and you should be able to sell it. Sell 2 and you are now distributing something you don't own. IMHO
This is a can of worms. While I would agree that once you buy it you can eat it, print it, burn it, read it, give it away or sell it like you would a crib after your children have outgrown it. But, I do know of folks who have posted just this kind of sale on ebay and been quickly notified that they are violating the authors rights. And ebay pulled the sale. I think legally, it would be a hard case to make. Actually, for several reasons. How many times have you seen any sort of warning BEFORE you bought an ebook? One stating that you had absolutely no rights whatsoever. I've never seen something like that, and I've been buying them for years. Granted, there are sometimes "read me" text files saying what you can and can't do, as far as resell rights, give away rights, etc. But so many ebooks get passed around and sold by so many re-re-re-re-re-sellers that there is no guarantee that what you see in that text file is what the author originally said. Any one (or more) of the folks along the line could have easily edited that file giving you Private Label Rights to a book that was never intended to have them. Then, with some books, once you open them, there is a sometimes entirely different set of conditions that you must assume were put there by the real author, but even locked and passworded pdf files can be opened and edited, so even there you cannot be sure. But, assuming the conditions at the beginning of the book are the real deal, you have no way of knowing what they are before you buy the book, so you could argue before a judge that you only found out after making the purchase and you would not have bought the book - had you known. And since the author did not make his restriction perfectly clear before making the sale, you were within your rights to sell it, just as you would an printed book you had ever owned. I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice. But, I'd be willing to go head to head with any author who tried to enforce something like that.
I think you are fine under the circumstances you posted. http://www.digitalsecrets.net/secrets/Copyright.html
thanks for the replies everyone, just to clarify i haven't bought the rich jerk and i haven't sent any e-books that i didn't have resell rights to, to anyone. i was just curious about the laws
The laws are different in every country. In Canada, you're allowed to make a copy of something you already own for personal use and that's why we're essentially immune from the RIAA when it comes to dl'ing songs as individuals. The RIAA can't prove what we have legal rights to and what we don't. With that said, the absense of a license does not grant you defacto copyright to the document to do whatever you want with (resell, give away, etc...). Whether you can physically give away a copyrighted electronic work to a friend is a grey area at best (even if you do delete it from your hard drive). The odds of anyone ever coming after you would be small at best anyway.