[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Depends on what the license says in the first page of the book. It may actually disallow you ripping out pages. You don't own the book, you merely paid for a limited license to read it per the instructions provided in the license agreement. Anything else would be immoral.

[3036e4]

No, that is not how copyright works, at least not in this country, but probably not in many countries. You buy a book, not a license. Copyright luckily isn't an unlimited right to dictate exactly how a work is used.

Ebooks sadly are different. I only buy DRM-free ebooks that grant me rights similar to what always exists for printed books, but that sadly limits what ebooks I can buy quite significantly.

[kstrauser]

You cannot coerce me into believing that buying an ebook is any different than buying a physical copy. Either way I’m exchanging money for the right to possess a copy of it. Legal fictions be damned, if I pay for it, I own it, and can do whatever I want with it short of distributing copies of it to others.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business. I do not exchange money to possess a copy of it, but sometimes I have to wait three days while libgen.li is doing whatever the fuck it's doing (being DDOSed, having Russian FSB datamine the logs, downtime to have all 14 million epubs get their covers replaced with the fuzziest 141x296 cover image that's a bad scan of a worn out paperback printed in the early 1980s, etc).

Copyright is unfortunately like one of the supernatural demons. You draw the little chalk circle on the ground and voice the incantations, and you think you're in control. That it can't leave the circle. But once summoned, this demon does not go away, and it just ignores the circle... it's just a scribble in chalk. Then you run around gibbering forever, crying about how it should've worked, you should've been safe while ignoring that it's a demonic force hellbent on burning down the Library of Alexandria and plunging humanity into a new dark age. Reject copyright. You'll never get it to play nice. They always feel hungry, always trying to take more. Every book on the New York Times Book Review Notable 100 list is available for 4 minutes of your bandwidth. Every Hugo winner, every Pulitzer novel, ever Nobel winner, every trashy little magazine you liked to skim through when you had to go to the grocery store with mama as a kid, all the classics of antiquity, everything. They're right there, waiting for you.

[sneak]

> I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business.

Most people do not agree, in that they think arranging the magnetic fields in your drive to represent and store child pornography should be punishable.

It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Most people do not agree, in that they think arranging the magnetic fields in your drive to represent and store child pornography should be punishable.

I do not do that. Thus, the example is irrelevant. Though it might actually be a good example as to how people use excuses like that to violate others' liberty even when they're not engaged in that particular reprehensible activity. Even before you finished reading that sentence, the little "but you might" thought popped up in your head.

>It isn’t a stretch then to presume that storage of other types of data might also be proscribed.

I don't dispute that it is proscribed. I simply do not care. When copyright maximalists have to stoop to "what about child pornography" arguments, I think it is more than reasonable that people simply stop listening right at that point. Nothing else they say can or should ever matter.

[sneak]

I think you must have misunderstood me. I'm not a copyright maximalist, in fact I am against all copyrights and IP and even the existence of a state to enforce same.

I'm pointing out that under our current system, our society has banned storage of certain digital material. It is not inconsistent with our current system to expect other types of digital material to be banned similarly.

> I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business.

It's not just sequences of magnetic fields; it's what those magnetic fields represent that cause them to be legislated upon. Thus, your implied argument that you should be free to do whatever you wish simply because it's just magnetic fields on your own device (an argument I agree with 100%, fwiw) is not really a rebuttal in this case because our current system does not recognize or permit that right, and a majority of people in our society agree with that circumstance.

It's nothing whatsoever to do with what types of files you personally do or do not store. The CP example was simply an example of one type of banned magnetic field patterns. Another would be bulk stolen PII.

I actually agree with your viewpoint; but ours is a minority opinion that is not reflected in society or law. Even though there is no victim when a digital file is copied, a majority of people in our world do not want possession and distribution of certain files to be legal.

[3036e4]

It's because they managed to get DRM-circumvention into copyright laws in most countries, so they just have to put some kind of DRM in the ebook and then they can claim that any attempt to use the ebook outside of the official software is DRM-circumvention and therefore illegal, even if you are not necessarily infringing on any copyright per se.

[kstrauser]

Oh, I understand their arguments. I just wholly reject them as nonsensical. If I buy an ebook, I will happily strip the DRM so that I can read it on the device or app I choose, and I’m morally and ethically fine with that.

I use to rip DVDs so I could watch them on my laptop. Same idea here; same lack of moral conundrum. I wouldn’t share copies of those things outside my household, in the same way that I’ll let my kid read my physical books but I’m not scanning and sharing them on my website. But for my own personal use? Of course. I own those copies.

[trenchpilgrim]

This is not true - you have received a property right to the copy of the content and can legally alter or destroy it. A license in the book cannot override your property right.

You may encounter issues if you attempt to distribute the altered copy, but that's not at issue here.

[3036e4]

You can even cut out parts of the text to re-sell, which is exactly what press clipping services did for newspapers. No copies were made, so no copyright infringement (that simple logic was fine until someone managed to get DRM-circumvention added to copyright laws).

"The first press clipping agency in London was established in 1852 ... Early clipping services employed women to scan periodicals for mentions of specific names or terms. The marked periodicals were then cut out by men and pasted to dated slips. Women would then sort those slips and clippings to be sent to the services' clients".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_monitoring_service

[tzs]

Careful. It's not that simple in the US.

See Mirage Editions v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341 (1988) [1] and Lee v. A.R.T. Co., 125 F.3d 580 (1997) [2].

The first, in the 9th circuit, involved a company whose business was:

> 1) purchasing artwork prints or books including good quality artwork page prints therein; 2) gluing each individual print or page print onto a rectangular sheet of black plastic material exposing a narrow black margin around the print; 3) gluing the black sheet with print onto a major surface of a rectangular white ceramic tile; 4) applying a transparent plastic film over the print, black sheet and ceramic tile surface; and 5) offering the tile with artwork mounted thereon for sale in the retail market.

The appeals court found that this was a copyright infringement.

The second, in the 7th circuit, involved the same defendants who bought an artists' notecards and small lithographs from a retail art store and:

> mounted the works on ceramic tiles (covering the art with transparent epoxy resin in the process) and resold the tiles.

The 7th circuit found that this was not an infringement.

There were some differences in the cases, in particular in the 9th circuit case the defendant was buying art books and cutting out the pictures to mount and sell but in the second case they were buying individual notecards and lithographs to mount and sell.

As far as I know this has never reached the Supreme Court, and neither case has been overturned in its circuit by subsequent cases in that circuit, and so Mirage is still the law in the 9th and Lee still the law in the 7th. In other circuits there have been district court cases that dealt with this issue, but it has not reached their appellate courts.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/856...

[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/125...

[mnw21cam]

No, you absolutely own the book, but you have a licence for the information in it.

[ballenf]

Wouldn't the first sale doctrine override such terms in most cases?