[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...