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Currently all over the blogs: think tank calls for ‘private right to copy’. If you didn’t know already, every time you rip a CD to your computer, and then copy that MP3 to your portable player, you’re breaking several copyright laws. Clearly these laws are out of date and ineffectual, but that doesn’t stop the various industry bodies involved from pushing to tighten them up rather than rewrite them.

The news now, of course, is all about music, but the same arguments apply to books. Soon, ebooks will allow you to ‘rip’ your books to other portable devices, or back them up on a secure hard drive. Current copyright law forbids this, but it can’t possibly stay that way. At the moment, only one industry, music, is really fighting this, but film and TV are quickly catching up, and books will follow. Will the smart publishers find new and innovative ways to sell their books, or will they fight the same, desperate, hopeless rearguard action as the other entertainment industries? My money is on the latter, but it leaves room for some interesting projects in the intervening space.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 12:40 pm and is tagged with News, Rights, eBooks. Here's a permanent link to this post, and the RSS feed for the comments. You can leave a comment below, or trackback from your own site.