We introduce the term ebook copyright in order to make several observations about copyright law and the issues that have to be addressed in the electronic world that differ from the paper world for which copyright law was actually developed.

We should mention that we are convinced by the arguments that won the day when today’ s copyright law were enacted through the Berne Convention. These included provisions to effectively prevent any organization from being able to obtain control over the access to information, and, in particular, to facilitate analysis of published works, the ability to quote extracts of published work for the purpose of criticism (please to remember that criticism is not compelled to be negative – although the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives the first meaning as, “The action of criticizing, or passing (esp. unfavourable) judgement upon the qualities of anything: fault finding. (1607)”).

As copyright law currently stands, there is precisely no difference between a written work that is on paper and one that is in what’ s called a ‘dematerialized form’ or in other words an ebook. (Dematerialized is a posh word that is used to mean it is in a magnetic form. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary tells us, “To deprive of material character or qualities (1807)”).

So ebook copyright is no different from normal copyright, in fact the two things are identical.

But is that appropriate?

Copyright law includes a number of requirements, such as fair use, that allow the extraction of, by general consent, 5% of the material. In an age where the only way to extract material was to sit down and write it out, longhand (a technical skill, something that would likely defeat the current school generation) it really did not matter that the law allowed you to copy parts of a work.

However, with a computer, it requires little, if any effort, to get 20 people to copy 5% of a work, perfectly legally, and BINGO, the whole work has been copied and can be trivially reproduced all over the Internet.

And that’s the big flaw with the copyright concept in current law. It is based on what is now an anachronism, an outdated approach that fails completely to respond to the realities of the digital age. Because much of copyright law comes from an age where it was difficult and slow to make a copy of something, and difficult and slow to publish.

Today, thanks to the Internet, copying and publishing are entirely trivial activities, and there is little, if any, protection available for ebook copyright.

To give you some rather curious examples, we are aware of a document that was made publicly available for free use from the web site of which was subsequently being sold elsewhere as a consultancy report, and of summaries of books being sold in addition to the books themselves, despite the authors having provided them free gratis as advertising material. In both cases the originator of the material was receiving nothing although the copyright was self-evidently theirs.

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