I don’t follow Harry Potter; I haven’t read any of the books. Apparently there are quite a few fans. The latest book is ready to be sold, but isn’t supposed to hit the market until 12:01 am on Saturday, July 16th. Not even book reviewers get to see it before then. It’s a clever gimmick and I’m impressed by the efforts the publisher took to keep the books from getting out too soon.<\/p>\n
However, it didn’t work. A store near Vancouver accidentally sold 14 copies before they realized their error. It was a supermarket, not a bookstore, so I can understand the oversight. I imagine somebody was just putting the stock out and didn’t know about this whole shroud of secrecy. Once they realized what happened, they took the rest of the books off the shelf.<\/p>\n
Oops. An honest mistake. Oh well. Let’s just hope none of those 14 people work for the newspaper.<\/p>\n
That was not the reaction of the publisher. Instead, they got the Supreme Court of British Columbia to grant an injunction against the buyers to prevent them from reading the books. Yes, that’s right. They are not allowed to read the books before the date allowed by the publisher.<\/p>\n
What!? How can a judge get away with that kind of an order? The buyers didn’t violate a contract with the publisher. They just walked into a store, bought a book, and brought it home.<\/p>\n
According to the article<\/a> I read, the author’s agent said:<\/p>\n The fact is that this is property that should not have been in their possession. Copyright holders are entitled to protect their work. If the content of the book is confidential until July 16, which it is, why shouldn\u2019t someone who has the physical book be prevented from reading it and thereby obtaining the confidential information? How they came to have access to the book is immaterial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s bunk. Copyright law governs exactly one thing: the right to copy. That’s why it’s called copyright. It isn’t the right to read. The buyers can’t copy the book, but they can read it. And they can talk about it. And they can write reviews of it. And they can sell or rent or lend the book to others. The only right reserved for the publisher is the right to copy.<\/p>\n Don’t read the next paragraph. I hereby declare it to be confidential until after my death.<\/p>\n Whatever happened to good old property rights? The US Supreme Court now allows the rich to seize property from the poor<\/a>. It’s illegal to buy a DVD player that would let you edit the movies you buy. And now in Canada you can’t read your own books until the publisher says so. If this keeps up, I may have to start agreeing with Richard Stallman<\/a>.<\/p>\n Update:<\/strong> I tried to submit that article to Slashdot<\/a>, but was swiftly rejected. However, when I emailed Richard Stallman to bring it to his attention, he put it on his home page<\/a>! (Later moved to its own page<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t follow Harry Potter; I haven’t read any of the books. Apparently there are quite a few fans. The latest book is ready to be sold, but isn’t supposed to hit the market until 12:01 am on Saturday, July 16th. Not even book reviewers get to see it before then. It’s a clever gimmick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-citizen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}