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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

This 'of course you dont own it' is false. Compare with a book, which you can own. The law makes sure you stil can't distribute limitless copies, even if you own it. But you can inherit a book, lend it out, be sure it stays around after the vendor would rather take it back, even swatting flies as a purposes it wasn't ment for.

Licensing, and specifically the EULA, was popularized by Microsoft, to make sure you didn't get the rights on their software you have on a book. Would you tolerate a book with any of these: Disclaimer of warranty or fitness for purpose; Automatic revocation; Forbidding critique; Monitoring. Presumably you could license books instead of sell them, and add all anti-rights.

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It is not false, just books never had such a problem and so the license wasn't deemed necessary to put anywhere. You own the paper that it's printed on, but you don't own the pictures or the words in the order they are written down.

The protection that a book has against being copied is that the format makes it more difficult to copy it quickly/cost-effectively for most people. You can do what you are saying with a DVD such as inherit it, though it's terrible for killing flies.

But the fact is that you are not allowed distribute a "copy you made" at all of a book without agreement from the copyright holders/owners or to the extent the law dictates.

The difference is you don’t need to make a copy of a book to use it. That’s what gives EULA’s their power. A copy of Windows on a DVD that you can’t copy to a HDD is at best decorative rather than useful.

A book on the other hand could be read by thousands of people in it’s lifetime.

>The difference is you don’t need to make a copy of a book to use it. That’s what gives EULA’s their power.

While often assumed to be the case, that's probably not true. Copyright law generally allows for incidental copying necessary to use a product. And, in fact, (US at least) law has been amended over time to explicitly allow certain types of copying needed for functional purposes. So licensing is probably not, in fact, necessary. Rather licensing came in at a time when it wasn't clear that software could be copyrighted.

you can copy books, movies and audio that you own as long as it's not for re-distribution.

Another way of looking at it is that you don't own the book neither. You have a licence, bound to a physical copy (that you own though, and that is transferable). The thing that changed in the last 20 years, is that we are now buying licences that are not even bound to physical copies, and that are expresly nominative.

I suspect that if books would have allowed this sort of mecanism (on a technical level) it would have been used. From the publisher point-of-view, it just makes sense.

The generation growing up now does not see media as an asset that they want to own for the rest of their lives, and they are perfectly happy paying 10€ / month for unlimited access to media. Hell we're having a hard enough time to get people to care about the planet in 20 years, so getting them to care about this is going to be a hard sell.

I have plenty of bookshelves in my house and plenty of other media too--though at least some of that is ripped and the discs are sitting in boxes in the attic. I also spent way too much time and effort earlier in my life hauling that stuff around (plus a ton of other paper) when I moved.

I at least like to think that, if I were younger today and especially if I were living in a small and/or shared city apartment, I'd have a whole lot less "stuff" and would rely a whole lot more on digital content.

ADDED: To your other point. Anything covered by copyright law has some restrictions on your rights as an "owner." So you can't copy a book and give those copies away. (You can probably digitize and otherwise make copies for personal use--certainly you can as a practical matter.) You can't give public reading performances (Most obviously in the case of stage plays. You don't even have mechanical licenses as in the case of music.)

Licensing (probably) came in with the IBM System/360 when IBM was starting to sell some of its software separate from its hardware primarily for anti-trust reasons. At the time, whether software could be copyrighted was still something of an unsettled legal matter and, therefore, IBM considered copyright a weak protection so they settled on licensing. And, of course, because of first sale doctrine a lot of companies subsequently latched onto the idea even after software came to be seen as clearly copyrightable.

> Licensing, and specifically the EULA, was popularized by Microsoft

Without sounding like an old carmudgeon, but "Licensing" and "EULA"'s were around long before MS arrived on the block and were already "popularized" within the IT business. MS, Apple etc just picked up where the old minicomputer and mainframe hardware and software vendors left off.

you can lend and re-sell books, dvds, blurays, tapes, cds and records. if you have the physical medium, for all intents and purposes you own it.

you can even copy it for backup purposes. even if it requires you to break the encryption to do so.

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