IANAL too.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a piece of US law that change this for copyrighted works, to wit:

Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law:
602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].

There's supposedly an exception for single copies intended for personal use, also if these are incidentally resold.

I have the impression that the same kind of effect as the above statute could be created without the statute, e.g. by specifically *not* licensing the subsidiary to reproduce the book, but just have a non-enforcement agreement; that way, the merchandise would technically be counterfeit. It's also problematic to have it work the other way around; mandatory licensing in other countries could be used to basically gut copyright in the US, the way it was done by e.g. allofmp3.com

I'm on the fence about whether first sale should apply in this case; I think it probably should, but both directions have a lot of problems. Ideally, we'd have all the world at roughly purchasing power parity (and payment/hour for the same skilled labor) - alas, we're not anywhere near that.

Eivind.

Again: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

I agree with you in normal, sanity-based views.

However, the law here seems to be clearly against us:

Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law:
602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].

And even if it didn't, there would be tricks to get around it. E.g, the US company could refuse to license the work to its subsidiary, and just have an agreement not to prosecute in the other country, but would prosecute copies that showed up in the US. They would all technically be "counterfeit" but it would be a non-problem except in the US (and all other counterfeits would be a problem.)

Let's start with me saying that I think you are right in thinking the publishers are price-gouging - but your argument isn't sufficient to show that.

A publisher has a cost of C for creating the content of a book, and an incremental cost of I for producing a copy, it sells at price P, and it sells X copies. It will have an incremental income of P-I for each copy sold, and a total profit on the project of (copies sold)*(price - incremental cost) - content costs (X*(P-I) - C).

If it has two different segmented markets, like in the above example, it will still have C for the overall content costs, and then P1 and I1 (say, US sales with $90 price and $15 production cost), and P2 and I2 (say, Indian sales at $9 price and $5 production cost.) The overall profit will be X1*(P1-I1) + X2*(P2-I2) - C - in this example, (us sales)*$75 + (indian sales)*$4 - (content costs).

Transitioning US sales to $4 per book can easily make the project have a loss if the content costs are high, even if there *is* an incremental income per copy. In this case, the Indian income is just a bonus - it's all the market can bear, so the publisher will accept it, but it's the US (and probably European) sales that actually carry the cost of the production of the content, and not providing it to the Indian market would just make it more expensive to the US/European consumers; as would selling it at a higher price there, as the market just couldn't purchase at the higher price.

Of course, lots of academic textbooks are sold with hardly anything paid to the author, so I think the publishing industry is probably engaging in price gouging (as the cost of content should be close to zero). But that's where the argument is; that they can do physical production and resale at a lower price don't mean that there is an option of having a lower price in the market that bear the brunt of the cost. It could be that the entire project goes in zero profit and these prices are the best possible; we need other evidence than the price differential to show it is different.

I'm not the OP, and I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I would argue that first sale should cover things that are "licensed only for region X" to also be used in region Y; that a sale of an information good to the general public include a license that can be re-sold, and that region restrictions cannot apply.

As it is, I believe that isn't generally applied; copyright licenses are granted by area, and importing into a different area for re-sale is not necessarily legal. I'm not sure if importing into a region for personal use is always considered OK - I hope it in general is, because I brought my collection of DVDs and CDs with me when I relocated to the US, and would hate to have them deemed contraband.

It wouldn't have been DNA; DNA is too complicated and has problems replicating without a bunch of machinery. RNA is one possibility, though I personally have the feel that it is too complicated as well. One example of a hypothesed simpler pathway is Cairn-Smith's Clay hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Clay_hypothesis) though experiments indicate that clay crystals likely aren't stable enough to work for this purpose. However, there only needs to be some kind of material with the right properties, and then evolution rapidly creates variation and more advanced structures. (For more on abiogenesis, you may want to see the nice talk.origins FAQ at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html)

Which country do you live in?

I did not put it together, but did take it out of the box. And it wasn't for not looking right - it was for not actually being the thing I thought I bought *and* being broken. Normally, I'd accept a repair/fix for something that's broken, but as it was the wrong thing, I explained the situation and IKEA accepted a return.

In detail: I had, I thought, bought four bases and four tops for cabinets. I opened and started putting together one of the tops, noticed that it was missing a screw, and opened and got the screw out of a second top and finished the one I'd started building. I then tried putting it on top of the base - and then found the top didn't fit, and was intended for wall mount. I then went back to IKEA and returned the top I'd opened for the screw (and the two unopened ones), and bought the four tops that actually went with the bases. (I was also left with an unusable wall mountable cabinet, which I later threw out.)

BTW, returns in a bookshop - I would have thought that was fine as long as the book was in perfect shape (ie, unread, etc)? Returns of unread books is standard practice for especially holiday gifts in Norway, where I'm from. Is the problem that people lack a decent library (or decency) and treat the bookshop as a library?

++!

(I've done the same. I keep meaning to write a letter to them saying that.)

So far not at Best Buy, but I've regularly done this at IKEA - I'll pick up things I'm not 100% sure we'll need, and then return the things we don't need (or where I was just wrong). I've spent close to $10,000 at IKEA the last year and returned maybe $300 worth of things - with all the return value immediately spent at IKEA again. They have a lot of advertisements saying that it's OK to change your mind, so I assume they're fine with it - and I know I've bought more there than I would have if I had to carefully consider each thing and consult with my wife before getting it instead of after.

Eivind.

From what I can tell, allowing returns is a store policy thing rather than a US law; see e.g. http://www.enotes.com/consumer-issues-reference/purchases-and-returns#returning-consumer-purchases

I've also found returns to usually be possible the other countries I've lived in (Norway, Ireland). I would suspect that this does not drive up prices, because it presumably leads to higher income for the store than not offering it, or the stores wouldn't. I know I've seen recommendations to offer this for new businesses - it makes it much easier to get customers, because the customers take less of a risk, and the amount of customers that use it is small enough that it isn't a problem. Basically, it's treated as a marketing expense, and is a fairly minor one.

I know it affect me personally; I do buy some things I'm uncertain about because I can return them, and usually end up keeping them. I'll also say I don't abuse the system - with the single exception of small piece of furniture from IKEA that for complicated reasons were opened by mistake, I've only returned things in their original, shrink wrapped form, and done exchange on things that were broken when I got them.)

A better analogy: We've found car keys on a road once, so when looking for more car keys, we choose to focus on roads, rather than elsewhere, like hillsides and ocean.

Of course, the ideal place to look for lost car keys is in bars, but we don't know that - we've only found the one set.

"Do not tightly depend on Linux-specific features" and "maintain your own ports" are different. There's significant differences between writing reasonably portable code (which I think it is fine to ask for) and to fully deal with creating all kinds of infrastructure (which I don't think it is reasonable to ask for.) systemd is a seemingly OK solution to a problem that's been solved a number of different ways, with intentional direct Linux dependency, created by somebody (Lennart Poettering) that works for a Linux company (Red Hat) and would have advantages to blocking off other ways of dealing with things. This has also been stopped systemd from being used by some other Linux distributions, but the author is pushing for direct dependency on systemd. I interpret that as partially ego-driven (he'd like his software used), and partially personally philosophically based (he's a consistent GPL-user) with even more than normal Linux blinders on.

Source code has nothing to do with it. It involves breaking support for your competitors.

Unix API space.

I'm saying "Embrace, extend, extinguish" because there are developers that very specifically tries to tie things to Linux. Wayland specifically damages it: It creates a new path which is likely to be used by significant amounts of applications, and which means those applications won't work except with Wayland.

And no, it will not be feasible to keep using old versions of things if the world moves along. It is e.g. not feasible to use an old web browser, both due to the web itself evolving and the now known security issues. You're effectively forced to upgrade a lot of things; staying with the old does not mean keeping the old features, it means losing features.

These numbers can't be drawn conclusions from either; they have similar types of bias.

I'm only suggesting not drawing conclusions from numbers that have significant bias in them. In this case, I think the conclusion is right but the inference is wrong.

In more depth:

I believe the quality of software patents is horrible; and I believe both PEs and NPE mostly play with patents that should never have been issued. However, agreeing with the conclusion doesn't make me agree with the way it is argued - I want my side to come with strong and rational arguments.

"Lots of cases are lost" by itself doesn't really indicate anything about the average quality of patents. Assuming equal resources on both sides and that the cost/benefit of licensing is evenly distributed, the naive equilibrium should be that 50% of the cases go in either direction; if the win looks more obvious in either direction, pre-litigation agreement should become more and more likely. If we have a disparity in the number of cases won, it should indicate either bad evaluation, unrealistic licensing requirements, or disparity in the value of enforcing/not enforcing the patent on the patent owner and patent target side.

The 39% (Practicing Entity) could be the result of companies fighting harder because otherwise they would be forced to shut down (compared to the patent owner getting some extra revenue), and the patent owner cutting their legal costs. My intuition is that the natural state with most patents being valid would be for the patent owner to win more than 50% of the cases, as they sometimes want to shut down a competitor, and that competitor then logically would fight even with bad odds - but the situation is complicated enough that there could easily be other confounding factors that I can't think of.

The 23% (Non-Practicing Entity) could be the result of the practicing entities keeping the best patents for themselves, leaving the NPEs with the few garbage patents that exists - but the NPEs still can make money off suing with garbage patents, so they do. Again, I don't believe that is what is happening - I believe patents are granted way too easily, and possibly should not be granted at all, for any field - but I don't think the win/loss numbers shed any light on the overall quality level.

Eivind.