Comment Re:The question is whether copyright should exist (Score 1) 380
>if you believe copyright (in principle) to be a useful thing, then you de-facto have to be against reselling ebooks to be logically consistent
You're wrong. You can believe and apply the principles of copyright and apply the doctrine of first sale (exhaustion of copyright holders rights to control distribution of an article after it's sale). Indeed doing so seems entirely consistent to me.
>Copyright exists to address the free rider problem
No, wrong again. Copyright exist so that the public, citizens of a state for example, can aid the creators of useful works to get fair recompense for their creative activities. The public, the demos, do this by enforcing an unnatural right to a monopoly for the reproduction of works, said monopoly being given by the demos to the creator. The purpose is to ensure that creators don't lose financial (nor moral) control immediately that a work is published, the demos support them in that endeavour; the cost to the creator is to put the work in to the public domain in a timely manner (but this part of the contract has been badly perverted) - ie to allow everyone and anyone to use the work without charge, to give everybody a free ride.