If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the "first sale" doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School's
Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to
intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God
book?
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Gizmodo
Amazon's Kindle might pull in $750 million by 2010, growing from an estimated 189,000 units this year to 2.2 million in the next couple, according Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. But how does that stack up against other important gadgets in their first year of life? Silicon Alley Insider has done the hard work for us. Considering that Kindle is a gadget type that the mainstream has had no basic interest in until now (e-reader) and that it's been perpetually out of stock, it's not doing too shabby, though it's had a serious hype advantage over some of those gadgets. I have the feeling Kindle 2 is where it's really gonna be at. [Silicon Alley Insider, Thanks Dan!]
