Robert Levine

Looks interesting.  From Beyond the Book: At the recent OnCopyright 2012 conference, Robert Levine explained for the audience in a keynote speech how the commonly used language of copyright shapes the debate and makes for confusion on the fundamentals “I don’t think copyright infringement is stealing,” he told the Columbia Law School audience. “The idea that this is [...]

The first thing to be said about the lawsuit filed last week by the Justice Department against Apple and five book publishers is that the defendants very well may be guilty. There does seem to have been collusion among them to fix the price of e-books. But even if the book publishers’ actions were illegal, that’s not to suggest what they did wasn’t understandable. Indeed, there’s a plausible case to be made that the actions of the publishers actually amounted to combating an abusive monopoly—namely, Amazon. The Justice department may be acting correctly under existing antitrust law by suing

Ebooks have reignited the question of what we're really paying publishers for – the physical product, or what's written inside?

… Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically "made": there are no printing costs. But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the "text itself", then the delivery method shouldn't much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged.