Would you call Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture missive culture in and of itself? Whatever your vantage of the subject, this book that is available free of charge in electronic form from its very own website and is held under a Creative Commons license (which promises to give readers the ability to “redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix...provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Professor Lessig,”) is evidently available as a paid download through Amazon’s Kindle storefront. This might strike some observers as strange, and even out of place, given Amazon’s adherence to a DRM-laced platform for distributing content via the ebook service.
I for one cannot peg when exactly this digital volume entered Amazon’s virtual bookshelf, to be frank. And this topic of where to draw the transactional borderline is a tricky one. You can pay for a physical copy of Free Culture, so the fact that Amazon, as well as Lessig, may be profiting from digital downloads with a going rate of $9.99 per copy is not an economic no-no.
Kindle books are of course not reusable or adaptable in any way that the Creative Commons license allows for. You could copy passages manually if you felt so inclined. But you cannot distribute as you would a paper book, or a file downloadable from the corresponding website. (Of course, physical copyrighted books can be passed along at will, too, but let’s not digress for the sake of keeping this piece short and semi-sweet.)
So you can see how one might become quite torn over this specific matter if speaking in strict technicalities. It’s hard to pin blame on anyone in this scenario. Amazon makes available so many volumes that this slip could be made. How might the print publisher, Penguin, handle the issue?