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are not required to secure permission for uses that the rights holder will never discover. If you put some magazine clippings in your mood book, the magazine publisher will never find out you did so. If you stick a Dilbert cartoon on your office-door, Scott Adams will never know about it. 
 
So while technically the law has allowed rights holders to infinitely discriminate among the offerings they want to make -- Special discounts on this book, which may only be read on Wednesdays! This film half-price, if you agree only to show it to people whose names start with D! -- practicality has dictated that licenses could only be offered on enforceable terms. 
 
When it comes to retail customers for information goods -- readers, listeners, watchers -- this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he\'s brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You\'d be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers\' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction. 
 
At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you\'ll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we\'ve bought something. We bought it. It\'s ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel. 
 
When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital \"goods\" -- software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It\'s in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the information that it is presented with. 
 
The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox: the copyright license. These licenses had been presented to corporations for years. Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corporate customers had their own counsel, and real bargaining power, which made it impossible to impose really interesting conditions on them, like limiting the use of a movie such that it couldn\'t be fast-forwarded, or preventing the company from letting more than one employee review a journal at a time. 
 
Regular customers didn\'t have lawyers or negotiating leverage. They were a natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next click-through \"agreement\" you\'re provided with on purchasing a piece of software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out in those agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs with an \"agreement\" that bound its purchasers to destroy their music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to listen to their tunes while at work. 
 
But customers understand property -- you bought it, you own it -- and they don\'t understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don\'t know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you\'ve ever heard someone say, \"You need to defend a copyright or you lose it,\" you\'ve found one of these people who confuse copyright and trademark; what\'s more, this statement isn\'t particularly true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was
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