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By David Rothman

Doug works at Microsoft but is about to leave for law school, where he’ll specialize in–”surprise!”–intellectual property. Here’s a Doug-related case history, from an email to me:

Subject: Can I get the link to the Harry Potter book?

I purchased a copy from Waldenbooks, which promptly sent it to a random address at Microsoft. So I have paid for my book and do not have a copy (and probably am not going to get one, unless UPS does an amazing job of not losing packages with valuable contents).

So I am your ‘fair use’ dude, who has paid for a book, and probably will never see it. I will commit to destroying the book if I receive it, and keep the ebook version in its place (and I will not distribute it).

Class, what’s your advice? Should I have shared the Web address? I didn’t and would not have, even if the pirate page I saw had still been online. It no longer is. You can bet this would have been a close call. I really wanted to help the guy out. He even sent me a copy of his order for the p-edition.

Speaking of Harry: In just a weekend, J.K. Rowling’s new book accumulated more than $100 million in U.S. revenue–at least several times than the annual sales of the entire e-book biz in the States.

 
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