Over the years, publishers have made many attempts to avoid this exchange, controlling both the purchase price and what purchasers do with the books after they are sold. For example, in the early 1900s, publishers tried to control resale prices on the books people bought from retailers by stamping mandatory resale prices on a book’s front page.6 (That attempt was rejected by the US Supreme Court).7 Publishers also tried to limit where people could resell books they bought, in one case claiming that a book sold in Thailand couldn’t be resold in the US.8 (That attempt was also rejected by the US Supreme Court, in 2013).9 These attempts failed because the publisher’s copyright does not give them absolute control of a book in perpetuity; the copyright system is a balance between publishers and purchasers.10 If publishers want the benefits of the copyright system, they also have to accept the limits it imposes on their power.

The usual targets of The Publishers Association include domains that facilitate access to the popular Libgen library and eBook portals eBookee and FreeBookSpot. The trend was maintained this week when ISP TalkTalk revealed that more domains had been blocked in the UK. The new additions are as follows: ebookee.unblockit.kim, ebookee.123unblock.world, ebookee.mrunblock.bar, ebookee.nocensor.biz, ebookee.unbl4you.cyou, ebookee.unbl0ck.icu, ebookee.unblockproject.top, ebookee.proxybit.sbs, freebookspot.unblockit.kim, libgen.unblockit.kim, libgen.123unblock.world, libgen.mrunblock.bar, libgen.nocensor.biz, libgen.unbl4you.cyou,, libgen.unbl0ck.icu, libgen.unblockproject.top, libgen.proxybit.sbs

However, in the present era of publishing, those rights are consistently being called into question. Gennaro (2012) is particularly frank about how copyright law has come to privilege publishers at the expense of those who created the work in the first place: ‘Once you have transferred copyright to a journal [in order to publish] you cannot ethically use the words that you have written in another journal article; you no longer own those words’ (p. 109). Nevertheless, Bently (1994) remarks on Roland Barthes’ contention that once text has been published, the words no longer belong to that author or anyone else for that matter.

Anna von Veh