Porges, Seth. 2004. "We The People...Can't Make Copies?" Business Week (12 July): p. 12. "How much is the U.S. Constitution worth to you? On Amazon.com, the going rate is $2.99. A copy of the founding document, long in the public domain, can be acquired easily and legally for free on the Internet or at any public library. But e-book publisher NuVision Publications has begun selling it online as an e-book in an encrypted format that can be printed only twice per year." "Oddly enough, people seem to be buying the Constitution. The e-book's Amazon sales ranking, as of June 29, was a respectable 1,016 out of the hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells on its Web site. That's despite the fact that helping someone print the e-book more than twice could violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that forbids tampering with anti-piracy protections, according to Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
