• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Bookabooka - renting books is a breach of copyright?

sparkchaser

sparkchaser

Administrator and Stuntman
Staff member
I saw this on Slashdot and I just had to share it.

Copyright lobby targets Pirate Bay for textbooks

Copyright lobby targets "Pirate Bay for textbooks"

21 April 2009 8:54 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny

Copyright lobby targets Pirate Bay for textbooks Finnish book rental service Bookabooka is being threatened by national copyright lobby organization TTVK for running a service the lobby group calls "Pirate Bay for textbooks".

Bookabooka doesn't host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional "snailmail" (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn't handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.

Despite these "small" differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers' association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.

TTVK demands (PDF, in Finnish) that the service must be shut down by Friday this week or they'll sue the company. Bookabooka's founders have already stated that they wont respond to the threats, but instead will keep the service running.
Click to expand...

Ridiculous or does TTVK have a point? Personally, I go with ridiculous.
 
Apparently so.

I wish I had a service like this when I was in college. I hated spending $70 for a sociology text I knew I would sell back ten weeks later for $30.
 
I helped run a similar service when I was at Uni - we didn't exactly rent the books, but we helped connect students who wanted to sell their books with students who wanted to buy them. They weren't technically "rented", but given that most books changed owners every semester, that's just semantics.

I wonder if I should go down to the police station and report myself?
 
Ridiculous,even the Colleges and Universtities here have rooms where kids go buy used textbooks and also have used textbook stores.
 
Well, we have used textbook stores too but the availability was always less than half of the demand. For at least one elective class I just borrowed the book from the library. I was fortunate though because the professor didn't believe in switching to the latest edition every time a new one came out.

Side question: a few years ago there were murmurs of an open source textbook movement. Do you think that model has any viability?
 
It seems ridiculous. Anybody familiar with the copywrite laws in Finland?

Perhaps they view it the say way Microsoft feels about taking the OS from one computer and putting in on another?
 
We Finns have the right idea on many topics. Sadly my knowledge of my heritage basically ends there and im pretty much an average America white guy. Still the idea of borrowing text books sounds perfect.
 
Robert said:
Perhaps there is a difference when one "rents" out a textbook.
Click to expand...

I can't see how. This is essentially the same thing that happens when you buy a used textbook for $60 and sell it back for $25; you've effectively rented the book for $35.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top