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.
This is worthy of the Onion, but unfortunately it’s true.
Even if it were a threat its overblown. Profs often don’t use the same book year after year. Especially if they wrote the book. (Buy the new 22nd ed, now with new page numbers!)
As I am a librarian in Finland I’m somewhat worried about my occupations future as we have a collection of ~3 million copies which we distribute to people.
But I have to say that the officials have some convincing arguments. The TTVK has statesd, that renting books without the consent of publishers and authors is illegal because the service is on the Internet so anybody can use it.
You can’t argue with logic.
I might have some sympathy if the entire textbook industry weren’t based on ripping off poor students. Textbook prices are a joke.
Its another example of “Industry founded on taking advantage of the customer gets upset when customer wises up.”
That girl practically has her boobs hanging out. SN, you are such a pig. 😉
So wait a minute. I buy a physical textbook and they say I can’t loan it to a “friend” and charge a convenience fee to do so?
According to the doctrine of first sale I can do what ever I want to the book short of copying it. I can sell it, rent it, chop it into confetti, etc.
What is next? Can I be sued for creating a derivative work if I merely highlight important sections to study in the textbook I buy.
I graduated from college six years ago and would spend over two hundred dollars for books. I am taking classes at a community college for professional development and the books are about one hundred dollars for just one class. These places are out of control.
I had a professor who had his own textbook. At the end of class he asked for improvements that could be made in the next edition. Almost every student said that he shouldn’t make a new edition, at least until next year. It was only after he promised not to release the new edition the next semester that we gave him feedback on the textbook.
Let’s picket the local libraries. Call em pirates
Finland must have some insane IP laws.
#7: Aye, me bucko.
#6–Benji==you beat me to it, well done. YES==this case would make sense if the books were “licensed” rather than “sold.” I think Public Libraries have a specific exception under IP law. I wonder about the boundaries of the exception at my local branch that has a section for DvD’s that is quite extensive. I think Blockbuster et al get a special license to operate their businesses.
Yep–fun to balance all the legitimate interests that are in conflict with one another. Often the rule chosen is secondary to the fact that it is clear, makes sense, and can be enforced.
10 Bobbo,
Your comments about the DVD’s in the library brings up an interesting thought. Those of us old enough to remember when VHS (and Betamax) first came out, Hollywood, being the usual greedy, scared shitless of losing their cushy positions selves that they are priced new tapes at like $80 each.
Well, guess what? Hardly anyone wanted to buy them at that price, and, low and behold, the video rental business was born. It took several years for the nimrods in Hollywood to realize that if they priced movie tapes at say $20, lots of folks would actually buy them, but it was too late. There were rental outlets all over the place by then, and even if sales of new tapes increased, most people rented most of the time.
As for textbooks, its a several fold problem. First is that they sell in relatively limited numbers compared to say Tom Clancy’s latest. Like any specialty product, you pay more than you do for the mass produced one.
And they tend to have limited distribution as well. In many cases, the only place in town to buy texts for a particular class is at the on campus college bookstore. Large enough institutions, like UCLA for example can support off campus stores that will carry books for the popular classes, but even that is a relatively recent phenomenon.
And, as others have mentioned, unlike fiction or even most non-fiction books in the rest of the world, they tend to get new editions published regularly, for either worthwhile or dubious reasons, the new editions make the old ones useless, except as door stops.
So, there are reasons, some ligit, others questionable, why texts cost so much. Compared to other specialty books though, they aren’t really out of line.
The absolute worst is when the professor who is teaching your class also wrote the textbook. If you can’t understand the material from the lectures, you sure as hell won’t get much help from a book written by the same person!
As for Finland’s laws, well, I think the students need to review some of the footage of Berkeley in the 1960s. That will show them what needs to be done. :).
Could someone tell me why the RIAA and MPAA aren’t up in arms over Libraries and video rental stores?
To me especially Video rental stores. they only pay ONCE for the product and then make TON’S of money renting out the product?
Where’s the outrage there?
“Could someone tell me why the RIAA and MPAA aren’t up in arms over Libraries and video rental stores?”
Because they pay more for those films than normal consumers. The higher price includes the right to rent or loan the film. It’s been a while since I worked in acquisitions but it wasn’t unusual to pay something like 50-100 euros even for an older film. For example, the movie King Kong (1933) costs 42 euros to libraries but only 6 euros on Amazon. Also, libraries and stores can’t just go out and buy cheap DVDs from a supermarket discount bin because that price does not include the right to loan or rent the movie.
I don’t know if it’s the same in US but I think it probably works the same way.
Wow, Tiffany Teen can read!
This whole creative rights issue is getting outrageous. Do musicians need 70 year copyrights on their works? Will I be listening to the B-52s in 2050?
This book thing is just nuts. Maybe they can encrypt books and sell the encryption key. then in some unforseen disaster, all keys are lost and the whole of human knowledge becomes random characters.