Copyright Lobby Targets "Pirate Bay For Books"

An anonymous reader writes "TTVK, a Finnish national copyright lobby, is threatening a book rental service called Bookabooka for allegedly running the 'Pirate Bay for Books.' Bookabooka however does not offer a torrent tracker service, nor does it enable a user in any way to download eBooks; it simply provides a place for book owners to rent textbooks to each other via the traditional mail service. It is mandatory that all textbooks must be originals. The service is used by a lot of School and University students, and it does not handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks. Nevertheless, the Finnish book publishers' association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced the service is breaching the copyright laws and threatening their business. TTVK has given Bookabooka until Friday to cease operations or face a lawsuit. Bookabooka's founders have vowed to keep the service online and ignore the threat."

Comments

Coming from an author...

[Max Romantschuk]

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Robert Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein

Re:Smell of blood/books in the morning, etc.

[redhog]

The "revolution" is already here. It isn't a bloody one though, just the Pirate Party lining up for the EU parliament election the 7th of June.

We fight for your rights. We fight for a Free Internet. Vote for your local Pirate Party.

Because of Internet

[iJusten]

TTVK:n mukaan vuokraaminen ilman kustantajien ja tekijöiden lupaa on laitonta, koska palvelu toimii internetissä, eli kuka tahansa voi käyttää sitä.

TTVK (Copyright-information and enforcement Association) says that renting without rights from publishers or writers is illegal, because the service operates over Internet, and everybody can use it. Source.

How can you possibly argue over so eloquent argument?

Finns do this! (And anyone: Please mod this up!)

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the last straw for me so I decided to do something and I ask my fellow Finns to do the same:

Request and sign a supporter card of The Pirate Party in Finland. Do it here, it obliges you to nothing and doesn't make you a member of the party, you only sign it to show that you want The Pirate Party to be registered. Once they have 5 000 signatures, they can become a registered party and enter elections. The immediate advantage will of course be the increased publicity once they are registered.

Ps. Please mod this up.

Re:Who needs to hunt down textbooks in Finland?

[Firethorn]

I see americans on /. talk about this as if it's a normal thing. Maybe it is in the USA, that doesn't mean it is everywhere.

Like a lot of things in the USA, we're actually very fragmented. Remember, we don't have a national school system, we have 50 state level systems.

Some universities this practice is prevalent, in others it's actually forbidden. I remember one university that would allow a professor to teach from his own book - but such book had to be sold to the students at printing cost.

printed a large chunk of the content for us free in the form of a handout

Time for me to get a bit technical. Assuming said book had enough copies for economies of scale to take effect(several thousand copies IIRC), it's actually substantially cheaper to print the book than to 'copy' it using a laser printer/copier. You can get better results as well.

I have to say I think the american system which drives students into insane ammounts of debt both directly with fees and with very high other expenses is pretty strange/fucked up.

I have a theory that easy availability of credit/assistance has actually skewed the cost of a degree higher, much like the housing market.

Easy availability of credit means that individuals that wouldn't have gone go, and those that would have gone to a cheaper school go to an expensive one instead.

As a result, many universities haven't had to control their spending in quite a long time, despite all the moaning about not wanting to raise tuition. They've almost forgotten how to economize. To save money.

Restrict credit such that students don't actually HAVE the money to go to their college, and I'm willing to bet that the college would find a lot of ways to save money and reduce their expenses.

It's my personal philosophy that students DO need to pay for most of their degree; it's a good way to make sure they value it.