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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."
Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If I do not get any money, you are in breach of copyright laws.
Unfortunately it varies for entirely predictable reasons. At my UK university, while there are plenty of postgraduate or specialist texts compared to demand, there are usually at most three copies of anything, which is insufficient for undergraduate classes in the hundreds. Therefore year after year there's a stack of new editions of the basic texts in the book shop which are eagerly snapped up. I imagine the publishers wouldn't be happy if the university bought 200 of the current edition every five years.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I was about to say that books usually have a "do not rent" clause in the legal jargon on the inside, but I've just flicked through four of my uni textbooks and not one of them said it.
Assuming this is the same for the books being rented out, they're trying to stop a technically-not-illegal service from encouraging people doing something perfectly legal.
Eh?
This gets really stupid after a while. I mean everything you do will be a threat to someone's "business model". If I choose to walk to work then I threaten Fords model. If I choose to go the Gym instead of buying a wii-fit I'm hurting Nintendo.
Could my ISP sue me for writing a letter instead of an email?
Ridiculous is what it is.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Somebody is smelling blood here...
The logical conclusion of all this (including that EU law that is being looked at at the moment, where you have to be able to prove ownership of all media on your laptop/mp3player when crossing the border) is that private ownership cease to exist, and only corporations can own anything, and then allow the rest of us a peak once in a while, for a fee of course.
My only comfort is that when (if) the revolution comes it will no longer be the politicians who are first against the wall, but the copyright lobbyists...
It seems to me that "copyright" refers, in the most straightforward way possible, to the "right to copy." There are no copies being made in this case. It is simple, exclusive transfer of one embodiment of a book's content, convenient embedded in the physical, tangible medium of dead tree.
No copy, no outrage.
But the lawyers are getting paid, so as usual they will entertain the self-serving legal theories of their clients with dignity and care until such time as they lose or go broke.
We gotta stop these RIAA/MPAA morons before they ruin every little thing.
Next thing these morons would change the law to outlaw public libraries. Politicians as they always are, care about the next campaign, and almighty money. So they would say to the public that terrorists used libraries to steal ideas for making bombs, and so libraries must be closed or terrorists would take over the world.
O'Reilly would jump in with a pinhead or patriot question about Paris Hilton being a pinhead for supporting libraries and Miley Cyrus as a patriot for saying libraries are dull (Jamie Foxx says that Cyrus should make a s*x tape in Library).
First of all, create a group, donate liberally to it, hire the best lobbyist and make politicians fight for you, against RIAA/MPAA. Fight fire with fire.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
This is such a poor plan. When you take music away from people, you take away entertainment. Take away books (especially text books), you make people dumber. And we have a problem with this already.
I'll have to disagree with you. The availability of books depends significantly on your major. The situation which you describe can be true with books which are used on courses with a few (20) students. I'll dare to say that you are in the tiny minority of university students in Finland, who can find _nearly all_ or even a significant amount of their textbooks in libraries.
Unfortunately all books in first-year studies in, for example engineering, are quite scarce in libraries. Three examples from my own university:
University physics by Young & Freedman: 9 copies, approx 100 students, price ~80e
Calculus by Robert A. Adams: 8 copies, approx 50 students, price 77e
Microelectronic circuits by Sedra & Smith: 10 copies, approx 50 students, price ~60e
So, I have no problems imagining that such a service would be needed.
Erm
no one uses this site
Just wait for the Streisand effect to kick in. ;-)
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
We need book DRM so that only the person who bought the book can read it.
That would be the Kindle, then. I knew there had to be some reason for dedicated eBook readers.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Pirate Bay? What the hell does this have to do with the Pirate Bay?
Somehow, I think that, since the pirate bay guys got a bad verdict, comparing organizations to the Pirate Bay because they're screwing with your profits will become a fad. In which case, with due credit to that Godwin chap, I hereby claim ownership of Alperxe's Law: "All discussions about an organization hurting IP-based corporations will eventually devolve into the target of the discussion being compared to The Pirate Bay".
Do we still have the right to read?
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
Spell checkers have a downside.
FAQs are evil.
Or maybe Finns on average are smart enough not to install Alexa Toolbar? Anyway, the service is quite new, and before this incident relatively unknown. At least I had never heard of it until this incident, and same applies to several people who discussed this on Helsingin Sanomat website (many of which noted they shall be using the service as text book prices are not reasonable for majority of students).
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.
That is super retarded. What about libraries? Since when could *everyone* not use them? Greedy people will think of any justification to get more money.
Now that the western society "wealth" generation is completely dependent on artificial scarcity, people who benefit the most from this charade will be trying very hard to protect their revenue streams. They will only fail if the "third world" manages to gather behind China's lead, emancipate itself from corporate slavery and take back what they rightfully deserve. The concept of intelectual property is flawed in surprisingly similar ways the idea of communism was. Instead of promoting well-being of the masses through supporting investment in research and creativity, it has become a tool of manipulation used by the elites.
Thank you Finish copyright police TTVK or who every you are. I had never heard of this service before. It sounds great and now I might just use it!
I hope these book publishers never find out about these things called "libraries", where in the US they outnumber even McDonalds. They're the original Pirate Bay, dens of malicious copyright infringers, intent on taking money away from the poor little book publishers.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Your business model is dead. Your lawsuit is the wake.
~kulakovich
It isn't stealing. It's (if not for profit) not even piracy.
It's a civil tort infringing on the copyright holders' granted monopoly on copying their works.
it is human nature to treasure those things that are hardest to obtain either by price or by work.
By work? yes. by price? that's funny.
something hard to attain by price is folly, and are only treasured by the shallowest of humanity.
Those that work HARD are always more celebrated and respected. It's why a man that builds his own hotrod is far, FAR, more respected than the rich guy that bought his.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"pirates"
I know you are joking about pirates, but this "pirates" meme is pure PR. This legal move isn't about pirates or copyright or even about Pirate Bay. This is companies (using the smoke screen of the national copyright lobby) as a means to game the legal system into preventing people from using a business model that reduces their income. Using the name Pirate Bay is simply an attempt to use it for PR purposes to imply the business model of sharing is wrong. Book companies want to sell books and prevent people from sharing books.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity. I had assumed that there were more McDonald's in the world than libraries in the US. Around my apartment, there are no fewer than 4 McDonald's within walking distance, but only one branch library.
I had begun to think that maybe Americans liked cheap, disgusting food more than they liked reading.
Of course, maybe with all the piracy paranoia we allowed things to degenerate into a situation that companies want to be protected from ANYTHING that would hurt their sales. Not something I like.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
If they win, the TTKV most likely will need to pay for bookabooka's legal expenses.
- Raynet --> .
You seem to be a Finn based on your other comments - I would just like to clarify. Normally I'd say "like hell they would". But this would likely be tried in Finland, and so I assume your comment means "loser pays" is common in the legal system there?
On principle, US law has avoided that due to it being a potentially great imbalance. If I defend myself against the RIAA hoardes and loser pays, a technicality ruling could mean I have to pay millions in legal fees to RIAA laywers, while my defense is going to be a single affordable lawyer. My single guy against a hoarde of legal eagles makes it likely they can get out on a technicality my guy never saw coming. Losing the case means I am also bankrupt.
So "loser pays" can have the effect of making the little guy roll over for anything but the surest of victories.