[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Strolls

If you borrow a book from the library, scan it and reading it on an ebook reader, then it's probably fair use, until you return the book to the library. At that point you would ethically (if you had claimed the fair use "right" to create the ebook) destroy the ebook you created.

I'm not sure about that. Making a copy of something you only have temporary access to is legal for TV shows; why not for books? You can tape shows to watch later, and even to watch them with friends; why not copy books & share them with friends?

(I'm pondering. I don't expect that would hold up in court. But I don't expect it'd be brushed aside as irrelevant, either; the parallels are pretty strong.)

The author derives income from the sales of books to the library. If more people borrow a particular title then the library has to buy more copies of it, or borrowers have to wait or do without reading it.

For registered, state libraries, sure. But I have friends who have private lending libraries of books, and those don't inspire more sales when they're popular.

Scarcity is a property of physical books. To borrow the book from the library, scan it, return the p-book and retain the e-book - that's piracy no different from a straight darknet download.

The difference is that you did the work yourself. It's legal to copy a TV show you like; it's unclear whether it's legal to buy a homemade copy from someone else. Unclear whether they're allowed to run off extra copies & give them out.

Here in the UK it's clearly established in law that you may photocopy so many pages - and no more - for personal use. I forget the number, but it's perhaps a dozen pages.

Can you track down the law for this? I know many institutions--schools, businesses, nonprofits, and so on--have guidelines meant to keep them from being sued, but most guidelines I've seen have been built around "this is the maximum we're sure is safe," not "this is the maximum allowed by law."

If you buy an e-book from Amazon then that is covered under a license or EULA that you agree to at the time of purchase.

Breaking a EULA is not breaking the law; breach of contract is only subject to the penalties within the contract. If you break Amazon's license, Amazon may stop doing business with you, but that doesn't make it copyright infringement.

If you want to download an e-book off the darkent, then buy a pyhsical copy first, for the "license".

There is something nonsensical about this approach.

I have dozens of boxes of paperbacks. (Mostly sitting in storage lockers; house doesn't have room.) I could, theoretically, chop, scan & convert them all to ebooks. And then what? I'm morally, maybe legally, obligated to keep a collection of thousands of damaged books to prove I've got a right to my ebooks? And if I decide they're taking too much space, I can burn them or shred them, but not give them away?

There's something horrifically wasteful about this approach, about insisting that all these powerful digitizing tools can't be used to *increase* access to knowledge; it has to stay a zero-sum game based on the amount of paper that's been paid for.

I'm aware that "just send out 4000 copies of the ebook" is *also* a bad idea. But we need to find some middle ground, some way of letting Person A legitimately share their digital books with Person B, the way they can their physical books. We need real digital libraries, not publisher-restricted ones; publishers don't get a choice about which of their books show up in physical libraries. We need communities, not corporations, to decide what content is worth sharing with whom.