[Xenophon]

This question came up a bunch of years ago at Baen's Bar. The couple getting divorced had purchased most of the then-available Webscriptions eBooks, and wanted to know how they could split up the books. (More accurately, they wanted to split their account, with some books for him and some for her. Re-download capability, don't ya' know...)

The eventual outcome was that Arnold (the "Evil Henchman" and proprietor of Webscriptions, which is a separate business from Baen Books) simply created a second account that had "purchased" all the books from the original account. This effectively introduced a new "paid-for" copy of the books. The explanation given was that he (in consultation with the folks at Baen) had chosen to do this as an exercise in "good marketing." Their view was that this took 1 happy customer (sadly going through a divorce) and wound up with two happy customers (post-divorce).

In a related example, my sister has been buying every Webscription book since they became available. During that time, various of her kids have left home and moved out on their own. She asked for guidance on the question of "what can/should I do about their access to Baen eBooks?".

The response was, again, an exercise in increasing the number of happy Baen/Webscriptions customers -- "Hand each kid an electronic copy of all the books you've bought from us on their way out the door. You can even give them books up to that date at some later time, if that's what works better. But once they're out on their own and more-or-less self supporting, let them buy their own copy rather than sharing yours." They also stated more-or-less explicitly that the guiding principle was "what solution leads to the most sales going forward?"


It's important to note what they didn't do, though. They avoided everyone "just copy the books." They made it clear that this was "good business practice" not "copying the books is fair game." They also made it clear that these decisions represent their current idea of good business practice; there's no guarantee on whether or not they'll change their approach in the future.


Xenophon
Note: I am not an insider at Baen; I cannot set policy there. I may not even know what today's policies are at Baen. All I'm doing here is describing how they responded to two individual cases that resemble the OP's topic. Your mileage may vary.