Quote:
Originally Posted by wgrimm
From the ZD Blog:
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
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When you buy a physical book, only one person can be in possession of that book at any given point in time. This is why it's legal to loan it out, or even to give it away.
When you buy an electronic book, without DRM, it's all too easy for one purchase to turn into one purchase + multiple copies. If you "loan" an e-book to someone and you forget to delete your own copy permanently, you've now bought one copy from the ebook-seller and stolen one from publisher. If you "loan" it to 10 other people, you've bought the one copy from the e-seller and stolen 10 from the publisher.
In a world where 99.9999% of people would actually physically remove their electronic copy when they "loaned" it even temporarily to a friend, DRM would be unnecessary. Do you think we live in such a world ?
By the way, in terms of "loaning" your ebooks, the one outright legal way to do so would be to physically loan your Kindle to someone. I'm pretty sure Bezos, and the law, would not have a problem with that.
Gino.