Thread: Lending DRM'd books to a friend
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Old 04-10-2013, 10:40 AM   #140
hwlester
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ottdmk View Post
nogle: While you are technically correct, I don't believe there's a court in the world that would actually accept that argument.

As far as lending/selling e-books: there are a lot of technical difficulties to overcome. Libraries are able to lend e-books because of the infrastructure provided by Overdrive or one of the other, lesser-known, companies. The model works for libraries because Overdrive manages the licenses and the DRM enforces a limited term (three weeks in the case of my library.)

There isn't really a lot of incentive for a company like Kobo to invest in the infrastructure needed to make lending or selling possible. It would be a considerable expense for no return. And Kobo's model in particular makes it nearly impossible to implement.

Kobo, bless 'em, allow you to side-load their books onto any Adobe DRM capable device. (Or any e-pub device in the case of non-DRM'ed books.) So, how can they enforce any lending or selling protocol? Even if they had something in place on their servers to reassign the rights (temporarily or permanently) they can't do a thing about the sideloaded files. Adobe DRM does not require an Internet connection after you download the book. (Thank heavens.) There'd be no way for Kobo to police this.

The only way lending & selling can work is in a DRM free world where everyone's on the honour system. But publishing companies will fight tooth & nail to prevent this (mostly by trying to exempt e-books from first sale doctrine) because corporations will never, ever trust the honour system. (Plus the small detail that publishers have hated the used book market for decades.)
The difference is the way Adobe DRM supports lending versus buying. With lending, the DRM automatically expires the license at the end of the lending period whether the device is connected or not. For buying, the license doesn't expire, so some mechanism would have to be added to expire it or some type of limited license would have to be implemented like you have it for a year and then you have to renew it every year which would be bad for consumers.
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