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Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Finally.
And please, please, please don't bother to respond. Wouldn't want you to break your word.  |
+1
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Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm struggling to see any ethical difference between a long-term loan of one of my older Kindles with 5,000 books on it to a friend, and piracy. Wouldn't I effectively giving my friend a copy of my ebook library?
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It's interesting that we have been drawn into a discussion of license terms on what is simply a matter of ethics. As I understand it you are not alleging that lending a Kindle to a friend breaches any legal term. Whilst a consideration of physical books may not be strictly relevant to the license terms, I suggest it is relevant to ethical considerations. If we start off with the proposition that lending a friend a physical book is ethical, what is it that makes the lending of a physical Kindle with e-books on it unethical? You could lend your friend 5,000 physical books, or allow your friend to visit your home and read those books there. Of course, this is physically onerous in the one case and inconvenient in the other. Is the proposed distinction that two of you can read the same book at the same time? This would seem to be impossible in the second scenario, and most unlikely in the first. And, if you do have ethical problems with this you can take steps to prevent it, particularly when you are lending an old Kindle you yourself no longer use. I haven't used parental controls myself, but believe that there is an option to disable cloud access, which I take to include downloading purchased books from the cloud. If this is the case you could easily lend an old Kindle with access to only a single book. If this is the case lending your old Kindle with access to only a single book would seem to be ethically indistinguishable from lending a single physical book if you yourself ethically refrain from reading that book whilst the device is on loan.