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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Only thing is -- there is a legal justification. I linked to part of it on their web site.
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They claim a legal right to
single lending for each physical copy.
Even if you believe in that, they don't even attempt to claim a legal justification for unlimited lending, only a moral one.
Quote:
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You just don't agree with it. We have no knowledge what U.S. courts would say.
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Lets consider the idea that it is legal for a library to buy a single physical copy of a book and lend that eBook out an unlimited number of times.
Given that, why hasn't a single
real library done so?
Why are they paying through the nose for eBook editions, and having some titles restricted from being available at all, if they could simply bypass all the limits whenever they wanted?
The Library of Congress in the US, the British Library in the UK, and similar institutions around the world, hold copies of (close enough to) all books published. So they could scan them and lend them out an unlimited number of times, without permission from the publishers or authors?
Could Amazon?
The question only has to be asked for it to be clear what the answer is?
How is what the Open Library doing
legally different from me taking a book off my shelf, scanning it and uploading it to a torrent site?