Digital Ebook Lending

No, physical items have reasonable legal protection against the IP holder trying to dictate what you do with it after purchase. The first sale doctrine allows libraries, game and video rental shops and such to physically lend copyrighted works. But when "purchasing" an ebook is actually just purchasing a heavily restricted and revocable license to personally use a work but not share it in any way, it doesn't apply. So libraries have to buy special ebook licenses that cost several

Traditional libraries lend out the physical copies they bought. For ebooks, they have an agreement with publisher to lend out a certain number of copies.Owners are allowed to make digital copies for personal and archival use. They aren't allowed to transfer copies. The rights of digital ebook are in the license and most prohibit transfers. The rights of physical book are attached to the book.Nobody notices or cares when done on personal scale. But publishers care when Internet Archive

The difference is a matter of scale. I believe the loaning of books is allowed the same way you could loan out a physical book to a friend, etc. Loaning out a digital book to n people is just not the same. Likewise, libraries, which do loan out physical books to n people (but still less than is possible with a digital loan), pay more for their books for this very reason. If you want to loan out your digital book to n people, then you are going to have to pay a lot more for it (and that is just n

The starting point is that scanning a book and making it available to somebody else involves copying the book, and therefore infringes copyright unless you have the copyright holder’s permission or a fair use justification. In contrast, lending a physical book does not result in a copy being created. The e-lending system you have proposed is essentially what the Internet Archive calls “controlled digital lending.” The publishers say it is copyright infringement [1]; the Internet Archive says it

If you buy a physical book, you have a right to lend it for free or re-sell it (first-sale doctrine). The publishers want to establish a precedent that you cannot do the same thing with digital books: the library must buy a special license and pay for every reading.So this is about stripping people from their rights regarding to books made with a new technology.

You are allowed to copy other's books. You just can't derive a revenue from them.

Copyright infringement is about publishing, not consuming. If I copy a friend's legally-purchased .epub that's like borrowing their legally-purchased printed book. Same as if I take a book from a Little Library in my neighborhood, or borrow a paper book from the city library. Why is the transfer of digital content more restricted? A print publisher can't prevent a library from lending their book as many times as they want, so why do we give digital publishers that ability?

Copyright has a thing called the first sale doctrine. You buy a book and now that copy is yours. You can sell it to someone else or lend it out etc., which is what libraries do. They don't have to negotiate with publishers at all, they just go to a book store and buy books.Publishers claim that ebooks are totally different and have to be licensed instead of purchased because it's the internet. This is, of course, a naked money grab, but then they threaten to sue anyone who tries to

1. We are not talking about physical books.2. DRM is built in to most purchased ebooks, which means you can’t consume the book on any device. “Illegal” tools exist to circumvent this.3. Large ebook stores - like other digital stores - essentially lend you a copy of the book. So when they are forced to pull a book, they’ll pull your access too.Of course, now that the big players have consumed/archived the entire book dump, they can go ahead and kill it to prevent others from doing t

Libraries buy the e-book legally and loan it out to a single person who then returns it. Libraries are often forced to buy ebooks at a much higher than consumer price, supposedly to offset the cost of customers who would buy the book themselves if libraries didn't exist. The author/publisher get paid for every copy purchased by every library and no more than 1 person can be reading that copy of the book at a given time. If someone wants to permanently add it to their collection they mu