The Finnish book renting service targeted at students, BookaBooka, has been sent a cease and desist letter (in Finnish only) by the Finnish copyright agencies claiming that the company is breaking the law. The service has quietly received a lot of attention among students as a place to put your books into use – rent them for a monthly fee.
I first heard of BookaBooka about half a year ago and thought the concept was interesting, but it did not quite amaze me too much. The service has become successful among the most needy – the students who do not want to spend their few earned euros for expensive books. Very understandable – I didn’t either when I was in university.
What the Finnish copyright agencies, Kopiosto (or the Finnish Copyright Society) and TTVK (Anti-Piracy Centre in Finland), have sent a cease and desist letter for the founders of the service claiming that they break several different points in the Finnish copyright law. The irony in this lays in the way BookaBooka works – which reminds a lot the way ThePirateBay.org works: BookaBooka only connects people wanting to rent books.
According to the Finnish copyright law, it is perfectly legal for two individuals to practice this sort of activity among themselves – even for a fee. But the copyright agencies claim that since the service is on the internet, it is targeted at the public at large and thus does not comply with this point – which is a load of crap. The problem with BookaBooka in my opinion is that they are the enzyme or a platform that took the intercity book-lending to a national level threatening the business of the publishers.
There has been a lot of debate on this on the internet, both for and against the service. The problem I see with this is that the world we live in is changing and new services such as BookaBooka ought to be able to enable the same activity online that people practice offline. Once this creates friction, our laws are outdated and do not work in the way they should.
iWillStudy.com
Unita
indeed :|
I have to agree. I have to say this reminds me of the rental DVD industry in Finland. Some years ago I was interested in setting up a Netflix type servcie, where people could rent DVDs via the internet and they would be posted. It seemed a successful model in the US but after a lot of research it turned out that in the US, once you buy a DVD you have the freedom to do what you want with it. By contrast, to rent out a DVD in Finland you need to buy a rental DVD. For popular films they cost around €150 (Harry Potter, for example). As a result I concluded the model would not make economic sense here.
AFAIK the case for books is as with the DVDs mentioned earlier. A library has to buy a “library copy” of a book which then comes with the right to rent (or rather, lend) it out. Sort of when you buy a book or a DVD, you’re not really buying a physical object, but a license to the content. And that license restricts what you can do with the physical medium. Funny though that when you buy an ebook, they’ll present you with a license agreement. Should plain old books have an introductory section: “turn the page only if you agree to these licensing terms…”
Funny (or not) how this seems to another one of those disagreements between layman types and people who have perhaps in some period of their life studied law. I, for one, am always finding myself in such discussions. At university we have been trained to regard the law as one of the highest possible standards and as such we rarely find fault in it (although amusingly it might be our job).
So we go about in our lives thinking that whatever the law says we have to abide by and there shouldn’t be much discussion. Not unless it could save our client, in which case every other bit of the law is absolutely correct, except for the part we would need to interpret in our favor in a not very logical way.
So anyway, when not in court, we tend to think that the law is there for a reason and because the legislators have gone ahead with it, it must be right. But every now and again we are drawn into discussion with people who have not studied law and seem to think that in some particular parts, it’s a load of..well, poo. As citizens well versed in the language, of course we must disagree! What would our civilization come to without law?! If this one piece is not correct then who is to say if the whole building won’t collapse?! Impossible! This is the law and so it shall remain!
Right? Well… mostly..you can’t say, really. Might be right, might be wrong. Moral decision, although they have been stated in law in some way or the other, really depend on the person. And I do think most of us would think that it is okay if I lend my copy of Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to some other person. Because, let’s face it, it’s a funny book. And as far as I can tell.. I bought it. So it’s mine.
Okay, so legally I purchased a license to read it. Whatever. I bought a book. It’s mine. I’ll do what I’ll please with it, right? I mean, I can sell it, so why not lend it out?
I understand this as a person, but.. as somebody trained in the legal profession (although in another country), I can see how this could not be the case.
I have accustomed to think law and justice system optimizes being predictable and not so much finding what is right.
Imagine the world that we would be in if engineers had to respect decisions or solutions of past engineers, not only as guideline but as a binding precedent. This is however how the justice system works.
Laws or justice system are not necessarily ‘right’, and newer decisions are not necessarily better than previous since all the cumulated legacy has to be included in the system, to provide a predictable framework for people to operate.
Internet introduces problems for officials and lawmakers since it’s quite uncontrollable and services like this can be operated from anywhere. If you want people to obey the laws, you almost need to consider making laws more obayable since you cannot enforce them anymore.
We all break copyright laws several times a day just by using computer or doing our work. It doesn’t mean that copyrights are obsolete but laws defining them might be.
A load of crap indeed. What the book industry doesn’t seem to be getting that the people renting the books would not buy them anyway – they would simply copy them or buy the user generated notes (both activities currently endorsed by schools and student unions to ease the financial burden for the students).
Seems like a lot of poo indeed. While I usually bought my books (seeing it as an investment) there were also the occasions where I borrowed the books from classmates or the library or even copied them. I agree with Antti that if a law creates friction if applied to online activities, it could be that it is outdated and should be revised.
I believe Kopiosto and TTVK haven’t heard of http://bookcrossing.com/ neither.
If you understand finnish, here is a video interview of Bookabooka founder Jussi Riku.
http://digitytot.blogspot.com/2009/04/jakso-5-bookabooka-ja-kaksi-vuotta.html
What if I don’t understand Finnish?