BookaBooka Halts Business To Find Agreement With Finnish Copyright Agencies
Back in April we wrote about how BookaBooka, the Finnish book lending service, had received a cease-and-desist letter from the Finnish copyright agencies. Now BookaBooka decided to halt their business to work out the legal aspects of their lending business to keep the copyright agencies at bay.
The initial contacts from the Finnish copyright agencies weren't exactly co-operative. I had an e-mail chat with the founder of BookaBooka, Jussi Riku, and he confirmed that they were asked to stop their business on threat of 2 years behind bars. After this BookaBooka agreed to direct their SMS revenues to the copyright holders through the way that would be the best possible for the copyright agency. This was not negotiable and thus they were back to square one. According to Riku, all the discussions between BookaBooka and the copyright agencies were had in public media and thus the talks were not very fruitful.
