Do I violate the copyright law if I lend my book to someone for reading?
Are the copyright laws for eBooks different from those of published-printed books?
Don’t private libraries that lend books to people for money violate any of the copyright laws??
The key word is “copy.”
You have the rght (so far) of resale.* You can sell, lend, give or burn the specific copy of a physical book that you bought. Ditto (with caveats) for software, VHS tapes, DVD’s and CDs.
As mentioned, they keyword is “copy”. You can’t really give your eBook to someone without copying it
Plus, most books have DRM and breaking DRM protection is a violation of the DMCA prohibition against it.
You can loan the book or sell it. There’s a used paperback bookstore 4 miles from my house.
No. Doctrine of first sale; you are allowed to do what you like with the physical book you were sold.
If your e-book was sold to you in physical form (i.e. on a disk), and you don’t keep any copies, and you want to lend the disk, the same doctrine applies.
You don’t, however, get the right to copy (hence “copy right”) that material unless the copyright holder says you do. Some do, some don’t. Some of the e-book publishers are working with the readers to try and allow this in a technological way (i.e. a "lend’ button).
There are a few copy exemptions allowed by “fair use.” As a general rule, you can assume that anything someone on the internet calls “fair use” isn’t actually covered by those exemptions. – they’re very limited (academic use, reviews, and parody are pretty much it), and even then things like the amount allowed have to be decided pretty much case by case, and often by the courts.
No.
The law isn’t different, as such. The difference is in whether you own the book or not. If you own a book, you can lend it or sell it. If you don’t own a book – that is, you possess it and use it subject to a licensing agreement (a type of contract) – then you might not be able to lend it or sell it. This would be true whether you are talking about a physical paper book or an E-book.
It depends.
Just some nitpicks/clarifications here …
It’s not that “the law technically only protects right of resale for material produced … in the USA.” It’s that there is a provision of the Copyright Act that might constitute an exception or an exemption to the First Sale Doctrine. And Congress is allowed to do that. The First Sale Doctrine does not constitute a fundamental right protected by the Constitution. The question is really what Congress’s intent was – did they intend this prohibition to be an exception to the First Sale Doctrine or not?
Only if the disk was acquired through a sale and not a license. Software, for example, is almost never sold. It is almost always licensed. So even if you have a physical disk, if the license says that you can’t sell it, then you (probably) can’t sell it.
As mentioned by TimeWinder above, the fancy legal term for this is the first-sale doctrine. It basically says that once a physical item is sold (the “first sale”), the copyright holder can no longer assert any rights over that particular object.
And to emphasize the point, the physical object is not the same as the words that comprise the work. The physical object is the sum total of the words, the appearance of those words on the page, an art on the cover or the interior, the supplementary material, and the packaging of that material.
I think this is the point that confuses people, especially when it comes to electronic text. Although it isn’t strictly true, much electronic text appears at first glance to strip away all the packaging and leave only words. Therefore, the logical leap is that if you can lend or sell a physical book you should be able to lend or sell the words in an ebook, and many make the additional leap that you don’t need to pay for the words or that you can publish the words themselves.
We probably need new laws to account for this new world, though I would say that we’re in such a transition period that new laws that don’t - couldn’t - foresee the coming changes would be a worse problem than we have currently.
Even so, the basic notions of copyright still give good guidance as to behavior. The author owns the words and copyright is control of who and how they can be copied. The author, or the publisher to whom the distribution is licensed, maintains legally and morally full authority, and I’m not punning there. The physical objects that contain words can be sold, lent, altered, or destroyed. The words themselves are sacrosanct. Every use of them, some of which are certainly protected by law under Fair Use and other educational standards, needs to reference the author’s right of control.
There was also the case against someone who resold AutoCAD disks, which held that the license supplied with that software forbade resale; that clause was upheld by a court decision not long ago. (However, IIRC, that was the case where the owner upgraded then claimed he could sell the disks with the implied license, even though the upgrade did not allow for that.)
So if my eBook is a nontransferable license, can I nonetheless lend my Kindle with the book already on it to a third party for them to read? Can husband and wife ot parent and child not share a Nook?
I have seen the following message on the copyright page of some books:
(The particular example I’m looking at now is in the U.S. edition of a book that was originally published in the U.K., by Penguin.)
This suggests to me that, if you were somewhere other than the U.S., you might be violating some sort of law or policy if you lend your book after having it re-bound, though in the U.S. this is okay. I know I’ve seen public library books that have been rebound—is this really forbidden in other countries? Why is this an issue? I found an old thread asking about this, but I wasn’t totally satisfied with the answers given there.
A little secret for those worried about “you may not” notices: they’re not legally binding unless the other party can prove you’ve somehow agreed to them. That’s why software almost always includes a a EULA screen and “I agree” button in the installer.
Lying is generally legal, even for businesses. There are a few specific things businesses can’t lie about (the presence or lack of a product feature, stating something is illegal when it’s not, and the like). That “you may not” is just a demanding version of “please don’t”.
The think the cover restriction has to do with stopping the sale and circulation of pulped copies. These usually have the covers torn off and sent back to the publisher for credit although other methods have been used. The bookseller is supposed to destroy (or “pulp”) the book. But not all do that.
And while the person who tore off the cover but didn’t destroy the rest of the book and sold/gave away it is in civil trouble with the publisher, I don’t think anyone else “downstream” after that could be sued unless they were a party to the original con.
After all, how can the publisher distinguish a book whose cover was naturally lost from one that was intended to be pulped?
Nowadays they typically don’t strip the cover. Instead they draw a black mark on the bottom edge. Those remaindered copies are then sold at a big discount.
Two different things. Cover stripping applies only to mass market paperbacks. Hardbacks and trade paperbacks were never cover stripped, and those are the ones which see the black mark for remaindering. Booksellers did the stripping, but the marks may be put on at any level, bookseller, publisher, or wholesaler.
So If I have an eBook on my kindle, I can lend my kindle to someone else for reading.
But if I have bought my eBook and it’s on my laptop, can I transfer that eBook (as in cut-paste if not copy paste :P) to let’s say my mobile or to someone else’s laptop-mobile? Or is it a copyright violation too??
I’ll bet that every ebook you buy comes with a terms of service that specifies what you can or can’t do with it. That applies before generic copyright law does.
Yes, it is.
If you copy it to someone else’s laptop/mobile, then it is possible for that copy to be read at the same time you are reading your copy – thus depriving the author of the benefit of selling another copy, which is his right.
That’s also why lending your kindle with ebooks on it to someone else to read is NOT a copyright violation – since you have lent the only copy, you can’t be reading that ebook yourself while it’s loaned out.
(Note that many ebooks, and software, are allegedly not sold, but only *licensed[/i[ to you to use. Because companies can put restrictive conditions on those licenses that would not be allowed on physical books.
To be clear, it is theoretically possible to license physical books rather than sell them.