Neuter how? As I said above, you can load an Amazon book onto your Kindle without wifi by using the “download and transfer via USB” option. I’m sure there are things you can do with a Kindle that require wifi, but you can absolutely load books without wifi
But I don’t think there was ever any intention that they would sell a lot of copies to the public at $70. The intent was to try to maximize total revenues. The model was that video rental stores would be willing to pay very high prices for brand new releases, but that this initial demand would be undermined by offering the movie for sale to the public at a reasonable price at the same time. Plus, of course, with physical VCR tapes the technology did not yet exist to ruthlessly enforce a two-tier price system if they tried to offer the same movie to rental stores at $70 while offering it to the public at the same time at $20. But the movies always became available for purchase after some time had elapsed at a reasonable price.
Similar things happen today, but of course the models for revenue maximization are quite different given our different viewing habits today. There’s a timing pattern for availability in theatres, then progressive changes in availability & price for streaming purchase and streaming rental.
One could make the case (and some have here made such case), that allowing another person to simutaniousally have the copy that you currently have may have prevented someone from buying a copy that they could not get at the library, if you still ‘blocked’ that borrow.
However that seems to fall apart as I assume the contracted agreement has to allow the kindle environment and all parties would have the ability to review it and signed off on it. Now if there are issues, that could be addresses in the software or perhaps for the renewal with perhaps the fees changed to account for the dupes, or the publisher could drop the kindle format.
As for what you should do, I use Libby and for that if I don’t like a book I will usually return it right away to free it up for others, though sometimes I slip at that, sometimes forget I have the book at all. Would I borrow a copy and return it and still use it as you describe, perhaps as i do see that as better for everyone. Like if I forget about the book, I won’t auto-hold it for 14 days which has happened. I would rather borrow but not take up a borrow slot. So yes if I used the device like you I borrow what I want then return it right away (but keep a copy for some time), but mostly so I don’t have to remember to return it if I forget about the book.
And that’s the topic of the thread. The OP does this, and wonders if there are any ethical issues with it. I personally do not think this is the type of situation where “it’s fine, because few people will do the same” applies.
Nonsense. Not everything that is possible is legal or ethical, and an agreement only has to state what the expected behavior is, you don’t have to make it impossible to do anything the agreement forbids.
IANAL, but how can I violate a contractual agreement that I’m not a party to?
Someone tried to pull this on me professionally once, claiming that my actions violated a provision in the contract between them and our mutual client and I just laughed at them.
The question was about ethics, and whether some party is losing out through you doing this, not about whether you could actually get in any trouble for exploiting a limitation of the DRM technology.
It is not our responsibility to make sure some publisher does not “lose out”. Not that that means one should exploit a DRM loophole maliciously.
It falls under contract law, legally at least. Not nonsense, it’s how such things are done. Now ethically, I would say that the contract agreed upon would allow for what it allows for. There are moral limits, such as the software gave you it forever, but as far as the publisher is concerned, it needs to be addresses in the contract.
[quote=“kanicbird, post:49, topic:927961, full:true”]
The nonsense is in thinking it’s fine to use loopholes in the technical solutions if there’s a lack of a “what if the user circumvents our ‘lending one kindle copy at a time’” clause in the agreements libraries have with publishers, or that such a loophole means a library patron can ignore the agreement they entered into when they got a library card or signed up for loaning ebooks, which presumably says something about using the service as intended.
Or possibly you assumed these agreements contained no such restrictions. In which case, sure, your argument isn’t nonsense, it’s just based on faulty premises. It’s quite obvious that even if it isn’t spelled out in detail in the agreements, that once you press “return this book” on the library website, you are no longer entitled to use that electronic copy. I’m sure that if it became a large enough issue for libraries and publishers to deal with it they would do so by making it so you could only read it through some software while connected to the internet, and that prosecuting a case against a single user would be counter-productive, that doesn’t mean the combined meaning of your agreements with the library and the app-provider doesn’t currently add up to “you’re only allowed to use this content in a way that doesn’t infringe on copyright, and keeping a copy while claiming you have returned it constitutes such an infringement.”
There are some apps like that, and they are horrendously bad for people who want to use the loan as intended. We don’t all have internet access all the time.
My commuter train passes through an internet dead zone every day. If I can’t read my ebook on the train, what’s the point of having it at all? I vacation on an island with poor internet service. I like to read library books there, however. For that matter, I think most people leave the WiFi off on their kindle most of the time, because it burns through battery life about 8 times faster with wifi on that with wif off. Restricting library books this way just doesn’t do the job.
Here are Overdrive’s terms of use. I’ve quoted the digital content section below.
I’m not seeing anything about keeping things longer than intended. As long as your not distributing or copying what you’ve kept, you aren’t in violation of the agreement.
In the “Security, Cracking, and Hacking” section, they do have the line
- attempt to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
However, I don’t see turning off the wifi on a kindle as circumventing DRM, but rather using it as Amazon intended. It would be trivially easy for Amazon to have made the Kindle delete books after a particular date, whether they’re connected to wifi or not. The kindle knows the time, and could also make books from the future inaccessible, so resetting the time wouldn’t work. This is different from “there’s a bug in your software and I can exploit it,” this is a feature Amazon decided to implement.
That all goes to whether or not your violating your agreement with the library and Overdrive (if you’re not using Overdrive, then you’ll have to look at their terms of service); it does not go to whether the behavior is ethical. For that, I agree with @Darren_Garrison
Digital Content License
OverDrive grants you a non-assignable, non-transferable, limited license to use the digital content provided by OverDrive’s suppliers (“Content”) for your personal, non-commercial use, subject to and in accordance with the terms of the applicable EULA and these Terms. Where permitted, you may copy, transfer and burn the Content only for your personal, non-commercial use.
You shall not:
redistribute, repackage, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, publicly display, rent, share, lend, modify, extract, reveal, adapt, edit, sub-license and/or otherwise transfer or misuse the Content;
use the Content for synchronization, public performance, promotional use, commercial sale, resale, reproduction and/or distribution;
infringe the rights of the Content’s copyright owners; and/or
use the Software or any other means to download and/or save Content on public Internet terminals, shared devices, and/or public computers unless specified as a permitted use in the relevant Software EULA and only if permitted by Content suppliers, e.g. using OverDrive Read.
Violation of any of the above restrictions may result in a termination of your ability to access the Content. OverDrive reserves any and all rights or remedies that may be available in the event of your breach of these Terms.
I don’t have a Kindle but use Overdrive for library audiobooks. I routinely “copy, transfer, and burn the Content” onto my Mp3 player for listening, with the understanding that this is quite kosher under the rules. (The Overdrive desktop app even has a “Burn” button built right in.) Nevertheless, on the due date Overdrive will delete the original Mp3 downloads it made on my PC before I transferred them to an Mp3 player.
I trust I’m not expected to wipe my Mp3 player clean on the due date, on the honor system? When Overdrive deletes its original files, I get the impression they want me to stop listening on that date. But in full accordance with the rules, I do already have copies elsewhere. Unless I’m badly misreading the rules, and committing a crime by using an Mp3 player, I don’t understand why they bother to delete files from my PC.
From the " Copyright, Trademark and Intellectual Property" of the Terms and Conditions:
For Content downloaded or accessed from a library service, at the end of the lending period, your license to the Content terminates, and you may no longer use or access the Content. At the end of the lending period, you shall delete and/or destroy any and all copies of the Content. In the event OverDrive, the library or other rights holders determines you are violating permitted uses of the Content, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your ability to use or access a Service or the Content.
So, you ARE expected to wipe your player clean on the due date. I have no idea how they can enforce this, however.
The same way they know if you keep track of what page you were reading by laying a physical dead tree book open face-down. Librarians know, they just know. You then have to return all books through the drop box because they can now look into your soul.
Not trying to pile on, but FYI …
The [Burn] button exists because Overdrive can also be used as a player for stuff you’ve purchased and therefore have a perpetual (or at least long term) license to. Which you can legitimately transfer to additional devices.
Ultimately, this whole thread is discussing the same sort of ethics that’s somewhere between these two limits:
-
When they’re giving out free samples at the store, is it OK for me to take a couple dozen, not just one? Or to take a whole box of 200 little soaps off the maid’s cart at a hotel?
-
Is it OK to deliberately mis-ring my groceries at the self-checkout to save a few bucks? Like buying prime rib but telling the computer it’s really potatoes on the scale. After all, if the store wasn’t happy with people doing it, they’d do more to prevent it. Since I can do it, they must be OK with me actually doing it.
Each example above has been debated at length over the years here. With plenty of people saying it’s totally OK to do what’s suggested.
IMO none of these are great places to stick one’s ethical stake in the ground.
The narrow interpretation of the OP’s scenario is slightly different in that they are not directly benefiting from the cheating; they’re simply enabling others to more easily or more effectively cheat. And to do so unwittingly.
Well, what I do (keeping the library book a few days past the due date, to finish reading it) is more akin to helping myself to a second little soap off the maid’s cart because I used up the one they gave me than it is to taking a box of 200 of them, imo. Also, I didn’t read the entire agreement, and didn’t know it was against the rules.
But this discussion has been interesting.
Making a free to borrow library book available a week or so early is worse than filling a duffel bag with 200 soaps from a maid’s cart? Thankfully you think this less bad than fraudulently underpaying your groceries by $50-$100.
What is it about copyright that makes people act like novelists are being mugged at knifepoint when someone reads their book without permission? What the OP does is, from the perspective of the publisher, functionally identical to a person reading the first page, deciding “this is shite” and returning it, and also identical to a person speed reading through the thing in 45 minutes, then returning it. Yet this worse than stealing 200 soaps from a hotel.
I’d like to remind posters that it is the policy of the straight dope message board to take a hard line on copyright law.