books in a stack - Credit: austinevan on Flickr (CC BY)
AfterDawn.com reports that a Finnish book rental service called “Bookabooka” is being threatened by copyright organization TTVK. TTVK calls the site the “Pirate Bay for textbooks.”
Bookabooka doesn’t host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional “snailmail” (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn’t handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.
Despite these “small” differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers’ association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.
This is just outrageous. I don’t believe this is even within the scope of copyright law. Is this really any different than what Craigslist allows people to do? The article says that Bookabooka is not responding to the threats. Good for them. We need more services like this, not less.