Ebook TOS: can't share with spouse

[elf]

It's hit the news that Kobo Says You’re Not Allowed to Share Your Account – Not With a Spouse, Your Kids, Anyone -- someone finally wrangled an answer out of them, wherein they said "Legally, only the account holder has license to use the material."

Kobo's not alone in this; very major ebook store, and most of the minor ones, has a clause like this. Kobo is probably the first one to confirm in writing that it means "you are not allowed to let your spouse borrow your ereader and read the books you bought from us."

No wonder ebook sales for YA books are lousy. Kids can't buy books directly, and stores won't promote them because that would mean saying, "share your purchases with someone else."

Amazon Kindle Store (and wow, do they *bury* this; it's *hard* to find this page):

Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.

(emphasis added.)

Barnes & Noble NOOK books (six-point grey type on a white background is always such a joy to read! and only 7000 words of it!):

Barnes & Noble.com grants you a limited, nonexclusive, revocable license to access and make personal, non-commercial use of the Digital Content in accordance with these Terms of Use.
...
Only certain eBooks are eligible for lending. eBooks with an icon on their product pages indicate their eligibility for lending and will also have a "LendMe" link...

Smashwords:

If you purchase a work, you hold a non-exclusive, non-transferable, and non-distributable right of use. In other words, you are free to enjoy it for your own use, but you are not authorized to share, sell, or distribute the work to others.

Fictionwise:

The download of these product(s) is intended for the Fictionwise Member's personal and noncommercial use. Any other use of eBooks downloaded from Fictionwise.com is strictly prohibited. Users may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of these product(s), in whole or in part.

Also, the "copyright notice" showing on logged-in members' bookshelf pages says,
"You may download eBooks that you have bought for your personal use, but may not distribute them to other people using email, floppy, or any other method."

("Any other method" can include "hand them the hardware on which the ebook is stored.")

Sony Reader Store:

The license granted to you hereunder does not convey to you any of the following: (a) reproduction or promotional use rights in the Content (e.g., any uses that implicate or require public performance, or any use that would result in the commercial redistribution of the Content or any metadata underlying the Content), (b) rights to enter into arrangements with any revenue-generating broadcast system (terrestrial, satellite, cable and/or other distribution channels), (c) rights to distribute or redistribute Content on streaming applications (via Internet, intranets and/or other networks), (d) rights to distribute to others Content on other content distribution systems or on physical media (compact discs, digital versatile discs, semiconductor chips, hard drives, memory cards and the like), or (e) commercial, sale, resale, reproduction, distribution or promotional use rights for the Content.

(emphasis added)

(Note that an ebook reader is a physical medium, essentially a flash drive with a viewer attached.)

BooksonBoard:

BooksOnBoard and/or our publishing partners gives you the non-exclusive right to download, subject to the restrictions set forth herein, copies of the applicable Digital Content to your Devices, and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times on your Devices or as otherwise authorized by BooksOnBoard and/or our publishing partners as part of the Service for your personal, non-commercial use.
...
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, transfer, or assign your rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party except as expressly permitted by BooksOnBoard. Provided, however, that nothing in the Terms of Service shall prohibit any uses of Digital Content that would otherwise be permitted under the United States Copyright Act.

(emphasis added)

Ah. The first one that indicates that the rights are based on copyright law!

Google Books:

Google gives you the non-exclusive right to download, subject to the restrictions set forth herein, copies of the applicable Digital Content to your Devices, and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times on your Devices or as otherwise authorized by Google as part of the Service for your personal, non-commercial use.
...
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, transfer, or assign your rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party except as expressly permitted by Google. Provided, however, that nothing in the Terms of Service shall prohibit any uses of Digital Content that would otherwise be permitted under the United States Copyright Act.

(Apparently, Google borrowed BoB's boilerplate. I'd think it was the other way around, except BoB has been selling ebooks much longer than Google.)

...and so on. I have to look sideways at that "personal and non-commercial" phrase... does that mean you can't make money writing reviews of ebooks bought from them? Can't use them for academic research that you get paid for? Can't use the ebooks you bought to get ahead in business?

Is there a legal line between "commercial use of an ebook file" and "commercial use of the contents of the ebook?" The first may be *intended*, but I doubt the second is excluded by their current phrasing.

And apparently, according to most ebook stores, handing your ereader to your spouse is just as much piracy as uploading your purchases to a torrent. Or at least, just as much a violation of the user terms, and they can freeze your account and lock you out of your books if they catch you at it.

Comments

[elf]

I'm not worried about the pay-per-readthrough model. Not that I don't think publishers will try it--I'm sure they will--but the "get book content; share freely online" model predates ebook sales by about five years, and has grown with computer & internet tech faster than commercial exploitation has.

Like the music industry, the lumbering publishing industries are going to have to deal with the fact that they cannot control use of their content; if they're lucky, they can find a way to make enough sales to keep their companies going. If not, they collapse, and authors will need to find other ways to get income from readers.

That part will happen. We LIKE having new books to read. We WANT to support authors. The internet is packed with ways to get money from buyers to sellers; if the current ones stop working for authors, they'll shift to some of the others.

They won't, however, EVER be able to enforce "1 sale = 1 reader." Because no matter how strict the DRM is, it's not going to stop someone from just typing the text in. So I don't worry about new, ever-more-ridiculous DRM models; all they do is drive more people into fringe activities just to get normal use from their purchases.

[holyschist]

I do, though, because I am kind of lazy. I don't want to scan or type up books (although I've been seriously tempted for a couple out-of-print books I keep trying to get people to read). I don't want to have to spend half an hour fixing formatting when I buy an ebook, just so it's readable. Self-publishing has its pros, but there is a basic bar of "typically grammatical and spell-checked" that non-OCRed publishing house (e)books usually meet right off the bat. As much as I'm frustrated with major aspects of traditional publishing, I'm not keen on throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

(And I suppose they can always work harder on controlling devices, if they can't control data, which is even more potentially scary.