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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

>Their example didn't say they got their friend's permission prior to lending whatever was being lent to them.

You think it is okay to lend out other peoples property? You need a serious reality check if so.

I think people are missing the distinction between what you are saying happened and the theoretical situation I was noting. I said lend out something someone lent to you, you are saying they didn't actually get lent anything, they lent out something they weren't yet lent.

What you're alleging they did is equivalent to someone going to their friend's house and taking something of theirs to lend to someone else without asking them. I agree that if that's an accurate assessment of what actually happened, it's a lot less defensible.

Interestingly, if you consider any physical thing, in none of those scenarios does the manufacturer of the thing that was lent or not lent—with or without permission—have any say-so with regard to the lending of that thing.

That's because we confer and infer specific rights in different situations there. Selling something confers ownership, and lending something confers right to use, possibly limited by stipulations at that time. Re-lending something may or may not be allowed depending on what the original lending agreement was. In the metaphor, limiting in this way is like your friend saying "here, but don't let anyone else use it, I trust you, not them" when it's lent. For businesses doing some sort of lending it's generally more complex and a contract (like what you sign when renting a car), and may or may not cover usage by other people.

I have no idea what limitations, if any, are put on the lending of digital goods by law or by the specific terms of IA, or the terms the other libraries in question offer.

> In the metaphor, limiting in this way is like your friend saying "here, but don't let anyone else use it, I trust you, not them" when it's lent. For businesses doing some sort of lending it's generally more complex and a contract (like what you sign when renting a car), and may or may not cover usage by other people.

Sure, but at no point does the producer of a physical object that is being lent get a say-so in the agreement between my friend and me, or the contract between a lending business and me.

In the car rental metaphor, it'd be like Ford suing Hertz for lending me a Focus that Ford already sold to Hertz.

If the people you borrowed from say its OK after the fact then yes it is OK.

If I borrow a neighbours defibrillator, without asking, to save their child it would be insane for the manufacturer of the defibrillator to sue me for not buying my own defibrillator. While in theory the neighbour could object to me borrowing the defibrillator without permission, that does not appear to be what happened. Based on IA's statements it appears that libraries are saying after the fact that they were happy for their copies of books to be loaned by IA.

I would assume from their actions these publishers hoped to make a windfall on book sales when people were no longer able to access libraries and they saw IA's actions as attacking this potential profit. I can't think of any other reason why they would peruse their current course of action.

It's not OK morally to lend something someone lent you without their permission, but I don't think it's copyright infringement either.

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