If their works were able to be lent to anyone and everyone in the world they wanted higher prices for their books to be charged, just like what libraries have to pay since they can also lend to anyone off of the street.
Either way, it's hard to see how any of this was LendInk's fault.
The only truth is power. Legally the site was in the clear, and yet the authors had enough power to shut it down.
Many of the authors understood that it was legal but still did not like it because it skirted the spirit of the contract which that lending is for family and friends.
The strangest part of this story is that some outraged people were able to close a website they didn't have any claim to.
You can choose to strictly be on one side or the other, but the problem is that once you commit, you lose the ability to appeal to the other side.
http://heideas.blogspot.ca/2006/08/case-of-2000000-comma-and...
Here's a choice paragraph:
The CRTC lawyers, "armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation" decided
that a comma setting off an adjunct clause from a conjoined structure
necessarily gives it matrix scope, and if Rogers' contract lawyers didn't know
that, too bad for them.
The authors did not write the Amazon publishing contracts. Most of them aren't lawyers, and a lot of them may not even be college graduates. They cannot, and legally will not be held to a strict reading of the contract if they can prove that they reasonably believed that the Lendle program was limited (or marketed as limited) to friends and family of the ebook purchaser.
BTW, that's not the most expensive comma. Check out the comma in the Cleveland Browns contract that cost Cleveland a Superbowl-winning franchise. (The current Browns are an expansion team.)
1. They don't.
2. I don't either, I can lend physical books to whoever I damn please even in an other country if I want, and the author won't get any more direct money out of that.
3. Hell, companies can buy a book for all employees to read, they're not charged more because they're companies.
EDIT: in the U.S.
If anything, if this was the route intended, said authors COULD try to claim "tortious interference" (whereby a third party induces or enables the breaking of a contract between the first and second parties), but in order to do so, they'd first have to establish that a) the spirit of the contract with Amazon was 'friends and family lending', something that is not at all hinted at in the letter of the contract, and b) such a thing was known by LendInk and they knowingly set forth to do business regardless - and I think there would be a nebulous case with difficulty proving either.
On the other hand, perhaps there are some defamation cases floating around that LendInk could win, possibly also interfering with someone's livelihood?
I'm surprised the AG has not come out against services like BookCrossing which allows individuals to trade physical books and works similarly to LendInk. (Maybe there was and I just didn't hear about it).
It sounds like there were two objections:
1. OMG, this site is pirating my content! 2. I didn't want people to lend to anyone, just their friends and family
Case #1 is clearly an issue of authors being misinformed or technologically unsophisticated.
Case #2 is that authors probably thought that they were buying into a particular scenario, but the technology did not actually serve that scenario. The scenario I'm guessing the second camp thought they were buying into was one where lending would actually not be widespread --- where one would have to personally know someone in order to read a book without purchasing. It didn't limit who could be lent to by forcing users to declare "friends and family". I'm guessing that authors felt that LendInk was increasing the amount of lends actually happening above what would have happened had LendInk not been present.
Note: I'm not passing judgement on LendInk. Just that I don't think many people are able to make the technical distinctions that many HN readers or readers of tech sites are able to make.
Nope. That would require that Amazon have some way to investigate whether someone was really your "friend" (how is "friend" defined?) and be willing to spend the money to carry out the investigation. Not likely for a $1.99 ebook.
Perhaps they could limit you to a list of friends (a maximum of ten or whatever) but that wouldn't allow you to (e.g.) lend programming books to one set of friends and novels to another.