Ilegal alugar livros? E emprestar, também irá ser?

Parece que na Finlandia uma empresa que permite a estudantes alugarem os seus manuais escolares uns aos outros está a ser processada por violação do copyright:

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.

Se se considerar que alugar livros é uma violação de coyright, será que emprestar também não o será?

Richard Stallman em tempos escreveu The Right to Read, que penso pretendia ser uma "redução ao absurdo":

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment—for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)

[Um outro aspecto curioso do texto de Stallman é a sua sugestão de que os Democratas serão mais perigosos que os Republicanos, devido às suas ligações a Hollywood]