Kobo Says You’re Not Allowed to Share Your Account – Not With a Spouse, Your Kids, Anyone
From The Digital Reader:
Paul Durrant, a fellow ebook enthusiast whom I know through MobileRead Forums, decided last week to push Kobo to explain the specific details of the T&C we all agree to.
Kobo’s contract with users is fairly standard boilerplate, and there was one particular clause which says that a “Registered Users” cannot share the ebooks, yada, yada, yada. It’s boilerplate, but if you cannot guess what it says click on the link above.
The thing is, the only person who is “Registered Users” is the one whose name is on the account. So naturally this raises questions about whether someone’s spouse can use the account. Now that is an interesting question, isn’t it?
A straightforward reading of the T&C says that you cannot share an account between several people, something which is quite common.
Paul wanted to know if that was really what Kobo meant to disallow when they wrote the contract. And after he sent several emails and received 2 irrelevant replies, this was what he was told:
Legally, only the account holder has license to use the material.
That’s a very interesting answer, because it means that there are potentially millions of Kobo users currently in violation of Kobo’s T&C. They are all at risk of having their account closed and losing access to their ebooks.
But what’s even more interesting is that apparently Kobo expects you to buy a separate copy of an ebook for each person in your household who want to read it!
Heck, that’s something I didn’t even do for paper books, and it’s certainly not something I’m going to start doing for ebooks. And while I’m sure it’s some publishers wishing for this more than Kobo, this still came from Kobo customer service and the Kobo T&C.
Link to the rest at The Digital Reader and thanks to Eric for the tip.
Tech companies typically don’t think about their Terms and Conditions becoming the source of bad publicity. In fact, nobody from Marketing or PR even reads the things. From PG’s extensive experience with inside counsel at tech companies, he guarantees that almost none of these otherwise skilled lawyers ever considers customer backlash when drafting the T’s & C’s.
That may change.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
“That may change.”
P.G.
It darn well needs to. The fact that one can’t permit a fiend to read material on yer pad/kobo/kindle. “‘Ere darlin’ have a read of this great passage from IQ84, he out prousts proust.”
If ebooks cost a routine 50cents, I could see the logic, but they are frequently more expensive than their paper equivalents, and we’re only renting the accursed things.
Summat is badly rotten, and the pong is overwhelming. The pirates aren’t all on the Bay.
brendan
This is serious – I believe fiends can get quite nasty if thwarted. Fiendish, in fact…
Amazon’s fault.
@ Dan. Lol!
>But what’s even more interesting is that apparently Kobo expects you to buy a separate copy of an ebook for each person in your household who want to read it!
The reasonability of this attitude is directly proportional to the reasonability of the prices.
You can’t really expect consumers to pay premium for a single-use license.
I don’t see any reasonableness at all. If you buy it, you buy it. There’s no “sorta buy.”
Are the terms and conditions different for any of the other retailers?
I don’t think so. Even for Smashwords, the “copyright page” should include the following text :
“This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.”
Actually that’s just suggested text. It’s not mandatory.
I distribute my books under a CC license, and the text I put on the front page reflects that.
Oh, yes ! You’re right ! My bad.
I need to futz with that boilerplate sometime. Maybe I can embed something about “I didn’t put no stinkin’ DRM on this, so if you find DRM on it, I don’t care what you do with the DRM. Just remember that I jump up and down and clap my hands when I get sales, and play too much WoW if I don’t.”
Ditto. Right now I use the generic one that Smashwords provides, but it frankly doesn’t accurately reflect my views. Mine are similar to yours, sans WoW.
Yeah, the only thing Smashwords requires is “Smashwords Edition.”
Good to know. I thought a similar statement was required. Sounds like I have some files to edit.
I know this specifically covers the sharing of accounts, but I can’t help but wonder what the legality of a clause prohibiting the sharing of an e-book (even with family members) is if there is license text in the e-book itself that contradicts them (e.g., “Feel free to share this DRM-free e-book with friends and family members.”). After all, the author (or publisher, in some cases) is the copyright holder. Kobo shouldn’t be able to dictate such a license; it should be up to the copyright holder or an agent of the copyright holder.
Kobo offers ADE editions of their ebooks. And unless things have changed recently, ADE lets you authorize a number of devices – 6? There’s nothing stopping someone from legally downloading an ADE edition of the book they legally purchased and pushing that book out to the devices legally connected to their ADE software.
Unlike Amazon, Kobo doesn’t have a device management system on their site, so I don’t see why anyone would even want to share the Kobo epub versions. It would be a nightmare to sort out who gets which book (I know I don’t want my 10 year olds reading many of the books I buy!) and I certainly don’t want to have to deal with bookmarking wars between devices.
So my account is *mine* and DH has his own account. I can, however, push out copies of the books I purchase for my daughters through ADE.