It is believed that these authors misunderstood about the workings of the site that led to the claim and eventually its end. This misunderstanding bombarded LendInk with legal threats and claims. It is believed that these authors feared piracy and that let them misunderstand everything about LendInk. Here is what exactly happened. LendInk, which had been around for almost two years, was run by founder Dale Porter. One day, an author noticed his book being listed as available for lending on the site, and immediately raised an alarm on social networking sites such as Twitter. The author also stated in discussion forums that were devoted to Kindle-published authors that the site was pirating their content and lending it out to people for free. This eventually raised hue and cry among various authors, all of whom called and convinced their fellow colleagues to bombard LendInk with copyright-takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Those notices ultimately got successful to take LendInk out of business. As the founder Porter was dealing with health issues, and had the site running on auto-pilot, he didn’t send the authors immediate response, which further accelerated the angst among them. In most of these cases, it is believed that authors didn’t really understand the purpose of the website, LendInk. They thought it was hosting copies of their books to everyone, while the site was just focused on providing the right to share books between readers who already owned e-books. When the fact came out, there were few who later apologized for their attacks on LendInk. However, there are still many who seem unapologetic and even argued that built-in approval for lending of e-books between complete strangers was somehow not ethical. There was one author who even said that it was ok to share books between two friends, but not between two people who are connected by a website or service such as LendInk. However, many authors do not understand the fact that sharing content online in many cases can lead to increase in demand for the content. The faster these authors and publishers understand that, the better off will be the future. Taking down a web service such as LendInk, who was just trying to increase the budding market for their books, seems to be adding more delay to the expected.
