One big difference with your university analogy is that the university _did_ pay for the resource, often way more than you would as a private citizen, since it

One big difference with your university analogy is that the university _did_ pay for the resource, often way more than you would as a private citizen, since it is for sharing purposes. Even worse, for e-books, libraries are often limited to how often they can lend the book out, and this was done since physical books "degrade" over time, and so have a limited lend-life, the idea is that the same should hold true for digital books as well… I get the point behind your sarcasm of the first sentence, since that is the essence of the problem.