Are any of the sites that have pathfinder pdfs for "rent" legal


Customer Service

Silver Crusade

I strongly suspect that the answer is "Not only NO, but HECK NO" but if at all possible I'd like an official answer. I am NOT trying to get illegal access to stuff nor am I trying to take advantage of some grey area in the law.

There are various sites on the net that charge a monthly fee and claim to have legal copies of various Pathfinder books. I'm not going to post links but they're pretty trivial to find.

Are any of these actually legitimate sources as far as Paizo is concerned?


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens, PF Special Edition, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Send an email linking to the sites to customer.service@paizo.com and the CS team will get it to the appropriate people to look at. I'm unaware of any sites that can legitimately provide pathfinder PDFs outside of this one, however, so my initial guess is "no they are not legal."

Renting out physical books is totally fine though, due to the first-sale doctrine.


pauljathome wrote:

I strongly suspect that the answer is "Not only NO, but HECK NO" but if at all possible I'd like an official answer. I am NOT trying to get illegal access to stuff nor am I trying to take advantage of some grey area in the law.

There are various sites on the net that charge a monthly fee and claim to have legal copies of various Pathfinder books. I'm not going to post links but they're pretty trivial to find.

Are any of these actually legitimate sources as far as Paizo is concerned?

These are pirate sites... plain and simple.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

The only legal source for PDFs of Paizo products is the Paizo web site.

They're not even on RPGNow/DriveThruRPG or similar...


The only official and legal source of Paizo PDFs is paizo.com.

If you find Paizo PDFs anywhere else, they're pirate sites hosting unauthorized content.

EDIT: Ninja'd!

Community & Digital Content Director

These services are not legal. Paizo PDFs are only available through paizo.com. There are some Paizo licensed products available through other venues for Pathfinder Tales (Amazon Kindle, iTunes, Google Play, B&N Nook, and eBooks.com) and Pathfinder Comics (Comixology).

Should you need to report this sort of thing, you can forward it on to customer.service@paizo.com.

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