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Your scheme requires copying the work, probably several times, and distributing some of those copies, so it won't fly. I'm pretty sure the fact that digital le

Your scheme requires copying the work, probably several times, and distributing some of those copies, so it won't fly. I'm pretty sure the fact that digital lending necessarily makes tons of copies of the work—consider live server disk, backups (possibly many copies there), copies in cache across who knows how many devices on the Internet, the copy on the user's device, copies in RAM all over the place, et c., such that there might well be twenty copies of a book before it reaches the eyes of a borrowing reader—is why publishers are able to put license terms on ebook lending in the first place, since technically the whole process, practically speaking, involves copying the book a bunch of times.

logfromblammo 7y ago
What we know to be a copy by common sense, real world interpretation of the word "copy" is not necessarily what copyright law considers to be a "copy" for the purposes of enforcing copyright laws. Is holding a book up to a half-silvered mirror making a copy of it? Is looking over someone else's shoulder as they read making a copy? Do the activation levels in a person's visual cortex count as a copy? It may be useful to keep hairs unsplit, forget about the quantum mechanics of copying and focus on the observers. If there are two files with identical content on a filesystem such that only one user is authorized to read them, how many copies exist? To me, that's two copies in fact, but one copy by copyright law, in that the second real-life copy is not separable from the first for the purposes of commerce. The act of changing the access permissions on the second identical file would be what makes it a copyright-copy, not the act of duplicating the bits.
- shantly 7y ago
  In that case why are libraries bothering with jumping through these hoops and paying extra money for expiring ebooks anyway?
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    They want to be "good citizens" in the book-publishing ecosystem. They follow along with the publishers' schemes, to ensure that the channel for public access to the material remains open. They don't want to risk the possibility that there might be knowledge out there that an ordinary person might be barred from accessing via the public library. And as long as the publishers are reasonable, even when charging a higher library price, that's cheaper than libraries setting up a different infrastructure. The mission of most libraries is about access and public service, rather than raw price. The publishers can abuse that.

logfromblammo 7y ago

What we know to be a copy by common sense, real world interpretation of the word "copy" is not necessarily what copyright law considers to be a "copy" for the purposes of enforcing copyright laws. Is holding a book up to a half-silvered mirror making a copy of it? Is looking over someone else's shoulder as they read making a copy? Do the activation levels in a person's visual cortex count as a copy? It may be useful to keep hairs unsplit, forget about the quantum mechanics of copying and focus on the observers. If there are two files with identical content on a filesystem such that only one user is authorized to read them, how many copies exist? To me, that's two copies in fact, but one copy by copyright law, in that the second real-life copy is not separable from the first for the purposes of commerce. The act of changing the access permissions on the second identical file would be what makes it a copyright-copy, not the act of duplicating the bits.

shantly 7y ago
In that case why are libraries bothering with jumping through these hoops and paying extra money for expiring ebooks anyway?
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  They want to be "good citizens" in the book-publishing ecosystem. They follow along with the publishers' schemes, to ensure that the channel for public access to the material remains open. They don't want to risk the possibility that there might be knowledge out there that an ordinary person might be barred from accessing via the public library. And as long as the publishers are reasonable, even when charging a higher library price, that's cheaper than libraries setting up a different infrastructure. The mission of most libraries is about access and public service, rather than raw price. The publishers can abuse that.