6 ms·
Huh, seeing their full argument written out makes the temporary CDL policy make a lot more sense. They were already contracting with other libraries to increas
by boomboomsubban 4y ago
Huh, seeing their full argument written out makes the temporary CDL policy make a lot more sense.
They were already contracting with other libraries to increase the amount of out-of-circulation copies they could lend, and with 90,000 libraries closed they assumed removing any restrictions would still keep them well under the amount of out-of-circulation copies available.
And they were likely right, if "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" only had 888 lends at most a few books would reach anywhere near the total out-of-circulation copies. It makes the publishers argument look less like "we were robbed" and more like "we should have made even more cash off the pandemic."
- O__________O 4y agoCDL being “Controlled Digital Lending”
- ctxc 4y agoThank you
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoCompare to Aereo which was leasing subscribers a dedicated antenna and DVR to distribute OTA television.
- jefftk 4y agoAnd famously lost in the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
- aidenn0 4y agoExcept libraries have special carve-outs for copyright, while the communications act requires broadcaster consent for "multichannel video programming distributors." Ultimately the lesson of Aereo is that it is incredibly difficult to predict court rulings when in anything close to a gray area. Aereo had a viable case after the Fox v. Cablevision precedent, but ultimately lost.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chx 4y agoSo they let people borrow as many books as they wanted which obviously violates copyright law but accidentally this didn't surpass the number of available books and this makes the whole thing legal? Bold strategy.
- hannasanarion 4y agoSince when does letting people borrow books from a library violate copyright law? I could go up to my local library with a dump truck and load it up with books if I wanted to, I'm not making copies, so I'm not violating copyright, period. Copyright protects the publisher's ability to proliferate the stock of books, not to police the use of existing stock.
- fabianhjr 4y agoThere is an anachronism were the following circumstances collide: - lending is limited to the original bought copies (a library cannot create more copies of a book for further lending) - digital lending requires sending the data to another device creating a copy - digital lending has near-zero marginal cost (specially at scale) - digital borrowing has near-zero marginal cost (no library membership, single click borrowing for some minutes or some hours with single click return) IMHO I think Archive is legally in the right and it is only due to the previous circumstances, Archive.org collaborating with _a lot_ of libraries, and the tension between the older/traditional socialist/communal lending practice vs newer/contemporary private property laws that allows this conflict to emerge.
- tsimionescu 4y agoThe GP was referring to the fact that Archive.org let, in principle, an unlimited number of people borrow the same book. A library has a limited number of copies of a book, so if a million people come in and want to borrow it, only X will get to. Archive.org would have served a million copies of that book according to the emergency policy. Now, as far as I understand, it happened that no book was likely borrowed more times than the number of physical copies held by archive.org + the libraries they had partenere with. But the process they normally had in place to prevent this was explicitly decided to be ignored during the pandemic.