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My wife is a librarian. The elephant in the room here is that patrons are shifting toward a preference for digital distribution. However, Fair Use has not caugh

My wife is a librarian. The elephant in the room here is that patrons are shifting toward a preference for digital distribution. However, Fair Use has not caught up. So, libraries end up spending a large portion of their operating budget "leasing" ebooks from publishers at extraordinary markup over the print copies. These leases are only good for so many "check outs" -- often as few as 4-6 -- after which point, the lease must be renewed at a price that can be 2X or 3X the cost of the print book. It's downright predatory. IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.

greyface- 2y ago
It makes me incredibly sad to see the Internet Archive continue to argue that a DRM system (which is what controlled digital lending is) is a liberatory technology whose usage should be expanded. Libraries should stop lighting money on fire buying expensive short-lived licenses from publishers, and start referring patrons to LibGen, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub, etc.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  That's not a legal argument; you're arguing that crime should be officially encouraged by libraries and the Internet Archive. That's essentially an argument that they should commit suicide in protest of the entire idea of copyright. I'm not saying that speciously. If it's fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, there's no need for the public to go to shadow libraries; because they've then become de facto legal and the libraries might as well distribute the material directly (or aid with access and provide resources for the shadow libraries.) If it's not fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, when they do it they've called their own distribution of copyrighted materials into question by implying that they do the same thing as shadow libraries. DRM is an overlay over copyright which gives copyright owners some security that they'll be able to hold on to most of the distribution of what they own. It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all. If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. The giant multinational companies that own the vast majority of copyrights are begging you to stake the entire IA on such a sucker bet.
  - greyface- 2y ago
    It's not a crime to inform patrons of the existence of shadow libraries. > That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all. > If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. I agree with you. There is no (legal) excuse for the National Emergency Library, digital lending DRM is just a pretense, and they shouldn't have gambled the Archive on it. The battle will be won by shadow libraries, who by their extra-legal nature are better equipped to fight copyright directly.
    - anticensor 2y ago
      > It's not a crime to inform patrons of the existence of shadow libraries. That is indeed a crime: "promotion and incentivisation of crime", one of the major ways of starting an organised crime in fact. Do you want IA to be declared a criminal organisation?
      - greyface- 2y ago
        This is a huge stretch. If I go to my local library, I can take a book off the shelves, walk over to the photocopier, deposit some coins, and make a copy. Is that promotion and incentivization of (and profiteering from) copyright infringement? I can check out a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook, or any number of other books that detail and arguably glorify crime of various forms. Is that promotion and incentivization of crime? Libraries are repositories of information, including "forbidden" information.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all. Well sure there is, because it also works the other way around. You can have copyright without DRM, and enforce it not via some weak and easily bypassed technological fig leaf but with the full force of the government. A patron who makes a permanent copy even though they've claimed and agreed to have destroyed their temporary one would be liable for copyright infringement. There is no reason the law couldn't still prohibit that while allowing temporary lending. Copyright holders would have no more or less trouble enforcing this than they do any other infringing copying that happens in private, like when the user downloads the same book from a shadow library in a foreign country. The difference is that the local library has paid the copyright holder for an official copy, implying that they haven't done anything wrong, and neither have any patrons who don't illicitly retain a copy. Why should people doing nothing wrong have any liability?
leotravis10 2y ago
> My wife is a librarian. The elephant in the room here is that patrons are shifting toward a preference for digital distribution. However, Fair Use has not caught up. So, libraries end up spending a large portion of their operating budget "leasing" ebooks from publishers at extraordinary markup over the print copies. These leases are only good for so many "check outs" -- often as few as 4-6 -- after which point, the lease must be renewed at a price that can be 2X or 3X the cost of the print book. It's downright predatory. If you haven't read this, now's the time to: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/ https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit... > IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use. Very unlikely that would happen and libraries would inevitably pay the ultimate price in the long run in a period where they're under attack and most at risk of extinction from all fronts (politicians, governments, publishers, copyright cartel, list goes on all hate libraries and this would be a huge win for those groups as a sign to cripple them even more).
- swalling 2y ago
  Whatever happened to the idea of legal peer-to-peer lending? If I buy a book, it's my property to give away or resell. Why is it any different with an ebook?
  - coldpie 2y ago
    Because you aren't buying an ebook, you are licensing a copy of it. The terms of the license you agreed to were that you will not distribute or re-assign ownership of the material you are licensing. If you want that to change, you'll need to get congress to do something about it (lol).
    - thescriptkiddie 2y ago
      We as a society very urgently need to ban the practice of "selling" licenses, but in the meantime we as individuals can and should practice civil disobedience.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
IANAL: Can libraries just buy physical books and then format shift (scan+OCR) them?
- zaphod12 2y ago
  I suspect this is likely a violation of agreements, but regardless it absolutely does not produce a readable ebook
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    Agreements of what? I could have sworn the first sale doctrine means that I own the book, as there are for sure no EULAs that I agree to when purchasing nor opening to page 1 of a book. Copyright, for sure, but not an agreement that could be violated I would also take issue with the "absolutely" of your assertion about OCR. For some things, yes, for crazy fonted works, no, but the devil's in the details
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      I believe the idea was that a publisher could have a contract with libraries in order to rent them digital copies that imposes terms against other ways of getting digital copies. (Whether that should be or is legal is a separate question that I'm not going to answer; as ever IANAL.)
- tester89 2y ago
  No, copyright violation. Libraries are able to loan under the first sale doctrine, that is to say that the copyright holder exhausts their right to control the distribution of a copy after the first sale. However, they retain a monopoly on the production of copies.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The issue here is whether this counts as the production of copies and/or whether that production is fair use. For example, CDs are digital. To play a CD that you own, the player is going to create a copy of the song in memory in order to decode it into an analog signal that can be played on speakers. Then it's going to discard that temporary copy, leaving the CD as the only permanent one. It seems pretty obvious that either that sort of temporary copy doesn't count or that it should be fair use. But then how is it any different if the temporary copy is on your tablet instead of your CD player?
xhkkffbf 2y ago
Do you think the authors and editors should be compensated for their work? Charging for use seems to be a pretty straight forward way to reward the people who create good books.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Copyright grants you the right to profit from the first sale. It does not grant you the right to charge "per use." Should your books destroy themselves after you've read them once?
  - xhkkffbf 2y ago
    No. Copyright gives the right to control how a work is reproduced. In the case of printed books, we've arrived on the first sale doctrine which still does a pretty good job of spreading costs over all users. It's not perfect, but wear and tear help spread out the costs. Digital books are different. It's quite possible for there to be one "sale" in the first sale model. That doesn't do a very good job of sharing costs among the people who read the book. Nor does it do a good job of rewarding the people who produce good books that are in much demand. I'm quite happy with all of the digital "renting" schemes that effectively "destroy" the digital work after I've consumed it. Why? Because I want to pay the least amount and that means spreading the costs as broadly as possible. That's just fairness.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      Yes, it controls reproduction, but not all uses are a reproduction. The law also has zero concerns for "spreading costs" and it's why "fair use" and libraries can even exist in the first place. Further, simply because you give out copies of your work for free, does not mean you suddenly lose copyright protection. Costs and copyright are two entirely separate issues, which is why open source licenses can exist. Your attempt to convolve these two facts leads to an incredibly messy interpretation. Digital books are not different in any meaningful way. You have the right to sell a digital copy. Once sold, the user who purchased it, has a right to use that copy in any way the see fit. Including lending it to others, selling it second hand, or even reading it out loud as part of an event. The article makes it perfectly clear, this is not driving costs down, so while you may be happy with that outcome, that's clearly not what's actually occurring. So I'm genuinely surprised you've gone to this much effort to advocate for something that demonstrably fails to produce the outcome you're after.
jcranmer 2y ago
This is your friendly reminder that, if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright. Even given that libraries are clearly legal, copyright owners still try their utmost to make them illegal, because they're seen as lost purchases. If I were only allowed to change one thing about copyright, what I would change is not the length of copyright terms, but the treatment of digital works. Kill this stupid pretend game that you don't buy anything digital, you merely lease it, and therefore the creator gets to jerk you around to their heart's content because contract law supersedes all. No, make a digital sale a sale, and then we get to have the First Sale Doctrine kick in. And hopefully we get to sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as they repeatedly go to SCOTUS as the printer manufacturers do with some new harebrained attempt to work around First Sale Doctrine and SCOTUS goes "lol, nope, doesn't work." But truly, fuck the ebook lending practices. It's downright predatory and it just makes me never want to actually buy an ebook (unless it's from one of the few publishers that goes all-in on DRM-free ebooks).
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  what's your timeline on libraries? i guess you're counting ancient, private collections. public libraries happened well after copyright was established and just had to go to court and make their case. first sale doctrine indeed saved the day. the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act
  - brnt 2y ago
    If you do not consider the ancient, famous libraries to be public, Wikipedia puts ~1600 as a first date of modern public libraries. While copyright has a first occurance date in the 1700s, in some locales much later. Either way it seems public libraries were around at least a century before copyright, but by other measure, in some places, much longer.
hysan 2y ago
I’m glad to see this near the top of this post. The reality of what’s been happening to libraries in the shift to the digital age keeps getting ignored by everyone. For those of us who grew up only being able to afford reading books by borrowing from libraries, I’ve been dismayed to see so little discussion around this. Like other commenters have said, libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today and I think that points to a fundamental problem with legislation.
- navane 2y ago
  "libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today" This is so sad. I spend so much time growing up in libraries. Been locked up there accidentally more than once.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    What a library is today is so different. I'm not sure I would leave my kids alone in one like my parents used to. There was always the homeless element, but now there's rampant drug use in and around, anti-social behaviour is ignored or tolerated and it's not really about the books (digital or paper) but the free internet to troll your social media. Libraries used to be accessible jewels of knowledge, now they're generic community spaces.
    - chgs 2y ago
      Maybe in your area. Certainly not in my area.
      - influx 2y ago
        The last time I was in the Seattle Downtown library, there was a gentleman shaving and taking a "shower" in the sink of the shared public restroom. I'm of the mind there should be a place he could do that safely and easily, but that place shouldn't be the library.
        2y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
Maybe it's time for libraries to focus on the physical aspect... and education, for example teaching people how to pirate digital copies without getting malware. For ebooks, pirates can provide the public library service.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use. I find it extremely bizarre the people make posts like this, essentially conceding that controlled digital lending should be legal, but then claiming that they shouldn't win. Why shouldn't they win? They're doing something reasonable, meritorious and not at all clearly prohibited.
- KittenInABox 2y ago
  I believe the issue was that they weren't doing controlled digital lending. They allowed an unlimited number of people to check out an individual book digitally & then took donations for doing so. The original envision, where a book can be checked out digitally (and then is reserved until "returned", and mare available again), is way more defensible.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > They allowed an unlimited number of people to check out an individual book digitally You're referring to the emergency library, which only operated during COVID. The claim in that case is that it should be allowed because it's temporary and can only operate during an emergent crisis, thereby limiting the impact on the market for the works. > & then took donations for doing so Why should that be relevant unless a donation is required to get a copy? It seems like a bad faith argument to try to ensure that no one offering a free service to the public can solicit donations to continue operating it. > The original envision, where a book can be checked out digitally (and then is reserved until "returned", and mare available again), is way more defensible. Isn't the case about both?
    - joshspankit 2y ago
      > The claim in that case is that it should be allowed because it's temporary and can only operate during an emergent crisis, thereby limiting the impact on the market for the works. While personally I think that this is a powerful goal, how would that work in practice? Who determines what an emergency is? Once an emergency is declared, does everyone get the legal ability to seed torrents of copyright works? Or stream them directly to the public? If the copyright holders get upset about that then they will be motivated to downplay emergencies which puts them in opposition to the common good. What safeguards would need to be in place?
skybrian 2y ago
The economics of it seem quite different for rare books that might be checked out once a year versus popular books that are in constant demand. It seems like for academic research, storing a large collection of unpopular books is what matters. Making best-sellers available to many local readers is a different function.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Digital distribution is already the norm, it's already superior to all other technologies. The elephant in the room is copyright. It's the cause of all the problems and limitations we presently encounter. It makes no sense to even speak of "leasing" what's actually trivially copyable data. That's working within the conceptual framework of monopolists. There is no "cost", any costs associated with digital distribution can and will be so efficiently distributed among all users they might as well be zero. All the monopolists need to do is get out of our way. The only solution to this problem is abolishing it all straight up. Just get rid of copyright. It's holding us all back.
musicale 2y ago
Fair use is a defense against infringement, but what we could really use is copyright reform to enable building the digital library of alexandria without it being burned down immediately by infringement claims. For this to happen, libraries might need something like: 1) first sale doctrine for ebooks 2) explicitly legalizing the distribution (and non-infringing use) of digital copying and transcoding technology with substantial non-infringing uses, similarly to the analog domain (see: photocopiers, VCRs, etc.)

greyface- 2y ago

It makes me incredibly sad to see the Internet Archive continue to argue that a DRM system (which is what controlled digital lending is) is a liberatory technology whose usage should be expanded. Libraries should stop lighting money on fire buying expensive short-lived licenses from publishers, and start referring patrons to LibGen, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub, etc.

pessimizer 2y ago
That's not a legal argument; you're arguing that crime should be officially encouraged by libraries and the Internet Archive. That's essentially an argument that they should commit suicide in protest of the entire idea of copyright. I'm not saying that speciously. If it's fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, there's no need for the public to go to shadow libraries; because they've then become de facto legal and the libraries might as well distribute the material directly (or aid with access and provide resources for the shadow libraries.) If it's not fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, when they do it they've called their own distribution of copyrighted materials into question by implying that they do the same thing as shadow libraries. DRM is an overlay over copyright which gives copyright owners some security that they'll be able to hold on to most of the distribution of what they own. It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all. If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. The giant multinational companies that own the vast majority of copyrights are begging you to stake the entire IA on such a sucker bet.
- greyface- 2y ago
  It's not a crime to inform patrons of the existence of shadow libraries. > That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all. > If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. I agree with you. There is no (legal) excuse for the National Emergency Library, digital lending DRM is just a pretense, and they shouldn't have gambled the Archive on it. The battle will be won by shadow libraries, who by their extra-legal nature are better equipped to fight copyright directly.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    > It's not a crime to inform patrons of the existence of shadow libraries. That is indeed a crime: "promotion and incentivisation of crime", one of the major ways of starting an organised crime in fact. Do you want IA to be declared a criminal organisation?
    - greyface- 2y ago
      This is a huge stretch. If I go to my local library, I can take a book off the shelves, walk over to the photocopier, deposit some coins, and make a copy. Is that promotion and incentivization of (and profiteering from) copyright infringement? I can check out a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook, or any number of other books that detail and arguably glorify crime of various forms. Is that promotion and incentivization of crime? Libraries are repositories of information, including "forbidden" information.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all. Well sure there is, because it also works the other way around. You can have copyright without DRM, and enforce it not via some weak and easily bypassed technological fig leaf but with the full force of the government. A patron who makes a permanent copy even though they've claimed and agreed to have destroyed their temporary one would be liable for copyright infringement. There is no reason the law couldn't still prohibit that while allowing temporary lending. Copyright holders would have no more or less trouble enforcing this than they do any other infringing copying that happens in private, like when the user downloads the same book from a shadow library in a foreign country. The difference is that the local library has paid the copyright holder for an official copy, implying that they haven't done anything wrong, and neither have any patrons who don't illicitly retain a copy. Why should people doing nothing wrong have any liability?

leotravis10 2y ago

> My wife is a librarian. The elephant in the room here is that patrons are shifting toward a preference for digital distribution. However, Fair Use has not caught up. So, libraries end up spending a large portion of their operating budget "leasing" ebooks from publishers at extraordinary markup over the print copies. These leases are only good for so many "check outs" -- often as few as 4-6 -- after which point, the lease must be renewed at a price that can be 2X or 3X the cost of the print book. It's downright predatory. If you haven't read this, now's the time to: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/ https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit... > IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use. Very unlikely that would happen and libraries would inevitably pay the ultimate price in the long run in a period where they're under attack and most at risk of extinction from all fronts (politicians, governments, publishers, copyright cartel, list goes on all hate libraries and this would be a huge win for those groups as a sign to cripple them even more).

swalling 2y ago
Whatever happened to the idea of legal peer-to-peer lending? If I buy a book, it's my property to give away or resell. Why is it any different with an ebook?
- coldpie 2y ago
  Because you aren't buying an ebook, you are licensing a copy of it. The terms of the license you agreed to were that you will not distribute or re-assign ownership of the material you are licensing. If you want that to change, you'll need to get congress to do something about it (lol).
  - thescriptkiddie 2y ago
    We as a society very urgently need to ban the practice of "selling" licenses, but in the meantime we as individuals can and should practice civil disobedience.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

IANAL: Can libraries just buy physical books and then format shift (scan+OCR) them?

zaphod12 2y ago
I suspect this is likely a violation of agreements, but regardless it absolutely does not produce a readable ebook
- mdaniel 2y ago
  Agreements of what? I could have sworn the first sale doctrine means that I own the book, as there are for sure no EULAs that I agree to when purchasing nor opening to page 1 of a book. Copyright, for sure, but not an agreement that could be violated I would also take issue with the "absolutely" of your assertion about OCR. For some things, yes, for crazy fonted works, no, but the devil's in the details
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    I believe the idea was that a publisher could have a contract with libraries in order to rent them digital copies that imposes terms against other ways of getting digital copies. (Whether that should be or is legal is a separate question that I'm not going to answer; as ever IANAL.)
tester89 2y ago
No, copyright violation. Libraries are able to loan under the first sale doctrine, that is to say that the copyright holder exhausts their right to control the distribution of a copy after the first sale. However, they retain a monopoly on the production of copies.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The issue here is whether this counts as the production of copies and/or whether that production is fair use. For example, CDs are digital. To play a CD that you own, the player is going to create a copy of the song in memory in order to decode it into an analog signal that can be played on speakers. Then it's going to discard that temporary copy, leaving the CD as the only permanent one. It seems pretty obvious that either that sort of temporary copy doesn't count or that it should be fair use. But then how is it any different if the temporary copy is on your tablet instead of your CD player?

xhkkffbf 2y ago

Do you think the authors and editors should be compensated for their work? Charging for use seems to be a pretty straight forward way to reward the people who create good books.

akira2501 2y ago
Copyright grants you the right to profit from the first sale. It does not grant you the right to charge "per use." Should your books destroy themselves after you've read them once?
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  No. Copyright gives the right to control how a work is reproduced. In the case of printed books, we've arrived on the first sale doctrine which still does a pretty good job of spreading costs over all users. It's not perfect, but wear and tear help spread out the costs. Digital books are different. It's quite possible for there to be one "sale" in the first sale model. That doesn't do a very good job of sharing costs among the people who read the book. Nor does it do a good job of rewarding the people who produce good books that are in much demand. I'm quite happy with all of the digital "renting" schemes that effectively "destroy" the digital work after I've consumed it. Why? Because I want to pay the least amount and that means spreading the costs as broadly as possible. That's just fairness.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Yes, it controls reproduction, but not all uses are a reproduction. The law also has zero concerns for "spreading costs" and it's why "fair use" and libraries can even exist in the first place. Further, simply because you give out copies of your work for free, does not mean you suddenly lose copyright protection. Costs and copyright are two entirely separate issues, which is why open source licenses can exist. Your attempt to convolve these two facts leads to an incredibly messy interpretation. Digital books are not different in any meaningful way. You have the right to sell a digital copy. Once sold, the user who purchased it, has a right to use that copy in any way the see fit. Including lending it to others, selling it second hand, or even reading it out loud as part of an event. The article makes it perfectly clear, this is not driving costs down, so while you may be happy with that outcome, that's clearly not what's actually occurring. So I'm genuinely surprised you've gone to this much effort to advocate for something that demonstrably fails to produce the outcome you're after.

jcranmer 2y ago

This is your friendly reminder that, if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright. Even given that libraries are clearly legal, copyright owners still try their utmost to make them illegal, because they're seen as lost purchases. If I were only allowed to change one thing about copyright, what I would change is not the length of copyright terms, but the treatment of digital works. Kill this stupid pretend game that you don't buy anything digital, you merely lease it, and therefore the creator gets to jerk you around to their heart's content because contract law supersedes all. No, make a digital sale a sale, and then we get to have the First Sale Doctrine kick in. And hopefully we get to sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as they repeatedly go to SCOTUS as the printer manufacturers do with some new harebrained attempt to work around First Sale Doctrine and SCOTUS goes "lol, nope, doesn't work." But truly, fuck the ebook lending practices. It's downright predatory and it just makes me never want to actually buy an ebook (unless it's from one of the few publishers that goes all-in on DRM-free ebooks).

jazzyjackson 2y ago
what's your timeline on libraries? i guess you're counting ancient, private collections. public libraries happened well after copyright was established and just had to go to court and make their case. first sale doctrine indeed saved the day. the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act
- brnt 2y ago
  If you do not consider the ancient, famous libraries to be public, Wikipedia puts ~1600 as a first date of modern public libraries. While copyright has a first occurance date in the 1700s, in some locales much later. Either way it seems public libraries were around at least a century before copyright, but by other measure, in some places, much longer.

hysan 2y ago

I’m glad to see this near the top of this post. The reality of what’s been happening to libraries in the shift to the digital age keeps getting ignored by everyone. For those of us who grew up only being able to afford reading books by borrowing from libraries, I’ve been dismayed to see so little discussion around this. Like other commenters have said, libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today and I think that points to a fundamental problem with legislation.

navane 2y ago
"libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today" This is so sad. I spend so much time growing up in libraries. Been locked up there accidentally more than once.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  What a library is today is so different. I'm not sure I would leave my kids alone in one like my parents used to. There was always the homeless element, but now there's rampant drug use in and around, anti-social behaviour is ignored or tolerated and it's not really about the books (digital or paper) but the free internet to troll your social media. Libraries used to be accessible jewels of knowledge, now they're generic community spaces.
  - chgs 2y ago
    Maybe in your area. Certainly not in my area.
    - influx 2y ago
      The last time I was in the Seattle Downtown library, there was a gentleman shaving and taking a "shower" in the sink of the shared public restroom. I'm of the mind there should be a place he could do that safely and easily, but that place shouldn't be the library.
      - 2y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

Maybe it's time for libraries to focus on the physical aspect... and education, for example teaching people how to pirate digital copies without getting malware. For ebooks, pirates can provide the public library service.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use. I find it extremely bizarre the people make posts like this, essentially conceding that controlled digital lending should be legal, but then claiming that they shouldn't win. Why shouldn't they win? They're doing something reasonable, meritorious and not at all clearly prohibited.

KittenInABox 2y ago
I believe the issue was that they weren't doing controlled digital lending. They allowed an unlimited number of people to check out an individual book digitally & then took donations for doing so. The original envision, where a book can be checked out digitally (and then is reserved until "returned", and mare available again), is way more defensible.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > They allowed an unlimited number of people to check out an individual book digitally You're referring to the emergency library, which only operated during COVID. The claim in that case is that it should be allowed because it's temporary and can only operate during an emergent crisis, thereby limiting the impact on the market for the works. > & then took donations for doing so Why should that be relevant unless a donation is required to get a copy? It seems like a bad faith argument to try to ensure that no one offering a free service to the public can solicit donations to continue operating it. > The original envision, where a book can be checked out digitally (and then is reserved until "returned", and mare available again), is way more defensible. Isn't the case about both?
  - joshspankit 2y ago
    > The claim in that case is that it should be allowed because it's temporary and can only operate during an emergent crisis, thereby limiting the impact on the market for the works. While personally I think that this is a powerful goal, how would that work in practice? Who determines what an emergency is? Once an emergency is declared, does everyone get the legal ability to seed torrents of copyright works? Or stream them directly to the public? If the copyright holders get upset about that then they will be motivated to downplay emergencies which puts them in opposition to the common good. What safeguards would need to be in place?

skybrian 2y ago

The economics of it seem quite different for rare books that might be checked out once a year versus popular books that are in constant demand. It seems like for academic research, storing a large collection of unpopular books is what matters. Making best-sellers available to many local readers is a different function.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Digital distribution is already the norm, it's already superior to all other technologies. The elephant in the room is copyright. It's the cause of all the problems and limitations we presently encounter. It makes no sense to even speak of "leasing" what's actually trivially copyable data. That's working within the conceptual framework of monopolists. There is no "cost", any costs associated with digital distribution can and will be so efficiently distributed among all users they might as well be zero. All the monopolists need to do is get out of our way. The only solution to this problem is abolishing it all straight up. Just get rid of copyright. It's holding us all back.

musicale 2y ago

Fair use is a defense against infringement, but what we could really use is copyright reform to enable building the digital library of alexandria without it being burned down immediately by infringement claims. For this to happen, libraries might need something like: 1) first sale doctrine for ebooks 2) explicitly legalizing the distribution (and non-infringing use) of digital copying and transcoding technology with substantial non-infringing uses, similarly to the analog domain (see: photocopiers, VCRs, etc.)