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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there are many such places. If one is living in their tent, car, or similar situation, there are very few places where one is even allowed to exist peacefully without spending a few dollars, let alone take care of one's hygiene.
Libraries are one of the precious few places where one is not charged on entry or otherwise expected to buy something. Even public parks are increasingly hostile to the homeless, but often no real alternatives are offered. And I think that's a shame.
My city started a program to train librarians to administer narcan and the city distributes narcan to libraries [0]. I can't imagine Chicago is has a larger homeless population than most other cities (as it's very affordable here).
This isn't generally true, I am in the Boston area and only the Main branch is anything like this, all the tens of other libraries are safe places where a kid would be fine for hours.
yup i remember using the sound proof booths they had for patrons at my library and not hearing the announcement that the library had closed got locked in and only noticed when they librarians started turning off the lights to leave.
An unfortunate consequence of internet piracy is that noncommercial activity has been pushed out of mainstream policy. The library was way more crucial when I couldn't just illegally pirate a book on the internet. In turn I was way more willing to fight for it.
> mainstream policy [is...] an unfortunate consequence of internet piracy
no, this is obscene degrees of victim-blaming here. the modern copyright regime predates the internet being a major commercial vector for anything by literally decades. the DAT tape wars were 80s, the VHS/Betamax time-shifting wars were 70s. taping off the radio was 60s.
obviously as the noose tightens, more and more activity becomes "criminal", so the "criminal activity" stats probably do go up over time, but that doesn't inherently reflect some change in social mores as much as the legal framework changing out from underneath it. and that was not initiated by anything to do with the internet - this really dates back to the "taping off the radio" days and the blowback from studios who didn't like that, and retrenched in the 80s and particularly the 90s.
For popularity VHS was the 80's I think: "JVC released the first VHS machines in Japan in late 1976, and in the United States in mid-1977." and took a few years to take off widely.
Interestingly enough, VHS was developed in secret at JVC: "However, despite the lack of funding, Takano and Shiraishi continued to work on the project in secret. By 1973, the two engineers had produced a functional prototype.". The development of blue LEDs has a better story. Does Japanese culture encourage secrative development?
> libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today
And it would be more or less irrelevant that they didn't, because the massive amount of information made voluntarily available for free on the internet vastly outweighs the initial few centuries of libraries' existence by several orders of magnitude.
> 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.
IA seems to be arguing that society needs a way to archive and access all printed works.
The library model is one that has a long history and is therefore helpful as a way to accomplish that mission. The “controlled” part of controlled digital lending is only there as a way to try to appease rights-holders (who would otherwise argue in court that there should be no lending, only licensing (or not) under their complete control).
The unfortunate thing that happened is they decided upon themselves to freely and openly distribute copyrighted works at scale which is clearly prohibited and confirmed by precedent. This is the point that they should lose. No library is allowed to reprint books in full and simply hand them out to people who ask.
> which is clearly prohibited and confirmed by precedent
The "precedent" (pro copyright enforcement) has had unintended consequences to prior precendence (freedom of press...the literal printing press). Ignoring the battlefield of the limits of free speech is not constructive. Talking about past legal cases is not going to help in rolling back the dystopian eventuality.
> No library is allowed to reprint books in full and simply hand them out to people who ask.
It's obvious that they should not be allowed to do this perpetually or under normal circumstances. Why should they not be allowed to do it temporarily in an emergency? What existing case specifically addresses this?
It's not what case specifically addresses how it should be handled in an emergency but rather that there is no exception in copyright law for emergencies like a pandemic. If there's not an exception allowing a library to make unlimited copies during an emergency, they can't do it. It can be argued that there should be one added to the law but it doesn't change the fact that the IA clearly violated copyright laws when they lifted their Controlled Digital Lending restrictions.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
Who determines what is an emergency is the judge. If you guess wrong you lose, but some cases are clearer than others. If a global pandemic that shuts down the economy isn't an emergency then what is?
> 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.
The entire premise is that it's temporary and therefore not likely to negatively impact them. But it's also obvious that media companies have a preexisting perverse incentive to over-hype any form of danger, so a countervailing force in the other direction would be a welcome balancing mechanism.
what did they do with the donation money? if they did something charitable with any extra profit i think it should be ok, because then all there is is good-intentioned activity.
It’s not normally the courts’ job to change the laws. People need to get Congress involved. I doubt very few people write to their representatives about fair use.
The entire question is whether any change to the law is necessary. The courts created fair use to begin with and it has been codified by Congress in the statute for decades. Congress doesn't need to change anything if this is already fair use, so why shouldn't it be?
What is codified as legally fair use is extremely limited, and the limited changes to account for digital copies has mostly favored publishers. The terms of fair use should be updated and broadened.
What is codified as legally fair use is extremely squishy. It's the kind of multi-factor balancing test that lets the courts do whatever they think is right.
The problem is that's also the sort of thing corporations abuse to set bad precedents, by constantly nibbling away at the edges with expensive lawyers, and filing suit against defendants with far fewer resources.
This is why "according to corporate PR, what the defendant did was bad and wrong" should always be viewed with heavy skepticism. They're always going to choose a case where they can try to paint the defendant as the villain. And yet, we know who are the ones twirling their mustache.
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.)
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).
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
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.
> if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright.
Before the advent of digital media, the meaning of copyright could be cleanly derived from the words it is compounded from.
Any publisher arguing that to lend a purchased item to another person infringes on their exclusive right to produce copies, would have been laughed right out of the courtroom.
Copyright is ownership of information, data. All information is bits. All bits are numbers in base 2. Therefore copyright is ownership of numbers.
You can even figure out how big the number is.
digits = ceil(bits * log10(2))
For example, a 20 kiB picture is just a number with 49,321 decimal digits.
All numbers already exist. All intellectual work is just number discovery. Drawing? Music production? Editing source code? Fancy ways to enter numbers into computers.
Ok, I’m following you now. But there are two limits you’ve put on yourself:
1. This is limited to digital representations of information (which let’s be up front about: is the overwhelming majority of information in 2024, but the point is it’s not all)
2. What is actually stored is not a number. Below the KB are bytes and below the bytes are bits, but below the bits are (typically) on/off states. 1 and 0 are just convenient ways to reason about bits. They are not the underlying truth.
> This is limited to digital representations of information
All information is bits and all bits are numbers. How the numbers are represented is just an implementation detail. One could print a book containing all 50 thousand digits of the numeric representation of the 20 KiB picture I mentioned. That number is the picture! It's just represented in a very inconvenient form.
It may be hard to believe but there exists software which does exactly this. Paperkey, for example, is designed to create printouts of OpenPGP secret keys so that they can be kept offline. It quite literally dumps out the bytes as rows of numbers and you print them out. Imagine reading hexadecimal characters from a paper and entering all 4096 bits into the computer one by one by hand via text editor. I've actually done it. Yes, it's as nightmarish as it sounds like. Yet it works.
The point of this argument is to show how utterly absurd copyright is. It logically reduces to numeric ownership and illegal numbers. It's quite literally illegal for you to write down a certain number on a paper and give the paper to someone else. I think that's just delusional.
It just can't be refuted. If the copyright monopolists try to argue that the number isn't the picture, they only hurt their own interests in the process. Such an argument automatically creates a channel where infringement of their copyrights may occur. It's illegal to copy the image directly but it's okay if I transform it into a number first and then copy it? That makes no sense whatsoever. They would never make such a self-defeating argument. Therefore they do believe that the image equals the number and that they have monopoly rights to the number.
> They are not the underlying truth.
I believe they are. All of information theory is bits. On/off states is just a digital mechanism humans created to store the information. If you group the bits, it becomes possible to encode larger and larger amounts of data. And any group of bits forms a number pretty much by definition.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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?
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).
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.
DRM (if any) is one difference. Circumventing copyright controls can open you up to civil and criminal penalties.
Not all digital books are DRM protected. I recently listened to Cory Doctorow’s audiobook The Bezzel and at the end he tells you that you have the right to loan or sell your copy of the audiobook.
While I don't really agree with US copyright law, I think the issue is that it's relatively easy to make infinite copies of ebooks. It's basically impossible to guarantee that if I sell you my digital copy of The Colour of Magic that I don't have it anymore.
With a physical book, that's much easier; I simply don't have the book anymore. I could technically photocopy the entire myself and have the book as backup, but that's a pretty time-consuming process that most people aren't going to bother with.
The "solution" to this could be some kind of DRM, but of course that has its own can of horrible and problematic worms, not the least of which the fact that central signing servers suck.
I had an idea years ago of trying to have some kind of blockchain-based DRM but I never really figured out how to even get started with it so I never did anything with it. Still, I think it could be worth someone giving it a go.
> I think the issue is that it's relatively easy to make infinite copies of ebooks.
That's the case regardless of any DRM or even what the source material is. You can OCR a physical book or type the contents into your computer once from any source you can read with your eyes and then make infinite copies thereafter.
The thing that prevents this is that making unlimited permanent copies is copyright infringement, the same as it ever was. Making the unlimited copies is now cheaper than it was a century ago, but that has nothing to do with where or how the infringer gets the first copy.
Never mind breaking DRM, there are services that will OCR a book for around $15. For most books it would cost less to OCR than to buy a single physical copy, from which an infringer could make an unlimited number. Putting this out as some kind of significant distinction between physical and digital copies is just looking for an excuse for a money grab against the new technology.
Wait, no, you do not just get to claim OCR is as easy as "right click copy, right click paste".
Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it.
Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back.
It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.
None of that matters when the number of copies you can subsequently make is unlimited. The amortized cost of the one-time scan is entirely negligible.
This is the same reason DRM doesn't prevent everything from being on The Pirate Bay. It's not that breaking it is always trivial, it's that you only need one person to do it once. It doesn't matter if it costs one cent or a thousand dollars because neither of those is enough to be a deterrent.
In general breaking digital DRM is trivial. Or only mildly challenging as in the end you can get projector and camera... With text OCR and some automated editing should be good enough. And LLMs might make it even simpler.
The right to copy is what copyright deals with. You never had the right to buy a book, copy it, and give away or resell the copy.
edit: the "right" we have to copy them from device to device I think is just granted by the official interpretation of current law by Library of Congress lawyers. It would be entirely consistent to say that when I sell you an ebook, you get to download it to one machine once, and that copying it to a different machine is a violation.
I don't think so? I was saying that the library buys a paper book, scans it, and destroys the original, leaving them with a digital copy. I think (seriously, IANAL) that conversion process is legal because you start with 1 copy and end with 1 copy. The thing the Internet Archive is in trouble for is taking 1 copy and giving it to multiple people at once (effectively, start with 1 copy, end with >1 copy) which is probably a legal problem.
It's hard to make headway in copyright law trying to reason like a regular human being.
Copyright is an artificial constraint on something that is otherwise constrained only by cost of raw inputs and machine labor (even back in the days of setting the lead by hand)... And in that sense, not very constrained at all. The whole thing is an artifice that tries to encourage creation of novel work by couching monopoly on ideas in property law.
This leaves you with a quantum beast that mostly runs on "vibes." To your example: no, illegal, because you made a copy, right there, when you format-shifted. Or yes, because you preserved the total number of instances. Or no, because you moved a tangible format that is easy to preserve singularity on to a hard-to-audit, easy-to-copy format, thus greatly increasing the risk of copyright fiolation. Or yes, because you actually recorded the fact of the position of the ink on the paper in your original copy, and you can't copyright facts ("this is a historical record of what my book looked like"). Or...
Copyright is a ball of string and chewing gum held together by a few explicit laws and many, many centuries of precedent. It's very hard to predict what the end result of a lawsuit in novel territory will be, because it really does come down to "Which faction do the judges think should have more power today?"
I hope a greater and greater percentage of the population comes to understand this.
Currently the people putting in the bigger volume of “work” are the “we want the money” faction. Those who claim they own every concept that they touch. Because they will get more money if they win they treat it as both a war and a job.
Some legal-decision makers put in a smaller but more personally costly amount of work to fight against them in that war.
And a few in the general public put in work to try to change public opinion so that either the war can end peacefully (the “we own everything we touch” faction dwindles and get phased out) or we can get enough people to join the legal fights so that we can win the war.
Every time we become complacent they gain ground. Every time we make a stand they try to erode it from all sides. It is the active and vigilant effort despite them that makes forward progress possible.
This was about the "National Emergency Library" which ran for a while in 2020. After the publishers came after them, they returned to only having 1:1 lending.
From other comments here noting that digital copies are often both more expensive and allow only for a limited number of total lends to happen before invalid (4-6 being noted), it sounds like even getting a physical copy, converting to digital and securing or destroying the physical copy to allow a single digital copy to be checked out at a time would be useful for libraries. Just having a digital copy with the same lending characteristics as a physical one sounds like a win over that.
That is exactly what the lawsuit against the IA seeks to establish as illegal.
Almost everybody this thread mistakenly believes that the lawsuit is strictly about the unlimited lending that has long since been suspended - it is not.
The lawsuit was provoked by the unlimited lending, but takes a two-pronged approach - it attacks both unlimited and 1-to-1 lending.
As far as I can tell, the book publishers are merely seeking to have 17 U.S. Code § 108, subsection (g) enforced.
The law[1] makes it clear public libraries are permitted to make one digital copy and distribute it (lend it) once at a time on separate occasions. Subsection (g) outlines that distributing that one copy multiple times simultaneously forfeits the protections granted by this law.
§ 108 doesn't apply here, in either direction. See footnote 6 of the lower court decision, where the court notes that the Internet Archive doesn't rely on § 108, but instead on § 107 covering fair use, and also notes that § 108 doesn't restrict fair use by libraries: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
The reason IA doesn't rely on § 108 is "When a user requests a copy
of an entire work or a substantial part thereof, the library or archives must first make a reasonable effort to determine whether a copy can be obtained at a fair price. If it can, then no copy is allowed to be made." https://www.copyright.gov/policy/section108/discussion-docum...
What you're describing, "public libraries are permitted to make one digital copy and distribute it (lend it) once at a time on separate occasions," is what controlled digital lending refers to, and it would be cool if it was overtly authorized by statute, but it isn't -- the original CDL whitepaper ( https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/ ) relied on fair use instead. The trial court found that it fails that test, so unless IA wins on appeal, it doesn't exist.
this law is out of date and silly. one of the primary purposes of making digital copies is to have infinite copies, and everyone knows that.
[Request to delete that law submitted]
I think this is a lot less clear than just a yes or no. Imagine you have a library where you can't touch the books so you have to look at them through glass and turn the pages with some type of robotic arm. That probably wouldn't be an issue. What if you replace the glass with a computer monitor? So you are sitting in a room next to the book you are viewing. Then what if you extend the wire and sit in the building next door? What if you replace the wire with the internet? At what point did you start infringing on the copyright?
Imagine a video rental service where you can go in, and they will play whatever movie you want on a DVD player in the back room. How long can that wire be between the DVD player and the person watching before it starts being copyright infringement?
Aereo was significantly different, because there was no copyrighted material being rented. They were renting out servers, and the servers made per-user recordings. Aereo got super screwed over too, because the supreme court said they were 'basically' a cable company, and then they weren't able to get cable company style mandatory licensing either.
> Imagine a video rental service where you can go in, and they will play whatever movie you want on a DVD player in the back room. How long can that wire be between the DVD player and the person watching before it starts being copyright infringement?
I imagine it would be when you put a Y on the wire so that two people can watch from two different monitors.
nope, aereo didn't have a Y in the wire, still found to be infringing.
of course this gets to the core of the problem: rights on paper are one thing, but they are easily taken away by a plaintiff with money. if you don't have the money to defend the right, you don't have the right (and in fact stand a good chance of getting the right taken away for everyone else too).
Sounds like they had bad lawyers (or bad judges). Shouldn't be simultaneously possible to be a cable company and not.
But as IA isn't to my knowledge doing controlled digital lending with broadcast television, is there any plausible argument they would be found to be a cable company?
I’m not sure what you’re asking - they lost because the “we just host personal antennas for subscribers, it’s 1:1 between antennas and subscribers with no Y therefore it’s not rebroadcasting” was found to not be a viable argument, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
Like this is a weird “that’s not true, weren’t they actually…” that recites all the same reasons I just said they were found to be infringing?
Do you want my interpretation of the law, or what I think it should be?
Let me put it this way: You should very much be able to rent a DVD from across the world and control it by wire, and the only limit we need to prevent abuse is how often that DVD can change hands, since micro-renting could cause legitimate problems.
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.
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?
yes, but apparently the law hasn't been updated to allow for that, and legal people get confused by it. what is it that triggers the process of reviewing and revising/removing an outdated law when an entity breaks it? it's obvious that there could be thousands of laws that were made, that are now out of date because of advances in technology or scientific understanding. so isn't there some regular procedure for, when someone sues someone, allowing for the opportunity to consider if the particular violated law is still applicable? maybe if it hasn't been applied in a while and/or was made a long time 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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
If the plumber wants to write such a contract and the customer wants to sign it, sure. In many big cities, there are toilets that are pay-per-use. So, in essence, the market has already embraced the idea you mock.
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.
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.