<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/22/book-publishers-wont-stop-until-libraries-are-dead/>
"Earlier this week there was finally a hearing in the case brought by the big
book publishers to kill off libraries. That, of course, is not how the
publishers describe the lawsuit, but it’s absolutely what the lawsuit is about.
We’ll get to some of the details in a moment, but we’ve joked in the past that
if libraries were new today there’s no way that book publishers would let them
exist. In some ways they’re a legacy holdover from before publishers had that
much power. The attack on controlled digital lending (CDL) more or less proves
this.
As much as publishers like to
claim they “love libraries,” their actions here
speak quite clearly that they would destroy them if they could. Controlled
digital lending is no different from how a library lends out books today. In
both cases, it gets a physical copy of the book (either through purchase or
donation), and then proceeds to lend out that copy. With a physical library
it’s literally that physical copy. With CDL it’s a scan of that book, but the
scan is tied to the physical copy, so that if a digital copy is loaned out, no
one else can take out another copy.
Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale
rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of
copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries
are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made
available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple
times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled
Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect
libraries to do."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
