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https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/05/second-circuit-says-libraries-disincentivize-authors-to-write-books-by-lending-them-for-free/>
"What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but
they wouldn’t bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from
a library? You’d probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now
carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the extremely useful Open
Library from the Internet Archive.
The Second Circuit has upheld the lower court ruling and found that the
Internet Archive’s Open Library is not fair use and therefore infringes on the
copyright of publishers (we had filed an amicus brief in support of the Archive
asking them to remember the fundamental purpose of copyright law and the First
Amendment, which the Court ignored).
Even though this outcome was always a strong possibility, the final ruling is
just incredibly damaging, especially in that it suggests that all libraries are
bad for authors and cause them to no longer want to write. I only wish I were
joking. Towards the end of the ruling (as we’ll get to below) it says that
while having freely lent out books may help the public in the “short-term” the
“long-term” consequences would be that “there would be little motivation to
produce new works.”
Which is just all kinds of disconnected from reality. There is not a single
person in the world who thinks “well, I would have written this book, except
that it would be available for people to borrow for free from a library, so I
guess I won’t.” Yet a three-judge panel on the Second Circuit concludes exactly
that.
As you’ll recall, the Open Library is no different than a regular library. It
obtains books legally (either through purchase or donation) and then lends out
one-to-one copies of those books. It’s just that it lends out digital copies of
them. To keep it identical to a regular library, it makes sure that only one
digital copy can be lent out for every physical copy it holds. Courts have
already determined that digitizing physical books is fair use, and the Open
Library has been tremendously helpful to all sorts of people.
The only ones truly annoyed by this are the publishers, who have always hated
libraries and have long seen the shift to digital as an open excuse to
effectively harm libraries. With licensed ebooks, the publishers have jacked up
the prices so that (unlike with regular books), the library can’t just buy a
single copy from any supplier and lend it out. Rather, publishers have made it
prohibitively expensive to get ebook licenses, which come with ridiculous
restrictions on how frequently books can be lent and more.
It was clear that the only reason all the big publishers sued the Internet
Archive was to put another nail in the coffin of libraries and push to keep
this ebook licensing scheme grift going. Now the courts have helped."
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
