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Publishers vs. Libraries
John Thacker was the first to submit this news about American publishing companies preparing to wage war on the idea of reading books for free. You see, libraries loan books, and publishers don't get paid -- that's stealing. And libraries even do inter-library loans -- that's stealing too. "We," says Schroeder, "have a very serious issue with librarians."
Let's just concentrate knowledge and power around wealth and keep the heathens from ever learning anything.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
When a library buys a book or a paper journal they it can only be read by one person at a time. So if it is a popular title they will buy several. And each library will buy a copy of major journals. And while you can get it via inter library loan it is still a limited resource. And for each copy the publisher and author get paid.
Now go to a digital world where you can duplicate content with a few presses of a button and suddenly a library no longer needs 30 copies of the most recent Harry Potter book, they just get 1 and copy it. There needs to be a ballence here. The libraries need to be able to distribute information, but there also needs to be a way to compensate those who created it.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I'm surprised this hasn't come up before, what with the Napster mess. I have been able to check out music for over five years at my local library. The same goes for videos, e-books, magazines... libraries have always distributed all sorts of media.
The question is, do the authors care? Both kinds too. For one, I'm sure Stephen King isn't at the forefront of the movement considering he's making more money than God. However, smaller authors might really stand to gain a lot. Curiously, it's the DIYs that seem to be against the whole copy protection thing in the first place.
The bottom line is, if libraries go, book piracy will emerge. Just like Scour, Napster, Gnutella, and every other P2P out there.
Didn't Salon originally run this idea as a cartoon?
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But currently libraries already pay royalty fees for items that they lend out to people. See this article for details. So this isn't quite a hot topic as it seems, it's more about the exact details of how it will work...
The real problem is that by changing to digital content the publishers have seen a way to inflate the amount that they get from libraries. Libraries don't traditionally have huge budgets with which to purchase new materials, and if they end up having to pay on a per-use basis then many of them will have to stop stocking as many items. And because libraries have traditionally been free to use, they can't pass their costs onto the public.
However in this case the libraries have something in their favour that Napster users don't - an unbeatable public image. You can't tarnish libraries as thieves and pirates, not without ruining your cause. It may well be that this issue is the single most important thing in deciding exactly how fair use and payment models will apply to digital content.
As far as I can recall, free lending libraries were invented in Philadelphia, by Ben Franklin.
Prior to Ben starting one, libraries were typically privately owned, or member supported. Back in the 18th century and earlier, the idea of a citizenry who could educate themselves with open libraries scared the shit out of the governments, books and literacy were fine for the nobles, but they would give funny ideas to the hoi polloi.
Sadly, this idea that common people can't think for themselves is still too common, we've all heard too much about governments that won't allow their citizens to browse certain auction sites because they may contain disturbing historical artifacts.
Reading the post article called some of Richard Stallman's writing to mind, specifically The Right to Read. This must be stopped. Now.
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The proposal of the culture ministry is the following (if I remember correctly) : a fee will be actually paid, but will not be charged to the user, instead it will be paid on a local government budget, and also partly by the bookshops who provide public libraries.
Everyone seems content with that, so it will probably pass as a law.
"Technology people never gave their stuff away," Schroeder says.
Bzzt, go and read some of those books rather than litigating over them and you'll find pretty much anything thats good software wise has been given away.
Does anyone get the impression that most cases like this have more to do with lawyers talking up cases to get cash rather than actual legitimate concerns?
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Ask any author besides Michael Crighton how much they get paid for their work. Diddly, for the most part. Editing and layout can be a reasonable amount of work/expense, but the fact of the matter is the actual printing press side of books is still a significant expense.
If these guys are planning on publishing books electronically, I don't suppose they were considering passing along some of the savings to the consumer/libraries? I mean, after all I'm not getting as much when I receive a bunch of bytes as when I receive a bound paper/hard back. With journals you have indexing/search capabilities, but that isn't much of a value-add for a novel. What's that, publishers are charging _more_ for electronic versions of books? For some reason sympathy for publishers is not exactly welling up inside me.
Publishers do render a real service both to authors and readers, I don't object to their being paid for it, but I don't see how the 'electronic revolution' is a big threat to them. When people check things out of the library, they still want to get something on paper. Unless libraries suddenly build their own printing presses their still going to have to buy these paper copies from publishers. The only exception to this is electronic journals, and these have been licensed per seat ever since they were invented.
You have no idea how much fun it is trying to complete a biology research project along with 2000 other undergrads and finding out the library has only enough licenses for thirty computers to access the electronic bio journals at once.
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Lets not get out panties in a bunch. Check this link out.
108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if-
(1) the reproduction or distribution is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage;
(2) the collections of the library or archives are (i) open to the public, or (ii) available not only to researchers affiliated with the library or archives or with the institution of which it is a part, but also to other persons doing research in a specialized field; and
(3) the reproduction or distribution of the work includes a notice of copyright that appears on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section, or includes a legend stating that the work may be protected by copy-right if no such notice can be found on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section.
Of course, it then goes on to say that libraries can only have digital copies for backup reasons, not to lend. But I think its fairly blatant that the publishers do not have a legal leg to stand on if they decide to go after the librarians. Beware of the wrath of Conan the Librarian.
What's your source? Literacy was always the badge of the elite: of citizens in Greece (wealthy men only), clergy in the middle ages, etc. It's only been relatively recently that universal literacy has been a goal, and only in parts of the world.
Likewise, in an increasingly literate and wealthy society, public libraries are less important. At one time they were the only way for most people to get books, now they are mostly just a (taxpayer-subsidized) cheaper alternative.
In an increasingly wealthy society, they should try to fit a modern niche. There are subscription libraries for certain types of specialized information. This is a great idea for those who want to share the cost of many $14,000 subscriptions, for a $20 per month fee.
She's adamant that the country needs to focus more on reading to children under the age of 5
provided, of course, that you have purchased and can produce a receipt on demand for a "5 listener license pak" for groups of 5 children or less, or, ir you act now, librarians, school teachers and qualified parents can get a 20 pak for the low low price of 10 if you send in the rebate coupon (allow 4-6 weeks for rebate processing). Some restrictions may apply.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
When dealing with physical media, there is a cost associated with the paper, the binding, the manual labor involved in producing it. But with digital media, about the only thing required is the computer to distribute the copies and someone to spell check (which I don't think even gets done that often.)
/.'r that just doesn't get it. The cost of publishing has LITTLE to do with the paper its printed on. Do you really thing the Journal of Tetrahedrional Chemisty (or whatever that reference was to in the article) really costs $14000 to print up??? Do you really think it was printed on Gold Leaf by monks slaving over each and every word?
/. -- we don't and thats why I normally don't complain about the lack of journalistic integrity here...this is the geek equivelent of People Magazine or something...Dammit I just want to know why it cain't work out between Tom and Nicole!!! I would expect a lot more integrity and correctness in reporting from someone I was paying quite a bit of money to...especially if my job depended on it.
Jeez another
Its like Music...everyone thinks that the musician looses NOTHING by having a MP3 distributed...its just a few bits...yeah there are advantages to using these things as advertising, but it still costs to produce that.
Do you think the people publishing the the journals are doing it for free? Its a prestigious role to be publisher, and it can make or break someones academic career. If you allow someone to publish something with less than credible methods or results, then yer career can be down the tube as well. As such, these people need to get paid and you are paying for their opinions, much in the way that we pay for the opinions of
clif
... of course, there was that Tom the Dancing Bug strip from last August.
- Mike
But is it such a bad thing. Take an extreme example: imagine if copyright laws didn't exist at all... would the world be too horrible a place for people to live in? Is copyright law the only thing that stops civilisation from descending into chaos? Would all artists stop producing works?
Sure, things would be different: some people might not be able to earn 'slightly less than Jack Valenti' salary by keeping their current jobs. Lots of things might change. But I don't the world would end. I definitely think people would continue to write songs, books, software and make films. There will always be ways to make money from them...
A few years ago, it was looking like the Internet might threaten newspapers. Nowadays, you can get copies of most newspapers online for free. They are voluntarily giving their stuff away, and yet people still go out and pay for the printed versions. Sure, it's not $10,000 for a year's subscription; but the point is, rather than crying about it and demanding news laws, why not try to go with the flow and see where it takes you.
Computers have always brought the threat of redundancies and unemployment, but they've also tended to create new jobs and new opportunities. I strongly believe that the threats to society created by the Internet will prove just as non-existent, if we give it a chance. The more worrying threat in the current climate is that those crying for new laws will get their way, and the people will suffer.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
I happen to be married to a librarian (yes, no kidding).
We were discussing this a few weeks ago. She is planning on a proposal for a spacialized library, non-profit style, and all that.
She has discovered that libraries, for anything that they have available (from the local newspaper to a flashy CD-ROM), are already paying more than you and me will pay at Barns and Noble for the same item. Much more. They pay more because this information will be available to lots of people.
Now, if publishers want libraries to pay for every people reading the book, for any interlibrary loan... they should get first huge discounts for buying all the stuff that the publisher is carrying.
Silly lawyers, because this is a publisher's lawyers idea for sure, a publisher that is having disminished revenues and tries to make that missing money in the courts.
The technical librarian description of this is "it completely sucks".
Regards,
opkool
The idea that libraries are "free" is a popular misconception. The public library I work at is supported by township property taxes, and to be eligible to borrow from the library, you need to be able to prove you are a resident of an eligible township OR purchase a card (which costs about as much as the library would have received from your taxes.) Not too long ago we had a case in which a local township opted against library service because they didn't want higher taxes. Even today, after a highly publicized battle, residents don't understand that libraries are not a free god-given right. Residents pay for libraries, just not overtly.
I'm still not entirely sure what all the uproar is about, though. The technology is very much in place to enable e-books to be loaned for a specific period of time. It's a simple matter of patron authentication and timed decryption or access, not altogether unlike the much reviled Divx format. Really, I think it's much ado about nothing.
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Something cleverSomeone (RMS maybe?) once said "Information wants to be free." That may be true, but who's going to create the information in the first place if they aren't going to see anything for their efforts?
We have this wonderful thing called "capitalism" that has a habit of being self-regulating. When the people who are making information don't get enough money for it, those who were doing it for the money will stop doing it, leaving only those who do it for self-gratification, the betterment of humanity, or other such motives. If that doesn't end up creating enough information, then suddenly there is a high demand and a low supply. Whenever such a state exists, then there will be a lot of money thrown into producing the information that people crave.
The problem with the current situation is not that they can't make enough money by selling information, it's that they're currently making MORE money than the market wants to give them, and they're trying to find artificial non-capitalistic ways to sustain their inflated income.
"Likewise, in an increasingly literate and wealthy society, public libraries are less important. At one time they were the only way for most people to get books, now they are mostly just a (taxpayer-subsidized) cheaper alternative."
Uh, a cheaper-alternative for *rich* people, maybe. For those of us who don't have the leisure income that you apparently do, libraries are the *only* source of books. I'm glad you're so freaking bourgeois that you think public libraries have outlived their usefulness -- do you feel the same way about public schools, public transit, and public utilities?
--J
I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
I find this article not surprising in the least, nor should anyone.
In regards to media (in general), our country (and to an extent the world) is suffering a kind of slow-motion nervous breakdown. There are changing issues, changing technologies, new opportunities, and missed potentials.
Instead of rationally looking at the big picture, people are busyily scrabbling in a mixture of Cover-Their-Backsides and Exploit The New thing. The end result is a kind of bizare insanity where our Public Libraries become evil pirates, insane copyright laws are enforced, no one's happy, everyone's afraid, and layer upon layer of technical and social limits are conjured up with no thought of the future.
I say this article, this situation, needs to be shoved in the face of the public as much as possible. PEOPLE ARE ATTACKING LIBRARIES, treasured public institutions. Copyright issues have gone completely insane.
I take some comfort in knowing these moronic legal acrobatics will eventually produce such an unenforceable mess and lead to so many ridiculous lawsuits, they'll be scrapped. I'd rather it didn't come to that however.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
We protect libraries because they give information access to anyone, regardless of income level.
We deplore shoplifting because it raises prices for everyone else and puts small stores out of business.
We as /. users are a conflicted bunch. We want everything for free but want to be over-paid at the same time. We often seem to confuse free beer with free speech.
The amazon.com honor system won't work- we singed up just to prove it
Where's that crystal ball RMS has been hiding?
I never did think we'd find ourselves moving towards a Stallman-Ray Bradbury world.
Of course, I'd never have read Farenheit 451 if it hadn't been in my elementary school's library.
If that isn't irony, I don't know what is.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
From what I note in the article, the people who are really getting hot under the collar about this are the publishers.
Perhaps, this is because, like the music industry, they're beginning to see that anybody can go direct with their content in a digital format, and bypass them completely.
As soon as this is really understood, then nobody, or at the very least far far fewer people will be relying on them, and thus paying their huge cut of each book paid for.
It looks like another outmoded dinosaur is desperately thrashing around with tooth and claw (read litigation) in an attempt to protect their revenue streams in an age when they're no longer required.
About the only way they can stay required is if they make it near enough illegal for anyone to publish their own content and not go through them.
And this looks like the first step in that direction.
Just a pondering,
Malk
Electronic media is not a loophole for the fat, wealthy media companies to continue fleecing the public!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
As a librarian, I have no problems with publishers making money at what they do. However, I think the reality of how libraries deal with e-books is mis-represented. The e-book products that I am aware of involve buying a set number of 'copies' of each e-book. If you buy 3 'copies' only 3 people can use it simultaneously and for a limited time only.
As far as journals and magazines are concerned, the library I work at pays in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year for access to databases that can be accessed inside the library by the general public and through the internet by authenticated students, faculty and staff. Some of these databases involve a cost of 64 cents per database query for finding citations of articles, not the articles themselves.
Now given that I work for a fairly typical small to mid-size library, with hundreds of peer institutions across the country with similar setups, I think publishers are probably getting a fair shake, and probably more than their fair share from libraries.
Now folks, please be respectful and treat her as the distinguised person she is. A considerate and well thought message will make more of an impact than a flame. Don't write anything you wouldn't say in person, and if you say foul things in person, please do the cause of liberty a favor and let other cool-minded person's do the writing. Okay, I'm stepping off the soap box.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
"These people have mortgages," Schroeder is quoted as saying in the article.
Answer: so what? The people who made buggy whips back when horse-drawn carraiges were all the rage had expenses too. Then their industry went obselete. Should the government have passed litigation that insured that their industry would survive, to "save jobs"? No, people adapted. They found something useful to do for society.
The MPAA, the RIAA, and now the publishers try to focus everybody on the creative people. They try to use the scare tactics that the musicians, writers, and so forth will not be paid unless we have all these draconian controls on digital distribution. But that's not what this really is about. There are lots of people in the distribution industry who have jobs that will become obselete as the digital world takes hold. Some of the people at the top of this chain of jobs have a lot of money and a lot of power. They don't want to lose it.
The creative people will not become obselete. All this technology can't replace the creativity of writers. What it can replace is the full industry that's in place to "publish" and distribute the writer's work. If these people really did care about the creators, they'd be trying to figure out how best to find a niche and adapt to the digital world. Instead, they're trying to insure that those who have the power base in the analog paper world maintain that power base once it has become unnatural for them to do so.
I have full confidence that the writers, musicians, etc., will find a way to live in the digital world, given the chance. We value them, and they will still be valued in the digital world. (I don't know it will work; I could spew some ideas, but I don't claim to have the answers. But I do know that the right answer isn't to clamp down and hand the keys to our minds to the executives of the RIAA and publishing industry.)
However, we don't value the recording and publishing industry. We've only valued them because they were necessary for the creative people to communicate their works to us. Those industries are becoming dinosaurs. We should let them die. The people with mortgages in that industry should find something new to do. That may sound harsh, but it's the way things go. Buggy whip makers had to find something new to do too. It's ridiculous to strangle individual freedoms across the world in the name of protecting jobs that are becoming useless.
Hey, maybe some of those trying to preserve their positions in the recording and publishing industries could instead try to find a way making a living by helping writers and musicians be recognized and known in the digital world, where information can flow freely without being blessed by a huge corporation, and where it will be that much harder for a really good writer or musician to become widely known! Maybe they could be on the forefront of inventing the new distribution model in a world where it's easy to freely copy content! Naaah, much easier to legislate the continued existence of their obselete industry.
-Rob
Sueage is the American pastime.
The idea of Intellectual Property was invented on the premise that it is feasible to create an artificial scarcity of information. If it is feasible to do this, then IP is a great idea, because it allows creators to sell IP as though it were tangible property, and thereby make a living just like any other person in a manufacturing trade. The consensus is (or was) that this is a Good Thing, and that it why the people chose to create copyright law.
But this artificial scarcity isn't really feasible anymore. They're trying to keep it that, with ever-increasingly-draconian laws. But these aren't really working, and more importantly, the side effects and other costs of these efforts are beginning to get very high. Libraries aren't just a geek thing; a much larger portion of the population uses them. If they are threatened, then society is going to lose its consensus that information scarcity is a Good Thing. When that consensus is lost, then IP will no longer exist, because there won't be laws that protect it.
Thus, intellectual creators are damned if they do try to keep information artificially scarce, and damned if they don't (due to technology). Either way, IP is on the way out. No wonder they're scared.
But this doesn't mean that society doesn't value what intellectual creators make, or that they are about to lose their means of making a living. They're just going to have to change what they sell. Instead of an artifically scarce resource (information), they're going to have to sell a naturally scarce resource: their creativity and labor. They're going to have to switch from manufacturing to service.
In a way, I'm already facing this in my software job. Most of the revenue that I generate for my company isn't in the form of products; it's in the form of billed time for custom programming. The customer is really paying for a service rather than a product.
And you know what? It's tougher. I have to keep on my toes and actually work every day, instead of making a product and hoping that it "goes big" so I can sit back and take it easy while the money comes in. Poor me, having to work for a living! Poor publishers!
Frankly, if a lazy slob like me can do it, then these so-called "businessmen" can handle it too. The harder they fight, the more I become convinced that they're either 1) Stupid, because they don't see the big picture or 2) Unethical, because they want something for nothing.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.