> 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.
If you haven't read this, now's the time to: 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).