Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

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This is awesome. I can remember clearly, in junior high school, the librarian informing us that we were only allowed to copy six pages of a book for homework assignments. I don't really have a strong opinion on much of this (one way or the other), because I'm not well enough informed on the topic, but I remember feeling weird about it, becaus the library aid made us feel like criminals for wanting to copy more than 6 pages. The library at that particular school was pretty substandard anyway.

I'm not so sure I won't be aging myself by saying this, but I feel very nostalgic about libraries, and the thought of them becoming obsolete saddens me, not so much because I can't imagine a future with mostly digital books, but because I always felt at home at the library (and not in the "there's a man sleeping under the 600s shelf" sort of way). I always felt a sort of wonderment at the library, and that others were there for the same reason added to that. I didn't visit the public library for school reasons, typically. Instead, I just sort of explored. I have always been a slow reader, so finding the exact right thing to read next was a bigger deal for me than just reading book after book.

I also volunteered as library aid in 12th grade, which was fun.

Are there others that feel / felt the same about libraries?

Digital is not a threat to libraries. Libraries have been some of the earliest adopters of digital materials.

DRM, copyright and the cultural myth perpetrated by big media producers that every tiny bit of content must be paid for are real the threats to libraries.

Yeah, we were only allowed to use the first 30 seconds of songs in school projects. Presumably that rumor started because of iTunes (which is crazy of course because iTunes obviously negotiates extra rights that you and I don't have). Meanwhile we just had to cite where entire photos came from! I think it was just the recency of the music piracy issues that made them care.

> Yeah, we were only allowed to use the first 30 seconds of songs in school projects. Presumably that rumor started because of iTunes

More likely, it was a rule adopted because fair use analysis is generally helped by using a limited portion of the copyrighted work, and organizations concerned with liability don't really want everyone independently trying to figure out how limited a portion is limited, so they like to set some standard that is likely to be limited enough in most real cases of the type they are likely to be exposed to (e.g., nonprofitable educational uses, for school projects) as to mitigate risk sufficiently.

> Meanwhile we just had to cite where entire photos came from! I think it was just the recency of the music piracy issues that made them care.

That's actually perfectly sensible -- the demonstrated propensity of interested parties to file a lawsuit, and the likely damages in the case a suit is lost, are perfectly rational factors to consider when determining how to craft a legal risk mitigation policy.

In general photo content owners are as litigious as music ones.

Did you have to pay for copies? If you were in junior high, I would assume that the 6 page limit is a cost limiting measure.

I felt that way too, they always felt like a quiet retreat from anything you may be experiencing in life really. It was always so calm and peaceful in there. Never anything offensive to the senses going on. Finding that place in the back corner where there wasn't any foot traffic and getting lost in a book was possibly one of the best things I remember about childhood. It was also one of the few things you can do without needing any money.

Knowing all the different information that could be hidden inside these walls of books that I was surrounded by that might be interesting to me was also something special. You can get that with the internet but there's really no visual, material feeling you get actually seeing the amount of things you can learn about.

(maybe I'm misspeaking, but in general I think this holds whether it applies to your case or not so I'm going to say it anyway)

Once/if you have kids, you'll get to relive that joy of libraries all over again. :)

(unrelated: my school libraries also prevented excessive photocopying of books.)

I used to do research at the local branch of some official government research library, and they were very strict about enforcing such limits; they kept track of who copied what, how much, and when. They did not lend, and if the limit was six pages and you wanted to copy seven pages you were out of luck... [there was some timeout, so you could come back some days later and copy the remaining pages, but man was it ever a pain...]

If you asked them why, they were decent enough to provide some sort of reasoned argument based on the actual copyright law to explain this policy, so I don't think they were just being jerks.

[This was in the UK, so I dunno if the laws were worse or better than in the U.S.]

Libraries are not becoming obsolete.

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