Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

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I think his issue is with the IA unilaterally deciding that they can chose that they want to simply ignore the authors rights to get compensated for their work at any moment they want.

And I totally understand his frustration. It's one thing to have pirating websites that have always distributed copyrighted material illegally. But for IA to decide that they only play by the rules when they want to is different imo. Not only is it bait and switch but it's also just weird to pretend to follow the law when you don't.

Imagine your boss deciding that you just won't get compensated for a few months because they decided to give away for free the software you worked on. If IA wanted to give away other people's work , it's still up to them to foot the bill.

It's not even that I'm totally against piracy, it's just that when I pirate I realize I'm not compensating the author and that if I like the stuff I'll try to do that later. Even the cracking scene tries to put notices on the torrents that if you like what you downloaded, consider supporting the creators.

With how IA presents it's whole program, there's no way to explicitly know that the authors have had no say in the emergency library beforehand and that they don't get compensated . IA looks benevolent but the authors don't.

Do authors have rights to be compensated? If I go to a library and take out a book, the author doesn't get compensated again. The book may be read by hundreds of people but it was only paid for once.

If I lend a book I own to a friend, the author doesn't get compensated again. It's my book, not the authors, and I can let anybody I want read it.

There has never been an expectation that authors get compensated for each person who reads a book. The system has never worked like that. A book is a physical object and authors get compensated for each physical book that gets sold.

It's only with the recent advent of ebooks in recent decades that "pay per reader" has even become technologically possible. Since the 90s.

Here in the UK, if you go to a library and take out a book, the author does get compensated, it's called the Public Lending Right. Apparently in Denmark they've had it since 1941 so I don't think it took ebooks to make it technologically possible.

It looks like Public Lending Right schemes for printed books exist in only a couple dozen countries and even fewer implement them as the UK has with payments per-loan (Canada does a one-time payment per copy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

In USA, the system publishers love so much means that the libraries may go bankrupt when there is an increase in lending. Sure, in the short term it might sound profitable. https://www.wbur.org/artery/2020/03/20/demand-e-books-rises-... http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2020/05/business-gove...

The Danish system works only because the state has agreed to foot the bill for whatever amount of money gets transferred to publishers.

> In Denmark, library book loans fell from 34 million in 2000 to around 28 million in 2014. 38 E-lending has increased rapidly in Denmark since the launch of its eReolen national public library e-lending platform in 2011, but e-lending still only represented just over 2% of all book loans in 2014.39 Interestingly, eReolen has seen a surprising expansion in the number electronically loaned audiobooks, which are now outperforming e-books in the eReolen’s monthly loan statistics.

https://www.statewatch.org/news/2017/dec/ep-study-e-lending.... https://www.kirjastot.fi/sites/default/files/content/Rapport...

This is a flawed comparison. Libraries exist because they can lend a book to only one person at a time. They don't try to provide full access to a book to an unlimited number of people around the world.

> Libraries exist because they can lend a book to only one person at a time.

this phrasing confused me for a minute, so to clarify: do you mean that if libraries could magically create infinite copies of a book, they wouldn't be allowed to exist, and are only tolerated because their presumed impact on copies-sold is limited?

We have had the ability to just reproduce books by printing them for literally centuries, and even more so since the commodification of printer technology. At even small scales, simply printing a book costs close to nothing. Yet libraries aren't just allowed to make copies of their most borrowed books and lend them away.

Libraries are allowed to only lend the number of books they have bought because it's a good compromise between public interest and copyright protection. It has nothing to do with scarcity.

At even small scales, simply printing a book costs close to nothing.

I don't think that's true. As far as I'm aware, we're talking dollars, not cents. For mass-market paperbacks, it's less than that, but that's the opposite of small scale.

What I should've said is smaller scales. But yes you are right that it's still going to cost a few dollars , but if it was actually legal to just produce your own copies surely we would see tons of printing shop specializing in very small printing runs that minimize costs. Right now its very expensive to only print a few copies because no business model makes sense at that scale unless it's plain copying which is... illegal.

> if it was actually legal to just produce your own copies surely we would see tons of printing shop specializing in very small printing runs that minimize costs

what would they print? they don't have the original "master" file for the book, scans look bad and take time and OCR-ing a scan is error-prone

honestly i don't find this convincing... i think if small-scale printing made economic sense (and was something people want), you'd see bootleg books, despite the illegality. digital piracy is mostly illegal and that hardly stops people

Would it really make a difference if libraries could make copies of their most borrowed books? The book is still being shared by hundreds of people.

Libraries didn't get the right to make copies of books when copyright was invented, simply because libraries didn't need an exemption - it's cheaper to buy another copy than to maintain printing capability.

Libraries predate copyright by a couple thousand years. The rules of copyright were written to be compatible with the existence of libraries, not the other way around.

That's the difference between a physical and digital product. Physical products have the first sale doctrine and eBooks don't. They are also physically limited. One at a time. Degradation. Shipping. Loss. Theft.

With regard to libraries and eBooks there are two common licenses. One, libraries can loan one copy of one book out at a time n number of times, then they can rebuy it. Similar to a physical book that degrades due to wear. Two, libraries can loan n number of copies of a book out for a fixed per-loan fee.

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