Publishers Lose Their Shit After Authors Push Back on Their Attack on Libraries
techdirt.com
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The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned. You basically treat digital copies as if they are physical copies, which can't be lent to more than one person simultaneously. Publishers don't like CDL, preferring more lucrative ebook licensing, but it's an intuitive application of the spirit of copyright law.
IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned. In other words, they blatantly ignored copyright, in both the letter and spirit of the law, and effectively pirated the material. And I think the publishers were very much in the right to pursue litigation about that.
I hear defenders of this stunt say that IA does so much important work, and that litigation threatens the good work, so they conclude the litigation is the problem. But if IA really does such important work, and the stunt jeopardized that work, then the fault lies with those at IA who were willing to imperil that work.
So yes, as an author I support libraries. Unless the libraries start acting like pirates.
Working with other libraries to lend out digital copies for ALL their physical books - fine.
Crossing the line into supposedly "justifiable piracy because Covid" - not fine.
At least that's how I see it.
"Now that you need us more than ever, we're going to step in front of a train. Someone better stop it." Something like that. They had to know they were courting trouble, so we have to ask why they did it anyway.
Doctrine of first sale does rely on natural friction of physical items to work as a compromise.
To take the CDL thing further, i think the natural extension would be for all the people who own a copy of the book to get together and create a transparent lending market with a reserve of enough copies that all members of this lending co-op can still get a copy whenever they want (think how a fractional reserve bank works). I doubt copyright holders would like that very much.
But then again, my personal politics is copyright abolition...
They had the full support of other physical libraries, which could not loan out their collections at the time because of COVID. The overall amount of copies was never exceeded as you seem to be implying here. For all intents and purposes, the basic principles of CDL remained in effect.
As far as I know, the Emergency Library was a unilateral decision by IA, not a partnership with a consortium of shuttered libraries.
The announcement did mentioned receiving support from other libraries, but it didn't indicate that those libraries owned sufficient copies to cover all CDL usage.
Indeed, if that were the case, I would expect the language to have been very different -- something like "expanded access" versus "suspending all waitlists," the latter of which only makes sense if lending is unlimited and thus not CDL.
http://blog.archive.org/2020/04/27/forging-a-cooperative-pat...
https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vTRPssQgr90y...
Which pretty clearly indicates the move was unilateral by IA, but they got by-in after the fact.
As far as I know, even "wear" of physical copies is simulated in this model: After 30-ish lendings, the digital copy "breaks", requiring the library to "buy" (really: license) a "fresh" one. (And for physical copies, reinforcing a book's binding seems to be prohibited as well, all to keep the number of acceptable lendings per copy predictably low!)
I get that it's effectively the only compromise many publishers and libraries have been able to achieve, but after taking a step back, it should hopefully become apparent that it's completely ridiculous.
Not even digital video streaming works that way – I find it scary to believe that publishers are being more complicated than the movie/TV industry! Count how many people are lending a given book and pay the authors accordingly, crunch some numbers about physical library lending and extrapolate from there, etc. There has to be a better way to still pay authors, but to isolate library patrons from this absurdity.
Here's hoping that this tacky skeuomorphism will age about as well as brushed metal.
This is awful! Where's the exact wording of this prohibition available at?
The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...)
As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.
So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?
In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.
And that's a bad thing because?
i assume this includes books still in print but first published a while ago. Anyways, long tail is going to long tail. Seems pretty normal to me.
I'm also a bit unclear how those numbers compare per year vs per the entire life time of the book, which seems like an important distinction.
However i imagine lots of people go with a publisher in the hopes that their book is a hit. In which case the publisher comes in handy. But you dont know beforehand if you are going to win the book lottery so you have to balance the probabilities.
Where does the DOJ make this assertion?
I think that The Association of American Publishers, together with other players, are in the process of re-defining the meaning of English word "disinformation". These days, the word "disinformation" basically means "something you disagree with" or "something you strongly dislike". I wonder if the online dictionaries would be catching up at some point.
To me, this is a signal that I should pay closer attention to something. Calling something "misinformation" is expressly saying that you want this information suppressed, which is more interesting than the information itself.
Participate in our collective objective reality -- or don't. But don't expect social media to spread your lies about the holocaust so you can preach the gospel of hate.
1. Deny fact "X" either historical, scientific, or otherwise provable -- meanwhile never disclosing your ulterior motives.
2. Argue from first principles that people who believe "X" should be allowed to say it no matter how repulsive or dangerous it is.
3. Debate endlessly to make it seem that "X" is more controversial in its widespread belief than it is. (Search HN for the Ivermectin). Aso, make sure to engage in whataboutery, false premises, strawman arguments, or demonization of those who support "X". (See Dr. Fauci)
4. Complain when someone (or a group of people or a corporation) decide to not let your arguments against "X" on their network as censorship.
If you believe that bleach injection is really about a practical decision to choose the best medicine and making the wrong choice due to misinformation, then you're lost in your own bigotry.
In terms of the current capitalist model, we're agreed, piracy is a bad thing: People pirate media, the industry suffers monetary losses, the media producers don't get paid enough to keep producing, and as a result of all this there is less media. I'm with you.
What if the entire premise that this was a bad thing was wrong though?
The only thing that would go away is _this iteration_ of media creation and distribution.
"In the old days", things like music and stories were _meant_ to be copied, shared, and even expanded, by everyone. I'd argue this was a better system because it's literally what "culture" means:
"the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively" — my Apple dictionary, don't know it's source ;)
The standards were high, because the motivation was in great part the art itself, not as much the monetary gains (compared to today). Of course the artist has to earn money to live, but they used to before too! This part is a whole argument in itself, so I won't expand on it here.
My point — and believe it or not, I have a point — is that technology seems to be naturally supporting my world view on this, and we're trying to artificially cripple it not to.