Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

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> Don't many community/government libraries do this?

Those books are licensed to the libraries by the publishers. The introduction of the opinion here explains how it works:

> This dispute concerns the way libraries lend ebooks. Public and academic libraries in the United States spend billions of dollars each year obtaining print books and ebooks for their patrons to borrow for free. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶ 113. Libraries usually buy their print books from publishers or wholesalers. Id. ¶ 114. Copies of ebooks, however, are typically not bought but licensed to libraries from publishers through distributors called “aggregators.” Id. ¶ 117. The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53..., page 3 (emphasis added).

It's worth emphasizing that part of the reason why publishers are happy to work with providing libraries with ebooks is that libraries are extremely good customers. There's something like 100,000 libraries in the US alone. A single organization like the Internet Archive just simply doesn't have the purchasing power to make publishers willing to give up any ground.

So then IA just needs to have a free membership and implement the most basic DRM.

Libraries' ebook lending programs are not legal because they require membership and use DRM. They're legal because they're authorized by the copyright owners, and those are the terms the copyright owners choose to impose (along with licensing fees).

But if I purchase the paper book, there is - thankfully - no shrink-wrap licensing anywhere that tells me that I can or cannot lend it to anyone, yet I sure hope I can. Why IA can't?

They can lend the book, they just can't make a copy of it and lend the copy instead.

Which might be legally sound (so says this court, we will presumably hear from others), but it’s logically balderdash. The copyright applies to the “intellectual property” content of the book, not its paper and binding. (I’m sure there are some esoteric exceptions to this because artists gonna art, but I feel confident that I’m representing the vast general case correctly.)

If I rightly own a copy of a book, I don’t think any court within the bounds of absurdity would say I can’t make a digital copy for myself because that’s how I prefer to consume it. Being allowed to lend one finite form but not another equivalent one is definitely something law or license might specify, but that doesn’t mean it makes any kind of sense.

> a digital copy for myself

"myself" being the operative word here.

you can make 100 copies for yourself. what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).

the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession, which replication would circumvent.

> what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).

I’m pretty sure I can do that.

> the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession

I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.

Any individual in IA’s position could do this without fear of legal scrutiny. An organization doing it is under scrutiny not because there’s actual, meaningful copyright violation happening but because they systemized a thing no reasonable person would object to individuals doing.

> I’m pretty sure I can do that.

Not legally.

> I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.

This is the part that is not true. For example, you are free to transcribe a book onto a parchement and read it that way, and store the parchment separately from the book for archival purposes, and keep the parchement even if the original book gets destroyed.

However, this is a limited exception to copyright. You are not in fact allowed, at any point before or after the original copy is destroyed, to lend or re-sell the parchment you created. That parchment will forever be an unauthorized copy, but one that you are allowed to use in certain limited ways.

The only wrinkle is that, at least in the EU, when you acquire an authorized digital copy of a work, you are allowed to lend or sell that copy as long as you don't retain access to it during the lending/after the sale. This is allowed even though technically you are technically creating a new copy of the digital work and destroying your own afterwards, but this is an exception specific to digital realms, it can't be extended to digital copies you make of a phyisical work.

Does that mean I can take the book, copy it, then resell it, keeping the copy?

Obviously there are lots of jurisdictions and you have to hit a broad brush with answers, but generally, no. Your reproduction is only considered to be reasonable by law while you retain the original.

Now I'm wondering how this would apply in situations where the person doesn't know if they have the original or not.

Inspired by the fact that my emulation of Link's Awakening to play on a screen I could see is technically legal since we had a cartridge stuffed away in a drawer. But for 10-15 years that cartridge lived in a limbo land of 'we used to have that, it might still be around somewhere...'

I believe this court ruling suggests that, while you are free to make a copy for yourself of a work you legally acquired, and you are free to lend or re-sell the original work you acquired, you are not free to lend or re-sell the copy you made, even if the original doesn't exist anymore.

Basically, the only thing you are legally allowed to sell is the exact copy you bought of a physical representation of a work, assuming it was created by an authorized entity. You do not legally own an abstract copy of the idealized work, you own a physical object which happens to represent a copy of that work.

Note that this is in fact very much how most people would think of copyright. If I buy a book and someone steals it from me, or it is there in my house and it burns down, I don't have some right to now obtain another physical representation of that novel free of charge, or to obtain a copy made by a friend with a xerox. My sole right was to that one physical copy I bought, and that no longer exists.

Can they just buy an ebook instead of a physical copy?

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