The Ruling That Threatens the Future of Libraries

While it would technically be legal here for a library to copy one of their copies for archival purposes should it finally disintegrate, the knowledge is on the precipice of being lost. There's absolutely no justification whatsoever for that book still being under copyright.

I doubt harms like that were even considered at all by my own government here in Canada when the copyright term was recently extended 20 years. For some reason when people think copyright they think pulp trash of the last few years. Maybe copyright should only be a few years then?

Land is neither created nor easy to copy.

You should have to do something that benefits the public in order for the public to grant you that right. And if you want the property to land in your nephew's hands, they too should have to contribute.

Also, there's another important mitigating factor hindering copyright reform. As outspoken copyright reformer Cory Doctorow points out, most people have very little interest in copyright reform as they don't see copyright issues impinging much on their daily lives.

Whilst in recent decades copyright has come from a subject that the average person's knowledge of which would hardly fill a sentence to a much talked about topic (at least for a reasonable percentage of the population), the actual details of matters concerned with copyright reform are either difficult to understand or have little relevance—or both. Many know all's not well with copyright but it doesn't affect them sufficiently for them to become involved politically.

Essentially, we end up with several camps—the vast majority who'd like to see 'something' done but who are not sufficiently committed to do anything about it (these are the people who've been placated by iTunes and such, as these services offer the path of least resistance).

Then there are the pirates (a small but not insubstantial lot), who, almost by definition, have solved their copyright problems.

Lastly, there's the tiny numbers of people lobbying seriously for change (like some of us here who are posting to these columns on HN).

In opposition we have well funded Big Media and Publishing, with bags of money, they can lobby politicians very effectively, witness the power and extent of existing copyright law in almost every country not to mention WIPO, international copyright treaties, etc.

In summary, we reformers are not only heavily outgunned but also we're without reinforcements. For that to change something significant has to happen to stir the wrath of the great unwashed.

There are thriving communities of people who do all those things without trust funds, and never getting paid for it either. Or getting paid for commissions rather than for duplication.

Take a look:

https://www.deviantart.com/

https://www.etsy.com/

Even books and stories:

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

It was about an alleged loss of revenues which clashes at least with the fact that libraries are a "consolidated" practice, and it ended with a judge decreeing that you cannot provide remote consultation of material just because you have the item locally.

People have been buying books even when those books are freely accessible in libraries - since libraries existed.

This sets up a logical fallacy of false dichotomy: that the existence of certain forms of lending lead to an author never getting paid. So while the answer might be that we’d have far fewer books than we have now, the premise is one that cannot be taken seriously, i.e. the reality is not one where authors never get paid.

I think an interesting question to ask is: how many authors would exist if there were never libraries?

Authors commonly grew up spending all of their time in libraries. It’s what sparked their love of books, and that spark eventually became more books. They’re often the first to tell us how much they value libraries and the role that they play.

Yes, authors should be paid for their work. But applying binary thought to the consideration of how authors should be paid and the role of libraries is guaranteed to lead to an incomplete understanding of the situation.

For example, I can't see one of the big publishers happily publishing a treatise on how they're killing innovation. One of the little ones, certainly. (Beacon probably would).

> But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard?

Do we want only the voices of those who can present their work in a palatable money making way to data analysts and C-suite types to be heard?

We may find out soon enough. Book consumption, book stores ... seem to be circling the drain. I'd love to be shown to be wrong though.

If the entire publishing industry too is in descent, I suspect they will only get more obnoxious trying to cling to their last profits. Of course we'll need Archive.org even more then and after.

Even ignoring AI, the maximum possible market for writers is also quite small: If every single person buys a new book every week, even if this money is evenly distributed so that every author gets £12,000 per year (fantastic if you're living where The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is set, not so much when you're living where the series author is based), that's a maximum of about 34,667 authors worldwide, which I think is about the number of agricultural workers in just famously small and not-agricultural Singapore[0].

Personally I am of the opinion that arts should be funded mainly by government grants, though not entirely from them as free markets do at least help align production with demand.

[0] take with a pinch of salt, the stats (page 72) look like they're rounded to 0.1% and I've not read the details: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2018humandevelop...

I'm generally not in the "information wants to be free" camp, but I don't think "unlimited digital distribution" was what IA and libraries were doing. Instead, they linked the number of digital copies to the number of physical copies they had, effectively giving them another way to loan out books they had already purchased.

Publishers predictably didn't like that, because they wanted to charge libraries again for the privileged of loaning out ebook versions of the books they already had, at much less favorable terms than they had sold the physical books to libraries as far as I understand.

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that authors and publishers should get paid for their work. I'm much less convinced it's a good idea that they be able to repeatedly gouge underfunded public libraries that want to embrace new ways of lending out their books.

Authorship is centuries older than the modern copyright regime we suffer under. You present a false dichotomy.

Copyright functionally does not protect the rights of all artists. It only protects artists that are large and well-known enough to retain ownership over their work. The vast majority of artists are not that large. The vast majority of publishers know this, and thus they demand ownership up-front as a policy. Any contractual obligations to return ownership at the end of a publishing period will be subverted in a way that most benefits them and harms the author.

If copyright were inalienable - i.e. there were legal maximums on how much you could transfer to a publisher at once, or the rights reversion regime were stronger - then maybe I'd be on the other side of this debate. As it stands copyright is just lunch money being given to bullied kids.

The IA did not want unlimited distribution[0], they wanted digital first sale. Publishers have been adament that first sale ends where the bits start, and courts have almost unanimously agreed with them. Normalizing Controlled Digital Lending would not do any more "damage" to writers than physical libraries already do.

Which, BTW, is not actually damage. Writers absolutely love librarians because they bring more readers into their back catalogue; publishers hate them because they represent a loss of control. Writers and publishers have different business models: a writer makes money when they sell copies of their work, but a publisher makes money when they control that work. So libraries benefit the writers at the expense of publishers.

Totally agree with you on AI; the discoverability problems that self-published writers already face are getting worse with the ability to generate "genuine fake[1]" spam books.

[0] The National Emergency Library stunt notwithstanding.

[1] "Genuine fake" is a term for "counterfeit goods that look and function similarly to the real thing".

The wider issue isn't over whether authors—or anyone for that matter—should or not be paid for work done (of course they should). Rather, it's over the unfair and inequitable nature of copyright law and how sleazeball publishers take undue advantage of it.

We need to keep in mind how these unreasonable copyright laws came into existence. They were framed in the 1880s by Victor Hugo and cohorts at a time when the average citizen would have had no concept of what copyright actually was let alone have had any notion of violating it.

Aurhors such as Hugo and cohorts were principally targeting unscrupulous publishers (usually printers) in other countries who stole works holus-bolus and published them without paying any royalties whatsoever. They were not obliged to pay as what they were doing in their own countries was perfectly legal (they weren't violating their own weak copyright laws and no local citizen's copyright had been violated).

So when the Berne Copyright Convention Treaty of 1886 came into force it was essentially unknown to the average citizen, and even for the few who knew of its existence, it was essentially irrelevant.

You don't have to be Einstein to figure out what wrong here, that is, at least as far as the public was concerned (of course, authors and publishers loved it and they made a killing). The lobbying for and creation of the Treaty was completely one-sided and essentially without opposition, the authors/publishers got everything they had wished for. Even by the standards of the day what publishers ended up with would have been deemed unacceptable if the then citizens had known about and understood the Treaty's wide-ranging ramifications.

That the 1886 Berne Copyright Treaty started from such a high one-sided base with a small group of authors and publishers in complete control and ruling the roost has made it almost impossible to achieve meaningful copyright reform.

With this small, powerful and well-funded group in control it meant that copyright was locked up and untouchable for the next one hundred years—that is until about the mid 1980s when the first 'challenges' to its rule came about with electronic data (actually, the first was a decade or so earlier when the Xerox copier became widely available).

What so affonts publishers so much is that they've ruled supreme and without challenge (except for spats amongst themselves) for a century. They're not used to being challenged as with other businesses so they've never had to conduct themselves in a proper ethnical and buisness-like way (they've behaved so badly for so long they don't realize how bad their behavior is). Hence, it's little wonder they're now behaving as even bigger asholes than before electronic publishing and the internet.

You also need to consider that publishers have not only been screwing the public with high prices through use of monopolistic practices but also they've screwed authors and content creators from the outset. Correct, these sleazeballs have been screwing those most rightfully deserving of royaltes for years.

I agree that public consumption has been trending anti-intellectual but I don't see how libraries are to blame. Your ire should be directed at modern society. Unfortunately that's a rather broad and manifold thing to dissect to determine where the problems lie.

A system where I can continue to explore ideas of philosophy, science and history. A system where I can explore new ideas through the community maker space they host. A system that allows me to recommend thought provoking books to friends, who in turn can explore the ideas regardless of their financial means. A system that helped me triangulate around some much needed knowledge at a pivotal time of change in my life. The place I vote. The place that hosts community events and classes aimed at improving the community.

The picture you paint is a problematic one, for sure. The picture you paint is not universal or inevitable. I do worry that the belief that this is universal can only hasten the demise of the good parts that remain.

Do you have a particular library system, and some examples of books you have been unable to get?

And can you say more about what you mean about libraries making money by destroying books? I've never heard of this, and am not finding much googling.

But I see a lot of value in providing books that the public wants to read, I am confused by your statement that there's no worth in letting people check out John Grisham from the public library. And it's obviously not like John Grisham's income is being hurt either.

For at least couple generations public libraries have seen it as included in their mission to provide the public with the recreational reading people actually want, so at any rate this thing you're complaining about isn't new.

I agree libraries should also be able to provide more than just the most popular books. Which requires they get enough budget to so. Ironically, if they refused to offer books people actually wanted to read, but only offered books some kind of experts thought were to be recommended on, well, whatever grounds you are suggesting should gatekeep what goes in a library -- they would find it even harder to get budgets. People don't tend to support raising the budget of institutions that refuse to give them what they actually want. But the reason to provide popular books isn't just some kind of manipulation of the public -- it's part of the whole mission of public libraries, providing books people actually want to read. And of course, providing for recreational reading, this has been the mission of public libraries for a long time, nothing new about it.

But the thing is most libraries accept donations so it’s really cheap for them to just keep the kind of books you’re talking about. However, people rarely donate the classics so that tends to cost them actual money.

So, a librarian who mostly sees people come in to use the public computers is likely going to prioritize their budget to maximize the number of public PC’s they can have. That’s going to mean spending less money stocking the classics and more filler.

Libraries are in the set of institutions that tamp down on envy, which-- according to many psychologists-- is by far the most destructive emotional force in modern society.

Libraries achieve this by a) offering an array of standard services, many of which are affordable (or even free!) to literally citizen, and b) not attempting to capitalize on offering premium or FOMO services for a bump in price. There's no equivalent of say, an American Express Black Card, at my public library. There is a single, unadorned laminated card offered to every patron, whether that patron is a an oil man or a fourth generation Appalachian hillbilly who just got running water[1].

Moreover, the kids of both the oil man and the hillbilly sit in the same story hour together (well, half hour-- they're kids after all) and get all excited about reading together.

Moreover, those kids are all treated the same by librarians who, like Oprah, end by giving every single participant a prize. (You get a book! You get a book! You get a book!)

But most importantly of all, the people who could not afford to buy the access to these books and programs can participate without feeling like a charity case. They are simply accessing a common resource delivered and paid for by people in the community who care about all the kids and adults who are patrons of the community library. That lowers the barrier to entry and makes it possible for more kids of various income levels to get a head start on reading at the ages when it's most impactful. It's like vectorization for reading enthusiasm.

Finally, that hillbilly or oil man can go to any state in the union, walk in to a public library, and for a small fee get another laminated card that gets them the same access. It's like the McDonalds of American civics.

I rankly speculate here in the bowels of HN that no one has ever envied another person for entering a public library.

I also rankly speculate that if you take a young sibling/niece/nephew to your local library's story hour (ok, half hour), your rhetoric and perhaps even demeanor would soften in quite the same way as the Grinch listening watching people hold hands and sing.

1: Okay, perhaps a single clarifying citation here. I believe the family got running water back in the 80s.

Edit: clarification, formatting

How is this a source of income?

Uh?