[HN Gopher] When you buy a book, you can loan it to anyone - a j...
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When you buy a book, you can loan it to anyone - a judge says
libraries can't
Author : leotravis10
Score : 74 points
Date : 2023-04-20 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenation.com)
| suddenclarity wrote:
| The headline isn't mentioned in the opinion piece? What the judge
| ruled was:
|
| > An ebook recast from a print book is a paradigmatic example of
| a derivative work.
|
| In other words, if a library buy a book, they can't just digitise
| it and share it without permission.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My understanding is that (in the US), it's legal to make copies
| of a copyrighted work you legally possess. However, all of the
| copies must be treated as an indivisible whole. If you sell,
| lend, or give the work away, you must include all copies along
| with it (or destroy them).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The law under which the suit was bought essentially concerns
| format-shifting before distribution/lending.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| I'd go so far as to say the article directly contradicts the
| headline.
|
| The author spends an enormous amount of time explaining how the
| rights of "end users" have been cemented, such as the right to
| change formats. If a consumer lends a book, they are, by
| definition, no longer the "end user" and none of that precedent
| applies.
|
| It's probably true that anyone can lend a book but that's not
| an "end user" right. In fact, that allowance is the very reason
| libraries can exist in the first place.
|
| The case and article are about something completely different
| (making copies, then distributing the copies). Odd headline.
| westurner wrote:
| > _that allowance_
|
| Right to property:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property
| the_third_wave wrote:
| In that case a large enough group of people coming together, each
| of them buying a single book which they then lend out to others
| can create a library, yes? For the price of a single book you can
| gain access to first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of
| thousands, then hundreds of thousands of books. All it would take
| is for someone to organise those people, keeping a list of
| requested books, presenting potential members with a choice of
| books to buy to join this modern-day library. Does the law state
| people have to keep their books at home? If not they can be kept
| in a central storage facility which can be accessed by members
| and/or from where books can be mailed to lenders.
| DueDilligence wrote:
| [dead]
| wesleychen wrote:
| The author really twists logic to make her point. Her main
| argument against the ruling is that copyright's historical
| purpose is to spread knowledge, so it should not be used to block
| controlled digital lending. However, the history laid out in the
| article is that "What persuaded early state and federal
| government actors to establish copyright was authors' reluctance
| to release their books publicly without the ability to stop the
| then-rampant piracy by publishers." This original application for
| copyright is strikingly similar to its current use to prevent
| digital copying and distribution.
|
| The CDL issue with the IA has been litigated multiple times on
| this forum by now, and the consensus seems to be that publishers
| weren't going to do anything about CDL until the IA started
| freely distributing digital copies in the early stages of the
| Covid pandemic. As someone who reads, I strongly support what the
| IA is doing, but as someone who produces content, I also want
| some way of controlling its usage. I wish the author would take a
| more nuanced approach to this topic rather than misconstruing
| reality to make the other side seem unreasonable.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > but as someone who produces content, I also want some way of
| controlling its usage.
|
| Nobody at this point is making an argument in favor of
| uncontrolled lending. And the judge is arguing against
| controlled lending.
| rcoveson wrote:
| The judge barely has to argue; the law on this seems totally
| clear-cut[0]. 108(c)(2) says:
|
| > ...any such copy or phonorecord that is reproduced in
| digital format is not otherwise distributed in that format
| and is not made available to the public in that format
| outside the premises of the library or archives.
|
| My understanding is that controlled digital lending is its
| own thing, with its own procedures and licenses. What IA did
| here was come up with its own controlled digital lending
| scheme based on ownership of print copies.
|
| This doesn't look like one of those tense cases where judges
| add to the law with rulings that involve reading in-between
| the lines. This looks like a case where the judge read the
| law, saw that the law discussed exactly what the defendent
| did, and so ruled according to the law.
|
| 0. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108
| [deleted]
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > was authors' reluctance to release their books publicly
| without the ability to stop the then-rampant piracy by
| publishers." This original application for copyright is
| strikingly similar to its current use to prevent digital
| copying and distribution.
|
| Depends. One of them is about an end-user action, one of them
| is about _another_ publisher getting into distribution of the
| work.
|
| They may involve the same technology (especially in 2023), but
| they are not the same action at all, which is a substantial
| part of the TFA.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My author friend had to go to court to get paid royalties for
| audio-book rights, which she had not sold. When Kindle(?) would
| read any book, it became problematic.
|
| Nobody to blame here; existing contracts just didn't know what
| innovations were coming. And business depends upon contracts,
| like it or not.
| chinabot wrote:
| Crazy Decision, but that's the way the world is turning. This is
| another reason I'm coming to believe I am eventually going to be
| shafted badly by being in the kindle ecosphere.
|
| I have been a user since 2010 with no issues for the first ten
| years. Then came the recent update the middle of last year
| whereby I can no longer lend my books out to my friend, this was
| a big blow as we used to exchange books we liked.
|
| Recently I have also noticed that the device seems to want to
| turn on Wi-Fi for me to open books I have downloaded already onto
| the device which also has sufficient memory to store them, this
| seems more to be the ones I haven't read for a few months. The
| final nail in the coffin came a few weeks ago when I wanted to
| re-read a book I had read and it asked me to purchase it,
| thinking I must have read it on kindle unlimited which I had
| subscribed to and cancelled a few years earlier I pressed buy
| now, after reading it I looked back through my purchase history
| and found the same book I had bought five years before. Not even
| sure who to call on this one but prior to this if I owned the
| book already it just came up with the read-now button not the
| buy-now!
|
| I am almost certain that sometime in the future if the kindle
| doesn't phone home after a period the books on it will disappear.
|
| I managed to get some books off it to epub format, but the most
| recent updates have somehow stopped the program that did that
| from working.
|
| Bottom line is I love my kindle, but I am only getting epub
| books, keeping them on the PC and emailing them to the device.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Is it crazy? Copyright is the right to make a copy. Libraries
| can buy and loan books because none of that involves making a
| copy. Digitizing a book and loaning digital copies does involve
| making copies, so it's a violation of copyright. Seems very
| straightforward to me. Am I missing some major detail or catch
| or something?
|
| Sure, there's an exception for "fair use," but I don't think
| fair use has ever covered making a complete copy of a work and
| giving it to someone else. And of the four factors judging fair
| use, the "amount and substantiality of the portion taken" one
| fails completely here. Doesn't seem surprising.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Is it crazy? Copyright is the right to make a copy.
| Libraries can buy and loan books because none of that
| involves making a copy. Digitizing a book and loaning digital
| copies does involve making copies, so it's a violation of
| copyright. Seems very straightforward to me. Am I missing
| some major detail or catch or something?
|
| The problem is that viewing copies that way completely
| trashes the rights people have for their digital goods.
| Displaying it is technically a copy. Reselling it is
| technically a copy. Format shifting is technically a copy.
| Lending is technically a copy.
|
| If I make an ephemeral copy, and keep the original in a vault
| the entire time the ephemeral copy is loaned out, that should
| be good enough. (Maybe you want a minimum loan period,
| details details, but something that works just like a
| traditional library shouldn't be illegal for digital assets.)
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| > Displaying it is technically a copy. Format shifting is
| technically a copy.
|
| Both of which are legally not copyright infringement. Have
| long settled case history etc.
|
| >Reselling it is technically a copy.
|
| Not really, unless you keep a copy after you sell it.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| > the rights people have for their digital goods
|
| People don't have any rights to their digital goods.
| Doesn't exist. They are not.
|
| It is wonderful to discuss ideas for how the system SHOULD
| be. I 100% support a legislated solution for digital
| ownership of copies of things, with a right to transfer and
| so on, but that's sadly a hypothetical discussion about
| what could be.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| It would be reasonable to allow for the exclusive sharing or
| transfer of an ebook. Why can't I resell the single-copy (and
| thus forfeit my own use) or lend it to a friend when done
| (and again I would be unable to use it when it was lent until
| returned/timed-out)?
| crooked-v wrote:
| > The final nail in the coffin came a few weeks ago when I
| wanted to re-read a book I had read and it asked me to purchase
| it, thinking I must have read it on kindle unlimited which I
| had subscribed to and cancelled a few years earlier I pressed
| buy now, after reading it I looked back through my purchase
| history and found the same book I had bought five years before.
|
| This is almost certainly the publisher's fault, by way of
| putting up a different listing for the same book. You've
| probably got two different versions of the book in your library
| now.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Sounds like someone needs to develop an alternative OS for the
| device that does away with all this nonsense.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > the device seems to want to turn on Wi-Fi for me to open
| books I have downloaded already onto the device
|
| They probably weren't downloaded. My Kindle has been doing this
| thing for years: it only seems to download enough metadata to
| show a newly purchased book in the list, but the actual book
| won't download until I try to read it. I don't know why because
| it's utterly stupid, I don't know under what circumstances it
| does this and when it downloads the entire book by itself, it
| seems to be completely random.
|
| > I managed to get some books off it to epub format, but the
| most recent updates have somehow stopped the program that did
| that from working.
|
| And 5 years later companies will whine to the media about evil
| piracy again.
| 015a wrote:
| I overall agree with the ruling against IA. And to be clear: I'm
| a pretty staunch open source / libre software advocate.
|
| > The IA maintained that it could, as long as it lent only the
| same number of copies it owned and locked down the digital copies
| so that a borrower could not copy or redistribute them.
|
| Let's drop the act and be real here: You cannot lock down
| digitally distributed files in any way which offers reasonable
| guarantees that someone remotely sophisticated couldn't copy
| them.
|
| Considering that, I think its necessary that the publishers and
| authors have approved and accepted (1) the distribution itself,
| and (2) the systems which protect the copying of their work. In
| the digital world, for example: they've generally approved of
| Kindle as a digital distribution retailer, and they've approved
| of the Kindle System (DRM, locked down hardware, etc). They
| clearly did not approve of IA distributing their work, nor I
| assume did they approve of whatever DRM scheme IA came up to help
| protect themselves from legal retribution.
|
| (sidenote: the fact that IA put DRM on it at all kind of whispers
| to me that they _knew_ this lawsuit would be coming, they knew
| what they were doing had shaky legal foundations, and while I
| have an immense amount of respect for what they do and their
| mission, knowingly breaking the law isn 't respectable even if
| you disagree with it).
|
| But step out of the digital world and into the physical one. The
| same rules apply. Publishers would generally approve of Barns and
| Noble distributing their books; easy enough. But to the second
| point, implicitly: Publishers have _also_ accepted the inherent
| physical laws of our universe which protect, not wholly but
| significantly, works from being copied at scale. There 's no DRM
| protecting physical books; no swipe of your ID card to unlock
| them; its just _physically hard_ to copy them, its _physically
| hard_ to take a book off your shelf and hand it to a friend in-
| person. When you view those facts relative to how easy it is to
| copy even DRM-protected eBooks, or how easy it would be to just
| "send" a digital book to anyone, anywhere on the planet, at any
| time, instantly; it makes a lot more sense to me why publishers
| are scared of allowing things like this.
|
| In other words: Applying the metaphor of a physical book to a
| digital one is a fundamentally misguided action because digital
| books are fundamentally different in the ways copyright has
| historically cared about. If a man in Norway messages me and asks
| to borrow my physical copy of Hunger Games; I'm going to say no.
| If he asks to borrow my digital copy, all hypothetically handled
| in Kindle, just enter his email, I can click a button to "get it
| back" at any time, instantly: I'm going to say Yes.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Did the judge actually say that all libraries everywhere are
| illegal? Or am I just supposed to infer that and conclude they
| must be crazy?
| ksherlock wrote:
| Of course not. The ruling was that the copyright owner has
| exclusive rights to prepare derivative works. IA scanning and
| lending is creating a derivative work without transformative
| value. Fair use doesn't apply. End of case.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Not so fast. I think your simplification resulted in
| oversimplification.
|
| > The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a
| library lends its ebooks only to the library's members. Id.
| PP 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. P 126. Demand for library
| ebooks has increased over the past decade. In 2012,
| OverDrive, the largest aggregator, processed 70 million
| digital checkouts of ebooks and audiobooks; by 2020, that
| number had risen to 430 million. Id. PP 119, 164.
| gs17 wrote:
| Nope, this is just about digitizing books and renting out the
| e-books as an alternative to the physical copies.
| lxgr wrote:
| It's almost as if copyright law, tailored to a specific medium,
| doesn't translate effortlessly to another, newer, completely
| different one!
|
| Skeuomorphic reductionism has outstayed its welcome on both sides
| of the debate, I'm afraid.
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