5/30/2023 0 Comments Website archiveTo better understand how some of these licensing agreements work, WGBH has a story outlining some of the details.Īnd the New Yorker has a piece breaking down some of these negotiations, and how dependence on e-books grew during the initial phase of of COVID lockdowns in the U.S.Ī piece from Vice’s Motherboard gets deep into the details of the case and the high stakes around it.Ī recent commentary from Doug Preston, president of The Authors Guild, shares more details about the ongoing lawsuit. Related links: More insight from Kimberly Adams The Authors Guild has expressed support for the publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Publishers like MacMillan argue that e-book lending can cut into revenue for authors and publishers, and that fees libraries pay help make up for lost revenue. The price of a digital copy for a library can exceed the cost of a traditional e-book that a consumer buys. Publishers sell distribution rights to companies like OverDrive or Hoopla, who then sell lending lights to libraries. While a traditional paperback is protected by the first-sale doctrine, in which publishers relinquish the rights to a book after it is sold, digital copies are not protected by this doctrine. Licensing agreements range in price, length of borrowing time, and the number of loans. And without question, it would be these libraries that would be hit the hardest.Įditor’s note (July 25 2022): Libraries currently pay fees associated with the licensing e-books - fees many find burdensome. For the last 50 years especially, they have been very intentionally used as engines of social mobility and social safety in low-income neighborhoods. And so libraries are historically underfunded. Sinnreich: It would be prohibitively expensive for local libraries to have to pay a fee, even a small one, every time somebody took out a book. So, publishers see this as an opportunity to get new sources of revenue from all these things that they didn’t get paid for before.Īdams: I’m also imagining what that might do to local library budgets. Right now, all these people are reading all these books without paying the publishers. Sinnreich: The publishers believe that digital lending should essentially be a right that they license to libraries and that every time a library wants to loan something to a reader, the publishers should get paid a licensing fee. And if they can tell that story to a jury, eventually, they might be able to convince them that they’re in the right and the Internet Archive is in the wrong.Īdams: What are the publishers saying in all of this? Do they have an alternative suggestion for how digital lending should be handled? And this was probably the best shot that they’ve got because they can tell a real story here that paints the Internet Archive as a bunch of copyright criminals. Sinnreich: The publishers have been looking for a way to outlaw controlled digital lending since it began. Kimberly Adams: The publishers have just been waiting on this, it seems. And that’s more or less what they’re seeking to do with this case. What they figured is that this was such an egregious overreach, that if they took the Internet Archive to court, they could essentially shut down online lending by all libraries altogether. And so the publishers saw that as an opportunity to strike a much larger blow. So many people are going to school online, they’re going to work online, we are going to allow more people to take out our digital books than we actually have copies of the physical books. But during the early months of the pandemic, back in 2020, the Internet Archive basically said, this is such an emergency. The following is an edited transcript of their interview.Īram Sinnreich: Basically, you can put an e-book or an audiobook on hold, and then, when it becomes available, you can download it to your phone or even your Kindle, read it, listen to it, and then when you’re done, return it the same way you would with a physical copy of a book or a CD. In that approach, libraries can send out one digital copy for every physical copy they hold. Sinnreich said the Internet Archive used a process called controlled digital lending for years. Read the full complaint here.Īram Sinnreich, a professor at the American University School of Communication, discussed the lawsuit with “Marketplace Tech” host Kimberly Adams. So the courts decide how those lending rules apply.įour major publishers are suing the Internet Archive, a website repository that also loans digital books. When copyright laws were written, much of the technology we use to consume media today didn’t exist. Sharing copyright music, movies and books online can be legally precarious, and there are restrictions on how they can be lent.
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