This isn't really a fair comparison. File-sharing has marginal costs close to zero, so wide distribution becomes essentially free. Public libraries must hold an inventory that can only be increased by paying for another copy of the book, movie, etc.
If public libraries had their own printing presses and loaned out copies they printed from some master edition this would be a fairer analogy, but in this case libraries would effectively be stealing from the publishers and authors, as file sharing sites are currently.
Even with ebooks that some libraries offer, which have the same costs close to zero as you say, there are often arbitrary limitations as to how many they'll lend out at a time.
The article main point is that Public libraries are more expensive that File-sharing, and that a zero-marginal cost hyper parallel public library would be indistinguishable to File-sharing.
The argument against file sharing then becomes the argument to keep tax paid public libraries sufficient inefficient that the copyright industry can create a living by supplying a better product.
Well to be fair the costs are irrelevant, you can claim the big issue is that Libraries actually getting their copies for free and in many countries actually charge (even if minute) fees for people to be able to borrow books making them more akin to Netflix than to TorrentFreak.
But the setup cost is really not the issue especially considering that you can setup a new digital library at little to no costs these days and as a very large portion of the books (I would say probably 99%>) that you would be able to get a hold on in a public library got digital copies than setting up the same exact collection isn't that hard.
Another argument to be made is actually the "value" of the information shared in libraries vs file sharing sites, while you can argue that even the poorest made film or the buggiest game has some educational value you would be hard pressed to claim that file sharing sites help propagate knowledge on a level that is even in the same order of magnitude as public libraries used too.
Yes some people might download a book, even a school book or some documentary (which today they are pretty worthless sadly) but majority of downloads are TV shows, Movies, Porn and Games which sorry claiming that they are akin to a public library is just blasphemous.
Movies, TV shows, games and music is all part of our common culture. The question is then if children who partakes in culture do better than those who are deprived, and what impact it has on their life.
One thing I am sure of is that there is no single artist in the world that isn't also a consumer of art. You don't become a great musician if you don't have access and listen to other peoples music, and you don't become a great movie director without watching other peoples movies. Same should be true for games, painting, and writing. If we removed all non-educational book from public libraries we should see a direct decrease in the number of writers that exist.
Yes, but that's not the original argument for the support of libraries.
If you want to claim that people benefit from downloading the latest game of thrones episode or the latest call of duty in the same way their great grand parents and great great grand parents did when libraries when public libraries were being established during the mid 19th century you'll find it to be quite an uphill battle.
Also since none of your examples actually stated a clear violation of copyright law on what ground do you even attempt to make an argument? Spielberg went to the movies last time I've checked.
1. It's only been in the last couple years that all of the big publishers would actually sell eBooks to libraries.
2. It's not selling, it's licensing, with severe restrictions.
3. They charge higher rates for the eBooks to Libraries than they do to the general public.
4. Some publishers only offer eBooks to libraries when the books have been out for six months.
Not in the article, but also important: publishers claim that libraries cannot simply digitize and loan out e-versions of their existing book catalogs--they claim that the eBooks are a different product, and that libraries have no license to do that. That would probably not stand up in court, but libraries aren't eager to antagonize the publishers, from whom they are still trying to get regular eBooks at regular prices.
The article is kind of ill-informed on this, too, I'm afraid. The difference between filesharing and public libraries is that public libraries operate within de facto and legal restrictions that don't apply to filesharing. A much better comparison, that fits the author's claim that the only difference is efficiency, is home taping and CD-copying.
Except ebooks come with licensing terms. You can't just buy one copy of a book and give it out infinite times. They have limits on use. Its modeled very closely on the physical book system.
>You can't just buy one copy of a book and give it out infinite times.
You very much can though, that's the beautiful power of digital media. Publishing companies with outdated business models are relying on archaic laws to prevent you from doing this. But it can be done!
Funny how we work so hard to simulate old models of scarcity rather than be brave enough to adopt new models that accept post-scarcity as the way forward.
Agreed. You could say that public libraries have a natural limit to their degree of sharing, whereas online filesharing does not.
For instance, when a popular book comes out the library might have a couple copies. If hundreds want to read those copies then they'll have to wait. Many of those people will be unwilling to wait and buy the book instead, which supports the author.
What an absurd title and statement. Of course you can defend public libraries and oppose file sharing! It costs almost nothing to share digital files, while libraries have very real physical location costs and costs to maintain physical books (and maybe even to purchase digital books?). Not to mention the local community benefits a physical library offers.
You didn't read the article. His point is that the purpose of a library is knowledge-sharing (and to your point, the expense of a library is for the greater good of knowledge-sharing). Since the purpose of file-sharing is knowledge-sharing, then they are similar in nature.
A "real-world" library's goal of knowledge-sharing is balanced with the need of the content-provider to make some money to support distribution and authoring of books. The public pays taxes to fund libraries so that people who can't afford to buy (or choose to not buy) particular books can still access them. There's a natural brake on distribution in that each copy can be checked out to at most one library patron at a time.
The most direct analogy carried over to the electronic space is e-book lending systems with built-in DRM. These systems usually keep the N-number-of-copies-available-for-loan restriction in place. Unlimited file-sharing does not at all resemble the balance between the-good-of-public-knowledge vs the-right-and-need-for-publishers-and-authors-to-make-money that a physical library model provides.
I would argue that the "need for publishers and authors to make money" is where the issue lies, not in the means of knowledge transfer (libraries vs. file sharing).
Just like how governments subsidize libraries, so too should they subsidize file sharing.
Well, I read the article, and the author's point about a library being for knowledge-sharing is misleading and possibly even dishonest. It's over-emphasized and ignores other important realities about how and why a library works the way it does.
I wouldn't say it ignores, more that he's making a supposition (an implied one). He supposes that if libraries had no expenses, no physicality, and nobody had to get paid, it would resemble file-sharing.
I am equating "knowledge" and "entertainment" and not making a judgement on what constitutes entertainment. If it can be known, then it is knowledge, regardless of whether or not it is fiction. So by that definition, it is all about knowledge-sharing.
That is a fallacious argument. Food stealing (which you said) and food replication (which would be the fair equivalent) are different things, as are book stealing and book replication. I'm not making any judgements about neither of those, just pointing out the false equivalency.
Would you oppose if someone managed to buy just one single piece of food, then replicate it at a molecular level and at virtually no cost, and distribute it for free to the whole world, so that no one would ever have to starve ever again?
"Of course you can champion public food banks, and simultaneously oppose food replication and sharing. Don't be ridiculous!
All it takes is either illogical, inconsistent thinking, or logically invalid thinking. There's no barrier to either of these, in theory or practice."
I don't understand how food, a consumable, physical object with a production cost much greater than zero, is the same as a book, which is a non-consumable physical object with a large production cost, or a file, which is not a physical object, and has a production cost so close to zero that it's not worth measuring. Can you explain a bit further how this "fixes" my statement, or my accusation of inconsistent or illogical thinking?
Both are easily available without stealing - books (videos, ebooks) from libraries and food from food banks. Heck the files that are shared are usually very cheap - why not just rent/buy them?
Some will make the argument that things that are easy to duplicate are OK to steal. If I wrote a book, I can assure you it would not have a low production cost however easy it was to duplicate/steal/"share".
What is really at work here is that people have become accustom to stealing easy to duplicate works and now they will use all kinds of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they aren't actually thieves.
I suppose that you're referring to "theft", but copyright infringement isn't theft: it's just infringement. So, mind your terminology in the future, and you'll be just fine.
Why should abstract cost matter? You think the authors are saying, "Oh good, at least they're paying the local utility companies to keep their copy of my book air-conditioned!" ?
In both cases, a single copy is paid for and shared with potentially tens of thousands of users. Now, you may have had the cost and physical inefficencies in mind as a rate-limiter on the unpaid (to the IP holder) consumption of media, but Falkvinge called that a quantitative, not qualitative, difference that doesn't matter. Honestly I'm not sure I agree [1] -- but who gets to define "how many" or "how cheap" is too far? I'm pretty sure the IP lobby would kill all libraries, lending, and re-selling if they could. Is that fair?
[1] It's perhaps too much like saying that deploying automated networked license plate scanners in every inch of a city is OK, because it's "just like a cop standing on the public street corner observing which cars are driving by", and I would definitely be against the scanners.
Exactly. We long ago accepted the compromise of buy it once, share it with many for free so long as only one person got to experience that copy at a time. (Or more accurately one household at a time at least since some content can be experienced as a group.)
In the digital age that "one person at a time" limitation seems far more arbitrary and limiting, which calls into question whether or not the original "one person at a time" compromise is still relevant in this day and age.
I don't understand how cost is an important metric here. Up until the 90s people bought encyclopaedias for reference. Today search engines have completely replaced them. One cost money while the other does not. Should you then defend encyclopaedias and oppose search engines?
I agree, making information as widely available and accessible as possible can only be a net positive for a society in the long run. It would be interesting if business models shifted more towards crowdfunding.
Any useful comparison of libraries to file sharing ends at believing both are just places where Stuff Is and you can go and get it for free. It's to our collective benefit that libraries are much more than that.
The article assumes that if you defend public libraries, you must defend them for the same reason the author defends them, and that particular reason happens to fit well with file sharing.
But there are other reasons to defend public libraries than simply the fact that they disseminate knowledge and this is worth carving out an exception in copyright. I think most people would defend public libraries on the basis of the doctrine of first sale: after an author sells a copy of a work, they can't control how you use it. As long as you're not making unauthorized copies of it, you can lend it out or do whatever else you like with it.
How is reading a book different of watching a movie? When I'm done, I can return the book/delete the movie.
The only difference is outlined in the article: the movie can be watched simultaneously by different people who got it, whilst I'm the only one with the book in my hands.
Yes, and that's the doctrine of first sale: you can do what you like with a copy you own, besides make additional unauthorized copies.
As such, libraries operate within the law and within the spirit of copyright, while file sharing doesn't.
You can certainly object to the spirit of copyright as expressed here, but there's nothing inconsistent about supporting it, and supporting public libraries.
Is that not one of the most common analogies used by Pirates, the similarities between file sharing and lending a book or movie to a friend? That argument has failed for file sharing, what makes your argument different?
The fact that file sharing involves copying, not lending existing copies, is significant. If pirates make that analogy then they're being ridiculous. I'm not sure I've seen it made myself.
Lending existing copies does not prevent copying. I have come across plenty of "pirated" physical copies of various literature sold for a fraction of the actual cost.
Who said anything about preventing copying? I'm just saying that the way libraries operate does not involve making their own copies, which is a (and I would say the) significant difference from file sharing, in terms of morality and legality.
That is an important point which you are not seeing. I can share a file (an ebook) with my "friend" which i acquired legitimately. He then makes a copy of it and distributes it via a file sharing site.
Similarly, I can borrow a book from a public library and make digital copies of it and distribute it. In fact some illegal copies of ebooks you find on file sharing sites are scanned copies of legitimately acquired physical copies (I have personally come across comics with library seals in one of the scanned pirated digital copies). Some pirates also distribute colored xerox copies of physical copies acquired from libraries.
The only difference between the two is time taken to do it.
I understand all of that, but how is it relevant to the question of the utility, legality, and morality of libraries and file sharing? The fact that people can do legally or morally questionable things with the stuff they borrow from libraries has no real bearing on the legality or morality of the libraries themselves.
Can't the same be said for file sharing sites? Why hold the file sharing sites accountable and question it's legality or morality when its the responsibility of the people (the user in this case) to be legally or morally accountable. Unless the file sharing sites themselves are uploading illegal items (like Grooveshark) I strongly believe you can't hold the site accountable. Libraries aren't held accountable for piracy that is caused because of it. When I see an ebook that has a library seal I wonder what kind of people the Library is lending books to. Is there any background checks done at all? When no one cares about that aspect why suddenly care about the morality and legality of file sharing sites? Its just hypocrisy at its best.
All I'm trying to say is that you need to see the bigger picture. When it comes to file sharing people talk about "millions" of times the particular file has been downloaded only because such a statistic is easily available. Nobody questions that when it comes to Libraries lending out copies because no one looks at what happens in between the time the copy is lent and returned. Can you find any statistic that tells you how many of the "lent" library books have been pirated? For physical book pirates, libraries are a boon. They get access to thousands of books for free/cheap.
If such sharing were allowed - and I do recall schemes for it, our UK library does [did at least] such a thing and it's used in software (eg Steam allows you to share with a family member but you can't both use the game simulataneously [based on docs not experience]) - then people would embrace it. For example we share our physical DVD collection with any of our friends that ask, we'd be more than happy to have a collection in common of media with a network of friends such that 10 families could purchase items and have them in kind, only being able to use them serially.
The problem with this is that you could get a network of 1000s of households/users and still rarely have clashes in use. Such clashes could be managed such that additional copies are purchased (or the user chooses an alternative item of media) as needed. Then you're probably going to be able to serve 10s of thousands in a group and still reduce overall number of media items purchased.
That's the halfway point between torrent style file sharing and library lending. Imagine you could access the currently used media libraries of all your friends (and "friends") ...
My local library will only allow one person to "borrow" a given e-book at a time. You must wait until someone else returns it before you can "borrow" it for a set period of time.
Obviously this is nonsense, and if the library were interested in efficient lending, they'd let everyone that wanted it borrow the e-book at the same time.
IMO, the same applies to DVDs - why not let thousands of people "borrow" a digital copy of a DVD simultaneously
But it's always been nonsense. A library could print their own copy of books for hundreds of years. They could easily do it since Xerox was invented. Digital just reduces the cost to copying just a little bit.
There is a fundamental difference between loaning and copying, both from a legal and moral perspective.
I think you're looking at it differently than Falkvinge (granted, he may be willfully contorting his perspective to whatever fits his argument.) Wikipedia says about the Libraries Act[1], "The Capitalist economic model had created shift patterns which left workers with free time[...] Campaigners felt that encouraging the lower classes to spend their free time on morally uplifting activities, such as reading, would promote greater social good." A committee reported, "the first step taken by a foreign writer was to consult a public library on the subject of his studies or composition; we find that no such auxiliary was at the service of the British intellect." So, the supposed reason (for the British, at least), was for the public good and intellect. The first sale doctrine is a legal defense, which is not the same as a reason public libraries should exist or why they are good.
This may be somewhat muddied by his use of "defend" everywhere, rather than something else. Anyway, I think he has a decent point, that libraries were last century's big threat to IP holders (would have liked to see some citations on the controversy though), the government decided a public good would be served with a smallish sacrifice from the industry, and that filesharing is a similar but much more efficient execution of that public service (but at perhaps too big of a cost to the IP holders.)
Well yes, I'm looking at it differently, that's my whole point. The article is saying that if you defend one you must defend the other. My point is that if you look at things from a different perspective then it's quite easy to defend one without defending the other.
It's all about whether you look at libraries as an exception to copyright which has been carved out for the public good, or whether you look at libraries as something that is naturally allowed within copyright.
Put it another way: the article argues on the basis of a library's purpose. I'm ignoring that, and merely looking at a library's right to exist. If you see the purpose coming first, and the right to exist being created on the basis of that purpose, then the argument in the article holds. If you see the right to exist coming first, and the purpose merely being why people take advantage of that right, then you get my position.
Maybe this is one of those American versus European things. It looks from my cursory examination (and I could easily be wrong, and welcome a more informed opinion from anyone who knows better) that the doctrine of first sale is an American thing, and European laws give more rights to the copyright holder.
Yeah, it does seem Europeans have more copyright rights, as others in the thread are citing copyright-based royalties that libraries have to pay (which kind of undermines his argument too.) I don't really know how the history/law worked, but at least the way he claims, "they made explicit exceptions to the copyright monopoly for the benefit of public access to culture and knowledge." I guess in America a special exception is not really needed. I think we're on the same page about the difference.
And just to be clear, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the idea that libraries serve a special purpose that should be enshrined in law, and that this then implies something about file sharing. I just don't think it's a position one necessarily must have, so the premise of the article is wrong because of that.
>As long as you're not making unauthorized copies of it, you can lend it out or do whatever else you like with it.
How does this work with files? How do I distribute a file without also copying it?
If I cut->paste instead of copy->paste the file for a friend, am I distributing my original file? What happens if I give my friend my music library and decide to buy myself new music?
I'm allowed to make copies of my music for personal use (otherwise good luck getting that MP3 on your computer to play on your mobile device). I make a copy and give the original to a friend. My friend then makes a copy of the original and gives the original to their friend. The copies made are authorized and we're lending out the original.
It doesn't work once you leave physical constraints on scarcity and existence.
You're right, once you hit the digital realm things change a lot.
Which is exactly why I think it's silly to think that one's views on libraries must decide one's views on file sharing. They're extremely different things.
Not an irrelevant difference. A public library is funded and maintained by the same community that uses it. The manual processes required to consume the material are a natural check in the process and the result is a mild shift in equilibrium. Communities benefit and libraries are legitimate customers, so publishers are at least still getting paid.
File sharing's equilibrium is nowhere near as balanced as the library. And equilibrium matters. It's the difference between a healthy and stable ecosystem and a rodent plague (https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk).
Do you think that peer to peer filesharing communities are not also funded and maintained by the community that uses it? I contend that this is exactly the case.
There must also be an original legitimate customer of the work being shared, so the publisher is still getting paid.
The difference does only lie in efficiency. In a world of ever-increasing efficiency, why do we shackle libraries to 20th Century levels of service?
Libraries legitimately own every copy they distribute. If they lend 10 copies of a book, 10 copies were paid for. They don't pay for one then Xerox 9 more.
File sharing exists explicitly to deny publishers payment for anything they distribute. 10,000 copies results in no compensation beyond the original.
A community that shares a public library is a community that shares a very broad range of common customs, traditions, values, and interests. They are literal neighbors. They have a shared interest in the success of the community along multiple economic, social, and cultural dimensions. "Knowledge for the common good" is a value, but pursuit of that value conflicts with other things the community also values. Resolution of all those conflicts provides natural checks and balances.
The only common interest of the "file sharing community" is sharing files, and any political or technical issues that happen to be directly related to sharing files. The virtual community can grow and expand infinitely based on only that one dimension. There are no natural checks and balances the way there would be for a real community. Instead of resolving conflicts, anyone who doesn't share that one primary value is not part of the community.
The more interesting point, really, is where on the efficiency spectrum it makes sense to place our institutions.
I mean, we all want libraries to continue to exist in the ebook era, right. But the old-style "library buys a single copy, and lends it to one person at a time" model, which made sense for physical books because it was a natural constraint, for ebooks is weirdly inefficient from the borrower's side and seems weirdly non-remunerative from the copyright-holder's side.
Publishers have started pushing toward pay-per-use licensing for libraries, which makes more sense for both copyright-holders (who get paid more for more popular works) and lenders (who aren't held to an artificial scarcity of a "single copy"). That makes sense as far as it goes.
But again, efficiency comes into play: If I know that my library has effectively unlimited selection (because this pay-per-use licensing makes it efficient for it to "carry" all the books licensed under this scheme) and the library is easy to use to check out books from, then there's no reason for me to buy books instead of check them out, because the hassle inherent in the old physical world is gone. And from the publisher's side, every library book loaned is basically a lost sale, so they're going to want near-retail licensing prices.
And that's where the linked essay is relevant: The current state of affairs is that we live in a strong copyright regime where the publisher's desires trump everyone else's desires. If they won't license a book to libraries for less than $10 a lend, then the library either has to pay that (which few libraries have the budget for) or not carry the book. And if you think public libraries are good, then that's a bad situation.
Which tends to point toward a situation in which copyright is no longer the best way to balance our goals of allowing broad access to culture while also recompensing authors, and to think about other ways to meet those goals.
That is where the "weirdly inefficient from the borrower's side" part comes in. It's a form of price discrimination. People who can't afford to pay full price, pay by their inconvenience instead.
I think we found a good equilibrium--library buys a copy and only lends it out one at a time. We know that works. Why change it.
Libraries are only legitimate customers because they have massive public goodwill, and it is probably difficult to assault their position. It doesn't sound good to have librarians and educators rallying against you. It's probably better to suffer their existence for now.
But surely many publishers view libraries as affronts to intellectual property, as libraries buy both software and books and charge their users almost nothing, relying instead on minimal fees, taxes, and donations. Unless libraries are paying royalties or something like that, they have basically appropriated the works of authors and publishers by brute political and social muscle.
The fact that it's difficult to combat the goodwill credit score of libraries just means that businesses and authors assuage themselves with your magnitude argument: "Well, it's not that much profit or control loss. Communities will never learn how to scale their resources, especially in high-population areas where consensus is often difficult in government."
Also, libraries may fuel arguments for the public, forming a slippery slope by which the public continues to take from the private sphere for communal benefit. If libraries didn't exist, it would be a lot harder to appeal to the public via, "This website is just like a public library! It is an institution of community learning and knowledge for all."
I think the symbolic threat of libraries means that any attempt to establish a culture of digital libraries should be severely challenged.
"You would frequently hear that authors are paid royalties when their books are borrowed from a library. This claim is not true. "
I'm not sure what he's trying to say. In the UK, public libraries are part of the PLR scheme in which 1,000 annually-rotated libraries provide their lending details which are then scaled-up in a linear fashion and the royalties calculated on that basis.
It does mean that low-volume authors might not receive royalties one year if their loans were not sampled, but the concept is that they'd receive out-of-proportion royalties the next year when the sample set rotated.
The only reason a sample was used instead of direct measurement was due to the volume of data; automation could nowadays calculate per-author royalties on an all-branches basis.
Source: I summer-jobbed in a library back in the mid-90s and compiled the PLR statistics for the branch.
"There are no working PLR systems yet in the United States, South America, Africa or Asia." So the existence of this system in some places doesn't itself invalidate the argument in places without that system.
Many comments here compare the cost of a physical library to near-zero cost of the internet, but that's not a fair comparison itself.
The cost of a physical library is physical, not informational. The article describes a situation where information sharing was challenged by the industry that has a physical monopoly on media (books). They were not granted informational monopoly, they only have monopoly on physical manufacturing.
Thus the absence of physical cost (or difference in efficiency) of sharing information does not change the concept of a library.
It's a one-dimensional argument that relies heavily on rhetoric. It's hard to draw any practical conclusions from such an argument. The point is mostly just to persuade you that file-sharing is good and anyone who opposes file-sharing is dumb.
The only practical conclusion I can draw about file-sharing is that it does not look like it will stop. Information sharing is only going to increase--that's what the internet was designed for. Publishers will probably need to focus on physical means of revenue that the internet can not inherently provide.
But that criterion can also be used to defend file sharing.
Many people are worried that copyrights last so long that some old movies that are good but not longer profitable are not being preserved anywhere except by pirates.
So we can observe that public libraries and file-sharing differ in scale and efficiency – and only in scale and efficiency...
That has to be a first in the public debate: Are those people actually standing up and demanding that public services, such as public libraries, be made less efficient, to have less output for the tax money spent on it?
I have to assume he's playing naïve here to make his point, because otherwise this argument is pretty silly.
First, "differs only in scale" is a ridiculous way to try and erase the distinctions between any two things. A snowflake and an avalanche also differ only in scale; that doesn't mean that if you like a white Christmas you'd love being buried alive on K2. Scale is the difference between a refreshing drink and drowning.
Second, no public service operates under a mandate of "maximum efficiency at any cost"; they operate under legal and regulatory frameworks designed to balance various different public interests. Highways have speed limits and traffic laws and restrictions on driving while intoxicated, along with uniformed officers to enforce these. They all reduce the theoretical efficiency of the highway as a conveyor of traffic, but they're there because there are other interests the highway needs to serve as well, like getting as few of the people who use it as possible killed. Different jurisdictions have different sets of laws that balance these interests in different ways, but they all try to balance them somehow.
Libraries are the same way. Knowledge-sharing is an important public interest that they serve, but the public has other interests as well. It has an interest in authors continuing to want to write books, for instance, and publishers continuing to want to publish them. So libraries strike a balance; they pay for their books, they lend them for a limited time, and so forth. These restrictions allow for wide public access without unduly cramping the market demand for books.
E-books make the old balance libraries set more complicated, since it's harder to lend them. Without some kind of DRM, you're not really lending them at all, you're giving free copies away, which is something very different than what libraries do with physical books. DRM can address that, but it makes using the library's resources more difficult and annoying. So the old balance needs to be recalibrated to find a way to meet all the interests the old one did. But replacing the world's libraries with the Pirate Bay would be blowing up that balance completely, not recalibrating it.
I'm curious to what extent this comparison holds true for the content these two systems share. My (under informed) understanding is that piracy mostly traffics in movies, TV shows, video games, anime, adult content ahem, etc. While libraries loan some of those things, they mostly loan books.
If PirateBay was mostly promoting the sharing of fiction and nonfiction, I might be inclined to buy this argument for an educated populace. But I don't think that HBO's Game of Thrones or The Seventh Son really provide the same level of education as many (if not most) books a library would lend.
There is a false equivalence. They both "share" a piece of content. The difference is that a) the library is bereft of an item while checked out and b) the library, or some benefactor, paid for the item. This means that the content creator got paid for their content
When a person shares a file, they are not bereft anything besides some bandwidth for the transfer. They can consume the media as another copies or streams from them. The same is not true for a library or by extension private media. Only one person can consume.
If they wanted a true equivalence, you can do it. Putting aside the fact that the DMCA says that private parties cannot backup DRMed material, I can do what ever I want with my material (right of first sale). I can read a book. I can throw it at the dog. I can burn it. I can lend it to a friend. The same is true if I converted the physical medium into a lockable digital resource.
In this scenario, I have file copied into a server. The server is my only means of accessing the content. The server is instructed to create a global lock on the media when consumed. So within my house, only one party can consume the material at a time. If I made this server public, I would be effectively allowing anyone to "borrow" my content. Once the content was watched, the consumer would lose access to the content and the global lock would be freed.
If I wanted to listen to Abba's Dancing Queen while some other person did, I would be blocked. "Sorry, that content is locked".
Now I, as a content owner, am bereft of my material. The only way to get access to it is to forcibly take the global lock from the person, thus ending their streaming.
So we can take this simple server concept and apply a Popcorn Time veneer across it. People make their LEGALLY purchased content available. The nodes in this distributed system file lock. It's searchable. It's free. It's perfectly legal (except for the DRM bit, but that's another issue).
People who value money over educating the public will support copyright, while people who value public education and free access to culture and media do not. It's really that simple. No argument's going to convince one side to hop on to the other. Unfortunately (for this matter), it's not 1850 anymore and the amount of people in power that value public education and culture (in the US at least) is virtually asymptotical to zero, thus the current laws we see demonizing copying.
Ironically, a lot of the people behind those laws, especially big tech companies, benefit greatly from a technically educated and skilled public that would not exist, or at least be much smaller, without piracy. Is it wrong for me to pirate a few thousand dollars worth of software, educate myself, and be able to contribute many million dollars worth of work to society? Copyright supporters certainly think so, but I'd argue that the benefits to the public far outweigh what the copyright owners wrongfully claim as "losses" but is really nothing more than wishful imagination of profits they would not have made anyway.
Of course, arguments for public benefits these days are unfashionable. The zeitgeist is to fight for the copyright holders to the end, despite the fact that most of the copyright holders are not actually the creators, not actually the people who would or would not benefit from copyright law. The fact that, for example, most artists on Spotify make about the same amount whether they're on the service or not is a whole other discussion and reason to end or modify copyright itself, but it certainly kills the argument that there would be no creative works if artists didn't get paid. That's actually the case currently and it's quite ironic to see the handful of extremely rich artists pretend to fight for the guy who made two dollars all last year while his record label and music service raked in millions. Copyright law mostly benefits scumbags who've never created anything worth perusing in their lives.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIf public libraries had their own printing presses and loaned out copies they printed from some master edition this would be a fairer analogy, but in this case libraries would effectively be stealing from the publishers and authors, as file sharing sites are currently.
The argument against file sharing then becomes the argument to keep tax paid public libraries sufficient inefficient that the copyright industry can create a living by supplying a better product.
But the setup cost is really not the issue especially considering that you can setup a new digital library at little to no costs these days and as a very large portion of the books (I would say probably 99%>) that you would be able to get a hold on in a public library got digital copies than setting up the same exact collection isn't that hard.
Another argument to be made is actually the "value" of the information shared in libraries vs file sharing sites, while you can argue that even the poorest made film or the buggiest game has some educational value you would be hard pressed to claim that file sharing sites help propagate knowledge on a level that is even in the same order of magnitude as public libraries used too.
Yes some people might download a book, even a school book or some documentary (which today they are pretty worthless sadly) but majority of downloads are TV shows, Movies, Porn and Games which sorry claiming that they are akin to a public library is just blasphemous.
How is it blasphemous to claim a book, a movie, and a game are just different forms of art, and should be treated the same - as art?
I can understand some people have objections to porn, but then, Safo books are in libraries.
One thing I am sure of is that there is no single artist in the world that isn't also a consumer of art. You don't become a great musician if you don't have access and listen to other peoples music, and you don't become a great movie director without watching other peoples movies. Same should be true for games, painting, and writing. If we removed all non-educational book from public libraries we should see a direct decrease in the number of writers that exist.
Also since none of your examples actually stated a clear violation of copyright law on what ground do you even attempt to make an argument? Spielberg went to the movies last time I've checked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/opinion/e-books-libraries-...
for example. Some points from there:
1. It's only been in the last couple years that all of the big publishers would actually sell eBooks to libraries. 2. It's not selling, it's licensing, with severe restrictions. 3. They charge higher rates for the eBooks to Libraries than they do to the general public. 4. Some publishers only offer eBooks to libraries when the books have been out for six months.
Not in the article, but also important: publishers claim that libraries cannot simply digitize and loan out e-versions of their existing book catalogs--they claim that the eBooks are a different product, and that libraries have no license to do that. That would probably not stand up in court, but libraries aren't eager to antagonize the publishers, from whom they are still trying to get regular eBooks at regular prices.
The article is kind of ill-informed on this, too, I'm afraid. The difference between filesharing and public libraries is that public libraries operate within de facto and legal restrictions that don't apply to filesharing. A much better comparison, that fits the author's claim that the only difference is efficiency, is home taping and CD-copying.
You very much can though, that's the beautiful power of digital media. Publishing companies with outdated business models are relying on archaic laws to prevent you from doing this. But it can be done!
For instance, when a popular book comes out the library might have a couple copies. If hundreds want to read those copies then they'll have to wait. Many of those people will be unwilling to wait and buy the book instead, which supports the author.
The most direct analogy carried over to the electronic space is e-book lending systems with built-in DRM. These systems usually keep the N-number-of-copies-available-for-loan restriction in place. Unlimited file-sharing does not at all resemble the balance between the-good-of-public-knowledge vs the-right-and-need-for-publishers-and-authors-to-make-money that a physical library model provides.
Just like how governments subsidize libraries, so too should they subsidize file sharing.
All it takes is either illogical, inconsistent thinking, or logically invalid thinking. There's no barrier to either of these, in theory or practice.
All it takes is either illogical, inconsistent thinking, or logically invalid thinking. There's no barrier to either of these, in theory or practice."
Fixed it for you. ;-)
Would you oppose if someone managed to buy just one single piece of food, then replicate it at a molecular level and at virtually no cost, and distribute it for free to the whole world, so that no one would ever have to starve ever again?
"Of course you can champion public food banks, and simultaneously oppose food replication and sharing. Don't be ridiculous! All it takes is either illogical, inconsistent thinking, or logically invalid thinking. There's no barrier to either of these, in theory or practice."
Some will make the argument that things that are easy to duplicate are OK to steal. If I wrote a book, I can assure you it would not have a low production cost however easy it was to duplicate/steal/"share".
What is really at work here is that people have become accustom to stealing easy to duplicate works and now they will use all kinds of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they aren't actually thieves.
So you're just wrong, technically as well as practically.
What is the correct term for taking something that isn't yours?
I suppose that you're referring to "theft", but copyright infringement isn't theft: it's just infringement. So, mind your terminology in the future, and you'll be just fine.
In both cases, a single copy is paid for and shared with potentially tens of thousands of users. Now, you may have had the cost and physical inefficencies in mind as a rate-limiter on the unpaid (to the IP holder) consumption of media, but Falkvinge called that a quantitative, not qualitative, difference that doesn't matter. Honestly I'm not sure I agree [1] -- but who gets to define "how many" or "how cheap" is too far? I'm pretty sure the IP lobby would kill all libraries, lending, and re-selling if they could. Is that fair?
[1] It's perhaps too much like saying that deploying automated networked license plate scanners in every inch of a city is OK, because it's "just like a cop standing on the public street corner observing which cars are driving by", and I would definitely be against the scanners.
In the digital age that "one person at a time" limitation seems far more arbitrary and limiting, which calls into question whether or not the original "one person at a time" compromise is still relevant in this day and age.
But there are other reasons to defend public libraries than simply the fact that they disseminate knowledge and this is worth carving out an exception in copyright. I think most people would defend public libraries on the basis of the doctrine of first sale: after an author sells a copy of a work, they can't control how you use it. As long as you're not making unauthorized copies of it, you can lend it out or do whatever else you like with it.
The only difference is outlined in the article: the movie can be watched simultaneously by different people who got it, whilst I'm the only one with the book in my hands.
As such, libraries operate within the law and within the spirit of copyright, while file sharing doesn't.
You can certainly object to the spirit of copyright as expressed here, but there's nothing inconsistent about supporting it, and supporting public libraries.
Can't do that with the physical book. Not for free anyway.
Stealing a book doesn't amount to copying the book and returning it.
Similarly, I can borrow a book from a public library and make digital copies of it and distribute it. In fact some illegal copies of ebooks you find on file sharing sites are scanned copies of legitimately acquired physical copies (I have personally come across comics with library seals in one of the scanned pirated digital copies). Some pirates also distribute colored xerox copies of physical copies acquired from libraries.
The only difference between the two is time taken to do it.
The problem with this is that you could get a network of 1000s of households/users and still rarely have clashes in use. Such clashes could be managed such that additional copies are purchased (or the user chooses an alternative item of media) as needed. Then you're probably going to be able to serve 10s of thousands in a group and still reduce overall number of media items purchased.
That's the halfway point between torrent style file sharing and library lending. Imagine you could access the currently used media libraries of all your friends (and "friends") ...
My local library will only allow one person to "borrow" a given e-book at a time. You must wait until someone else returns it before you can "borrow" it for a set period of time.
Obviously this is nonsense, and if the library were interested in efficient lending, they'd let everyone that wanted it borrow the e-book at the same time.
IMO, the same applies to DVDs - why not let thousands of people "borrow" a digital copy of a DVD simultaneously
There is a fundamental difference between loaning and copying, both from a legal and moral perspective.
This may be somewhat muddied by his use of "defend" everywhere, rather than something else. Anyway, I think he has a decent point, that libraries were last century's big threat to IP holders (would have liked to see some citations on the controversy though), the government decided a public good would be served with a smallish sacrifice from the industry, and that filesharing is a similar but much more efficient execution of that public service (but at perhaps too big of a cost to the IP holders.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850
It's all about whether you look at libraries as an exception to copyright which has been carved out for the public good, or whether you look at libraries as something that is naturally allowed within copyright.
Put it another way: the article argues on the basis of a library's purpose. I'm ignoring that, and merely looking at a library's right to exist. If you see the purpose coming first, and the right to exist being created on the basis of that purpose, then the argument in the article holds. If you see the right to exist coming first, and the purpose merely being why people take advantage of that right, then you get my position.
Maybe this is one of those American versus European things. It looks from my cursory examination (and I could easily be wrong, and welcome a more informed opinion from anyone who knows better) that the doctrine of first sale is an American thing, and European laws give more rights to the copyright holder.
How does this work with files? How do I distribute a file without also copying it?
If I cut->paste instead of copy->paste the file for a friend, am I distributing my original file? What happens if I give my friend my music library and decide to buy myself new music?
I'm allowed to make copies of my music for personal use (otherwise good luck getting that MP3 on your computer to play on your mobile device). I make a copy and give the original to a friend. My friend then makes a copy of the original and gives the original to their friend. The copies made are authorized and we're lending out the original.
It doesn't work once you leave physical constraints on scarcity and existence.
Which is exactly why I think it's silly to think that one's views on libraries must decide one's views on file sharing. They're extremely different things.
Not an irrelevant difference. A public library is funded and maintained by the same community that uses it. The manual processes required to consume the material are a natural check in the process and the result is a mild shift in equilibrium. Communities benefit and libraries are legitimate customers, so publishers are at least still getting paid.
File sharing's equilibrium is nowhere near as balanced as the library. And equilibrium matters. It's the difference between a healthy and stable ecosystem and a rodent plague (https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk).
There must also be an original legitimate customer of the work being shared, so the publisher is still getting paid.
The difference does only lie in efficiency. In a world of ever-increasing efficiency, why do we shackle libraries to 20th Century levels of service?
File sharing exists explicitly to deny publishers payment for anything they distribute. 10,000 copies results in no compensation beyond the original.
A community that shares a public library is a community that shares a very broad range of common customs, traditions, values, and interests. They are literal neighbors. They have a shared interest in the success of the community along multiple economic, social, and cultural dimensions. "Knowledge for the common good" is a value, but pursuit of that value conflicts with other things the community also values. Resolution of all those conflicts provides natural checks and balances.
The only common interest of the "file sharing community" is sharing files, and any political or technical issues that happen to be directly related to sharing files. The virtual community can grow and expand infinitely based on only that one dimension. There are no natural checks and balances the way there would be for a real community. Instead of resolving conflicts, anyone who doesn't share that one primary value is not part of the community.
I mean, we all want libraries to continue to exist in the ebook era, right. But the old-style "library buys a single copy, and lends it to one person at a time" model, which made sense for physical books because it was a natural constraint, for ebooks is weirdly inefficient from the borrower's side and seems weirdly non-remunerative from the copyright-holder's side.
Publishers have started pushing toward pay-per-use licensing for libraries, which makes more sense for both copyright-holders (who get paid more for more popular works) and lenders (who aren't held to an artificial scarcity of a "single copy"). That makes sense as far as it goes.
But again, efficiency comes into play: If I know that my library has effectively unlimited selection (because this pay-per-use licensing makes it efficient for it to "carry" all the books licensed under this scheme) and the library is easy to use to check out books from, then there's no reason for me to buy books instead of check them out, because the hassle inherent in the old physical world is gone. And from the publisher's side, every library book loaned is basically a lost sale, so they're going to want near-retail licensing prices.
And that's where the linked essay is relevant: The current state of affairs is that we live in a strong copyright regime where the publisher's desires trump everyone else's desires. If they won't license a book to libraries for less than $10 a lend, then the library either has to pay that (which few libraries have the budget for) or not carry the book. And if you think public libraries are good, then that's a bad situation.
Which tends to point toward a situation in which copyright is no longer the best way to balance our goals of allowing broad access to culture while also recompensing authors, and to think about other ways to meet those goals.
I think we found a good equilibrium--library buys a copy and only lends it out one at a time. We know that works. Why change it.
But surely many publishers view libraries as affronts to intellectual property, as libraries buy both software and books and charge their users almost nothing, relying instead on minimal fees, taxes, and donations. Unless libraries are paying royalties or something like that, they have basically appropriated the works of authors and publishers by brute political and social muscle.
The fact that it's difficult to combat the goodwill credit score of libraries just means that businesses and authors assuage themselves with your magnitude argument: "Well, it's not that much profit or control loss. Communities will never learn how to scale their resources, especially in high-population areas where consensus is often difficult in government."
Also, libraries may fuel arguments for the public, forming a slippery slope by which the public continues to take from the private sphere for communal benefit. If libraries didn't exist, it would be a lot harder to appeal to the public via, "This website is just like a public library! It is an institution of community learning and knowledge for all."
I think the symbolic threat of libraries means that any attempt to establish a culture of digital libraries should be severely challenged.
"You would frequently hear that authors are paid royalties when their books are borrowed from a library. This claim is not true. "
I'm not sure what he's trying to say. In the UK, public libraries are part of the PLR scheme in which 1,000 annually-rotated libraries provide their lending details which are then scaled-up in a linear fashion and the royalties calculated on that basis.
It does mean that low-volume authors might not receive royalties one year if their loans were not sampled, but the concept is that they'd receive out-of-proportion royalties the next year when the sample set rotated.
The only reason a sample was used instead of direct measurement was due to the volume of data; automation could nowadays calculate per-author royalties on an all-branches basis.
Source: I summer-jobbed in a library back in the mid-90s and compiled the PLR statistics for the branch.
https://www.plr.uk.com/libraryInformation/sampleLibLists.htm
https://www.plrinternational.com/faqs/faqs.htm#legal
[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urh...
The cost of a physical library is physical, not informational. The article describes a situation where information sharing was challenged by the industry that has a physical monopoly on media (books). They were not granted informational monopoly, they only have monopoly on physical manufacturing.
Thus the absence of physical cost (or difference in efficiency) of sharing information does not change the concept of a library.
Effectiveness is another important metric. Can filesharing give me access to all those millions of books that have never been digitized?
No? So I guess libraries can do something that filesharing can't.
I won't go so far to claim that filesharing could never give me a perfect replica of Bembo's "De Aetna". But it doesn't today.
See? I can defend libraries on another criterion than efficiency.
Many people are worried that copyrights last so long that some old movies that are good but not longer profitable are not being preserved anywhere except by pirates.
So we can observe that public libraries and file-sharing differ in scale and efficiency – and only in scale and efficiency...
That has to be a first in the public debate: Are those people actually standing up and demanding that public services, such as public libraries, be made less efficient, to have less output for the tax money spent on it?
I have to assume he's playing naïve here to make his point, because otherwise this argument is pretty silly.
First, "differs only in scale" is a ridiculous way to try and erase the distinctions between any two things. A snowflake and an avalanche also differ only in scale; that doesn't mean that if you like a white Christmas you'd love being buried alive on K2. Scale is the difference between a refreshing drink and drowning.
Second, no public service operates under a mandate of "maximum efficiency at any cost"; they operate under legal and regulatory frameworks designed to balance various different public interests. Highways have speed limits and traffic laws and restrictions on driving while intoxicated, along with uniformed officers to enforce these. They all reduce the theoretical efficiency of the highway as a conveyor of traffic, but they're there because there are other interests the highway needs to serve as well, like getting as few of the people who use it as possible killed. Different jurisdictions have different sets of laws that balance these interests in different ways, but they all try to balance them somehow.
Libraries are the same way. Knowledge-sharing is an important public interest that they serve, but the public has other interests as well. It has an interest in authors continuing to want to write books, for instance, and publishers continuing to want to publish them. So libraries strike a balance; they pay for their books, they lend them for a limited time, and so forth. These restrictions allow for wide public access without unduly cramping the market demand for books.
E-books make the old balance libraries set more complicated, since it's harder to lend them. Without some kind of DRM, you're not really lending them at all, you're giving free copies away, which is something very different than what libraries do with physical books. DRM can address that, but it makes using the library's resources more difficult and annoying. So the old balance needs to be recalibrated to find a way to meet all the interests the old one did. But replacing the world's libraries with the Pirate Bay would be blowing up that balance completely, not recalibrating it.
If PirateBay was mostly promoting the sharing of fiction and nonfiction, I might be inclined to buy this argument for an educated populace. But I don't think that HBO's Game of Thrones or The Seventh Son really provide the same level of education as many (if not most) books a library would lend.
When a person shares a file, they are not bereft anything besides some bandwidth for the transfer. They can consume the media as another copies or streams from them. The same is not true for a library or by extension private media. Only one person can consume.
If they wanted a true equivalence, you can do it. Putting aside the fact that the DMCA says that private parties cannot backup DRMed material, I can do what ever I want with my material (right of first sale). I can read a book. I can throw it at the dog. I can burn it. I can lend it to a friend. The same is true if I converted the physical medium into a lockable digital resource.
In this scenario, I have file copied into a server. The server is my only means of accessing the content. The server is instructed to create a global lock on the media when consumed. So within my house, only one party can consume the material at a time. If I made this server public, I would be effectively allowing anyone to "borrow" my content. Once the content was watched, the consumer would lose access to the content and the global lock would be freed.
If I wanted to listen to Abba's Dancing Queen while some other person did, I would be blocked. "Sorry, that content is locked".
Now I, as a content owner, am bereft of my material. The only way to get access to it is to forcibly take the global lock from the person, thus ending their streaming.
So we can take this simple server concept and apply a Popcorn Time veneer across it. People make their LEGALLY purchased content available. The nodes in this distributed system file lock. It's searchable. It's free. It's perfectly legal (except for the DRM bit, but that's another issue).
Ironically, a lot of the people behind those laws, especially big tech companies, benefit greatly from a technically educated and skilled public that would not exist, or at least be much smaller, without piracy. Is it wrong for me to pirate a few thousand dollars worth of software, educate myself, and be able to contribute many million dollars worth of work to society? Copyright supporters certainly think so, but I'd argue that the benefits to the public far outweigh what the copyright owners wrongfully claim as "losses" but is really nothing more than wishful imagination of profits they would not have made anyway.
Of course, arguments for public benefits these days are unfashionable. The zeitgeist is to fight for the copyright holders to the end, despite the fact that most of the copyright holders are not actually the creators, not actually the people who would or would not benefit from copyright law. The fact that, for example, most artists on Spotify make about the same amount whether they're on the service or not is a whole other discussion and reason to end or modify copyright itself, but it certainly kills the argument that there would be no creative works if artists didn't get paid. That's actually the case currently and it's quite ironic to see the handful of extremely rich artists pretend to fight for the guy who made two dollars all last year while his record label and music service raked in millions. Copyright law mostly benefits scumbags who've never created anything worth perusing in their lives.