[A2k] Sue the libraries - they're letting people get content on the cheap

[Teresa Hackett (eIFL)]

Andrew Brown

The Guardian

Thursday October 18 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/18/news.comment

Why hasn't the Recording Industry Association of America sued a library
yet? As a means of getting music to rip, the local library is hard to
beat. It's free, or very cheap. It will lend CDs for a fortnight, from a
fairly wide range which can be browsed in a comfortable and convenient
place; and if it does not have a particular CD, or even DVD, it will
make an effort to find it. If I wanted to build a collection of
published music for which I did not pay, the local public library would
be more useful than the whole internet.

Public libraries are invisible in most debates about copyright as it
affects mass consumption. Perhaps American public libraries are less
splendid than ours? Or maybe the good public libraries are in affluent
areas where people make private provision for everything. Still, they
are the institutions which have the longest experience of making
copyright goods available fairly to people who have not paid directly
for them; and in all the time libraries have been around, no one has
come up with a better model.

Libraries don't abolish copyright, and in some ways are more scrupulous
about it than most institutions. But they allow the price of copyright
goods to be lowered to the point at which they become worthwhile both
for individual buyers and for the makers. Of course, this is a lot lower
than the makers would like. Every year I get statements of Public
Lending Right (PLR) showing that thousands of people have borrowed my
books from British libraries, and as a result I will make, ooh, =A317.36
or thereabouts from it. On the other hand, this is rather more than
shows up in most royalty statements, and it is approximately =A317.36
better than nothing. At the same time, the readers have access to
something they are clearly not prepared to pay anything more for than an
imperceptible slice of general taxation.

PLR incorporates another principle useful in the digital age, which is
that the creators of works are entitled to continuing profits even after
something has been sold for the first time. Digital content is much less
stable than analogue or paper versions. Constant effort is required to
maintain it, and it is a pretty safe rule that anything digital which is
not upgraded is being degraded. We need a method to reward the labour of
maintenance, and PLR is a sketch towards that.

But the real value of libraries comes when they deal with large,
expensive and valuable digital stores of information. The county of
Essex's library system, for example, offers everyone in the country
access from their homes to a lot of really useful databases. There is
the Lexis/Nexis newspaper database; the full version of the Oxford
English Dictionary; the Grove Dictionary of Music; Encyclopaedia
Britannica in all its various forms; Who's Who and Who was Who, along
with the complete Naxos catalogue of classical music.

To any individual subscriber the cost of all these would run into
thousands of pounds a year, yet this reliable information is available
free, without any of it being stolen. In private libraries, the system
can be even richer. My subscription to the London Library gets me access
to 8m or so books, and if I can trust the handwritten suggestions book
maintained in the front of the library, it will soon offer access to
JSTOR, the definitive database of academic and scientific papers.

At the moment access to JSTOR is restricted to universities and their
members; unaffiliated researchers of any sort can't buy its articles. I
don't see that this material can, or even should, all be available for
nothing. Someone has to pay for the labour involved in collecting and
maintaining it. But it needs to be made available at a price ordinary
people are able and prepared to pay, in any country that wants to take
real advantage of the internet. This isn't a technological problem;
Google already indexes a great many publications available on JSTOR. The
problem, as usual, is a social one: it can only be solved by collective
action, and there is no better means of sharing in the information age
than old-fashioned, unglamorous libraries, even when you can use them at
home.