I love books and I used to buy books, but since I moved to Chicago, I haven’t bought any. Chicago has a kick ass library system. Now, hows this for cool, you can go online and hold a book at any Chicago Public Library and they’ll send it to your local library for you to pick up. You don’t even have to go further than your closest branch to get a book.
Anyway I was thinking, the music and movie industry hates Peer to Peer (p2p) because these people are getting the movies and music for free. But before all this, did any book associations oppose the establishment of libraries? (By book associations I mean whatever would be the equivilent of the movies and RIAA-Music people that oppose p2p)
Now I realize it’s not exactly the same thing, in p2p you’re keeping the file, whereas in a library you have to give the book back. Actually in Chicago’s library you can check out DVDs and CDs, and frankly, though illegal, nothing is stopping you from ripping those to your computer.
But skipping any arguments over the music/movies p2p, did the publishers of books and authors of books think (or do they still think) that libraries cut into their profits.
I mean I am a great example of a person, who bought books, until I moved to a place with an excellent library now, I never buy books. Well I buy books when the Chicago Library has a booksale, but the authors aren’t getting any money from that.
Public municipal libraries predate a lot of our copyright laws and are generally seen as the work of good government. Government wants a library system because its a social service and helps advance society, education, and commerce. Because of this and a bazillion other reasons there really isnt any organized movement against libraries other than the typical loud-mouth fringe of tax cheapskates and pro-censorship social conservatives.
Considering a library is accountable for its licenses, unlike P2P, there really isnt an comparison. The business logic here is sound too. For instance, there are books I would never, ever buy but may borrow from the library. So my library reconizes the demand and buys 10 copes. Thats probably ten copies that the publisher would not have sold. This is the logic behind video rentals too.
You can read a little history about the modern public library here:
So what, these authors made money on its original sale. Consumers (in this case the library) have the right of first sale doctrine. This means they own what they buy, thus can sell it used without a third party demanding a cut.
Its also worth noting that all this hemming and hawing and bending over backwards for the rights of the copyright holder and worrying about corporate profits is something new to society. I feel we have been conditioned by a litigious society and by a corporatist philosophy. People in the past saw knowledge as an amazing thing and education as a powerful force in the world. Now it seems we just worry whether CEOs have enough jaguars and if middle managers are spending three weeks in tahiti. Not to be too cynical, but social responsbility and the betterment of man was taken more seriously during the time of the founding of the public library systems in the 19th century. Or at least there was more idealism.
Copyright as a legal concept was born shortly after the invention of the printing press in the mid 17th century, when that new technology led to widesperead literary piracy. It had been an issue even before that, particularly for composers and their patrons. Folks have always been concerned about the rights of authors to maintain some control over (and make a living from) their work.
It’s kind of ironic for you to invoke the concept of “social responsibility and the betterment of man” in a post that derides the entire concept of copyright… but I don’t want to stray into GD territory. However, I’m baffled at how you draw a connection between the authors of books and CEOs with jaguars. Are you presuming that publishers are the ones who hold copyrights on books? They don’t.
I HAVE on occasion heard libraries denounced by the copyright nuts. Generally by the ones extreme enough to get outraged over people sharing books at all or reading over someone’s shoulder. One especially demented proposal I recall was to outlaw paper books and newspapers and require all published matter to be presented on monitors equipped with eye trackers, to make sure no one read over anyone’s shoulder. Fortunately they’ve yet to gain much if any traction.
Not really; copyright is getting perverted more and more as a tool to suppress information, instead of just to make sure the originator gets paid for his/her work and thus continues to produce. Or as a tool to gouge out money that the originator never sees, or as an excuse for destructive behavior like putting DRM in software that damages people’s computers. Not much “social responsibility” there.
Although copyright goes back a long way and is referenced in the Constitution, the real battles for copyright took place after steam-driven high-speed printing presses were introduced in the mid-19th century. American publishers stole British books by the thousands. By the second half of the century a few American books were popular enough to be stolen by Europeans, Uncle Tom’s Cabin most notably. The major issue about copyright law has always been piracy.
The Europeans created the Berne Convention in 1886, which the U.S. didn’t sign, and the International Copyright Treaty in 1891, which it did.
Library borrowing wasn’t an issue for most of the 19th century, because there were very few public free lending libraries. Most libraries were small, required memberships and charged fees to lend books. Not until the 20th century did the library evolve into the institution we know it as today.
And some authors did grumble about lost sales. They always have. As Quartz noted, most European countries give authors royalties for library use or for photocopying duplication. The Authors Coalition collects these moneys for American authors and parcels it out to writers organizations. That way the authors get at least something back.
The argument over whether libraries cut into sales or create new customers has been going on forever. You can find authors and publishers who will argue any side of that argument. Nobody’s ever figured out a way to quantify it. Virtually all authors are united in their dislike for outright piracy. That’s been true for longer than the library issue.
So have their been fusses about it? I was interested in a debate, because this is general questions, I was just wondering if there were efforts in the past to get libraries to stop lending books.
I guess it wasn’t till the beginning of the 1900s where people were really and truly literate either. I recall reading an interview with George Burns and he said he never got past the third grade and he couldn’t read well at all. He said he hired a girl to read him his script and he memorized it intensely. So at the radio mike he’d pretend to read but he’d have the script memorized. Jackie Gleason also commented that his reading skills weren’t what they should be.
So I can see how you can argue libraries perfrom a positive force, as reading, unlike movies and radio is active not passive
Essentially, libraries are not violating copyrights. You can argue as to whether they help or hurt sales, but it is not a copyright issue.
Copyright is the right to make copies (simple enough, but people seem to forget this). Libraries are not making copies of books, thus there is no copyright violation.
File sharing OTOH, does make copies – there is one on the server and another on your computer (and on the computer of everyone who downloads.
This is utter nonsense. Creative work is not mere information. To call it such is a slippery redefinition of the term information to mean “anything I can get my hands on.”
If you like an artist, musician, or writer, you should have enough respect for him to be willing to pay him for his efforts. And the copyright system is the only way to make sure this happens equitably to all creators. Copyright does make sure that the creator gets paid. Maybe the publisher gets more than the writer, but the writer always gets something.
As a gedankenexperiment, what would you think Disney would do if there were no copyright? Don’t you think they’d just find a really popular book (say Harry Potter) then make a movie at it without paying the author anything?
Not really. There have been movements (more successful in Europe, as mentioned above) to pay authors a fee, but no serious efforts to shut down libraries on the issue.
That’s more a failure of their particular schools than in literacy in general. Back in the 1830s, it was expected that all children learn to read and write. It may have gotten worse as schools became more crowded, but literacy in the US was always pretty good; it was considered a requirement for a free society.
Bad example: Disney has been making money from tales with expired or unknown writer’s rights and then trying to renew their own royalties through fraudulent means (for example redubbing their movies - this was declared fraudulent by Spanish judges after starting de oficio inquests into this issue).
Again, I say “baloney.” (And the OP’s question was about libraries lending books, so your point about DRM doesn’t really apply at all.)
This whole argument about copyright suppressing the spread of information is utter BS conjured up to rationalize piracy, to push the idea that “information wants to be free” and that copyright is just a tool of greed used by the soulless corporate automatons who we shouldn’t care about anyway. It’s a lie. Piracy hurts the guys at the bottom of the food chain the most. Capitol Records and Disney and Microsoft will survive P2P just fine. College bands and independent filmmakers and small software publishers are getting killed.
Today Americans buy millions of books. Today huge numbers of American children are functionally illiterate. Both are true.
Generalizations about the entirety of American history are even worse. Americans have always given education a high priority, but high school graduation rates didn’t go over 50% until after WWII. Mass market sales of cheap magazines, dime novels, and penny newspapers started before the Civil War, but picture magazines also had huge sales because they featured less text. The masses of immigrants that flooded cities, especially New York, from 1890-1910, when Nathan Birnbaum wasn’t going to school, were extremely poor and parents pulled kids from schools to make money at what we would consider a ridiculously early age, although many of them grew up to be successful and literate.
In all times from the Revolution on, Americans read heavily and Americans didn’t read at all. That’s the only generalization possible to make.
And the only generalization possible to make about authors and libraries is that a few authors have always grumbled about having non-buyers have access to their books for free. I can’t think of any organized movements about it, though.
I’d like to know more about this. Unfortunately, royalties is the wrong word so I’m not sure what you might be referring to. Nothing of Disney has ever fallen out of copyright to my knowledge in this country, and I’d be surprised if it happened in Spain.
But every fantasy writer who ever lived makes money from older public domain tales. Tolkien couldn’t have written a word without them. And you can’t copyright ideas in the first place.
And why is this important? I understand why we have our current laws about the making of copies, but making copies isn’t something magical. If you borrow a book from a library, and read it, and return it, you’ve used the author’s work without compensating them in any way. So what’s the moral difference? That you didn’t make a copy? But the only reason making an unauthorized copy is wrong is because if you do that the creator of the work doesn’t get compensated for their work. Same as when you borrowed the book from the library.
This is a very standard trope of anti-copyright writers, and it misses the actual argument by miles.
The issue is not payment, per se, but control. Copyright gives authors or other copyright owners control over how their works may be used, who may use them, what licenses are issued for them, and even whether to put them on the market at all. In all cases it should be the authors’ choice what happens to the book, not the choice of random people on the street.
Lack of understanding over control shows up in almost every anti-copyright argument. We did a thread recently about an Edward Gorey book. Because the book has not been reprinted some people took the view that anybody could reprint it as they wished. The claim was that it didn’t matter that you could get the book from a library or buy it used, or that the author and illustrator might not have wanted another edition. Instead it was morally right to post it for free on the Internet regardless of what the author or Gorey’s estate might have in mind for the future. Their argument again used only money. Used books and library books don’t compensate the copyright owners, so I am free to steal it without compensation myself. The issue of control never entered their heads.
Control is certainly closely entwined with the issue of money. Remember at all times that money is the junior partner in this arranged marriage. It’s my work, damn it. I get to decide what I do with it, even if that means hiding it in my basement. And especially if I tell the world at the top of my voice that I don’t want them stealing my works and posting them. It doesn’t matter in the least why I feel that way. I have the absolute complete legal right to act that way and you have zero, no, nil, nada to say in the matter. The vast majority of authors have proclaimed that library sales are acceptable as part of the social contract of promoting literacy, that the blind and other handicapped readers can get copies to convert into readable formats, and that used books must be allowed because of the first sale doctrine that is larger than mere books. At the same time the vast majority of authors say that the taking of works for other any reasons, especially with the specious excuse that they’re so easy to steal that there shouldn’t be any penalty for doing so, is an excuse so morally abysmal, so abetting of sheer robbery, and such a spiteful wresting of control right out of our hands that no language is strong enough to castigate it. (If you’re a libertarian who is favor of private property and still advocate taking our goods and livelihoods away with no compensation, not even a contract, note that you are abrogating every principle that you pretend to give lip service to.)
I’d like to hear the justification for ripping the private property we’re desperately trying to hold onto right out of our hands to use for purposes we’ve already strongly condemned. Don’t tell us you’re doing us a favor. We’ll be the ones who decide that, not you. We’ll be the ones to decide everything, not you.
Again I was just interested in if libraries ever got flack over lending books. I didn’t want to debate file sharing or whether the copyright law is correct. There’s plenty to talk about but I just was curious about that and don’t want the thread to get moved because the topic changed.
Just where did you move from, that this wasn’t done there? It’s a fairly standard thing in large public library systems.
Here in Minnesota, it works not only within a local library system, but also to the other public library systems, and the university & college libraries in the state. So via ILL (Inter-Library Loan) you can get any circulated book in the state.
When you borrow the book from the library, the library had to buy the book originally. Or it was given to them at some point in the past by a third party who bought the book. OK, we’ll take that further and suppose the third party bought the book for twenty five cents at a yard sale–but still, at the beginning of its life, that book was bought, the publisher paid, and the author got their cut. Your local taxes and/or university tuition, alumni membership fees, etc., go to support the library so in the end you do pay for the books you borrow. And the operative word is “borrowing”. You don’t get to take it home and keep it forever.
Quartz, I don’t know the law here but I am pretty sure lending royalties would be unthinkable here, at least for printed materials. I must say I find the idea absolutely abhorrent. The creators of content get their slice when the books are sold, not every time someone opens a copy.
