I am extremely not qualified to interpret the legal definition, nor what qualifies for fair use, safe harbour, etc.
This is getting out of the scope of General Questions, but there are some features distinguishing the real piratey pirate sites where they distribute (not necessarily to the public) videos freshly stolen from Hollywood studio servers, from sites like The Pirate Bay where they don’t store anything but just index links to whatever the users post, from sites like the Moscow University/Library Genesis collection where they do have a huge archive but don’t care about the DMCA because they are in Russia (and, incidentally, at least some part of their content was originally pirated, or so it seems).
The Internet Archive (San Francisco) has always claimed (and clearly posted) that their content is only available under fair use, but as many people who have been expensively sued can testify, what constitutes fair use is not always black and white and often comes down to how motivated people are to sue you and how much money you are willing to spend to defend yourself.
I get why they might not be happy about it, because community sharing of a single copy of a book to 100 people doesn’t make any more money than selling it to 1 person.
But I was responding to a characterization by @jjakucyk that the industry thinks of it as piracy. In which the industry is doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Nobody goes to the library and photocopies a whole book. That would cost many times more than buying the book.
I’m sure the industry isn’t happy, but tough shit.
Napster took its service offline in order to comply with an order to block access to copyrighted material. They then settled a lawsuit with music industry sources and attempted to relaunch as a paid service. That did not go over so well with their users, and they eventually went bankrupt.
Was it still under copyright? A lot of rare out of print books are old enough not to be.
Not all publishers dislike libraries. The science fiction publisher Baen has stated that libraries don’t actually cost them sales, and have put their money where their mouth is by making a lot of their own works freely available online. The theory is that readers will read those free works (which are usually the first book or two of a series), and then be interested enough to seek out further volumes in a form that Baen will be paid for.
They shouldn’t do that as a means to create a new copy of the book. I was thinking of a patron who has to pump a dime per page into a photocopy machine to copy a Harry Potter book.
I mentioned earlier that someone uploaded a document of mine to the site. I have since filed a DMCA request and they took the document down immediately.
This is allowed under copyright law (17 USC 108c).
(c) The right of reproduction under this section applies to three copies or phonorecords of a published work duplicated solely for the purpose of replacement of a copy or phonorecord that is damaged, deteriorating, lost, or stolen, or if the existing format in which the work is stored has become obsolete, if-
(1) the library or archives has, after a reasonable effort, determined that an unused replacement cannot be obtained at a fair price; and
(2) any such copy or phonorecord that is reproduced in digital format is not made available to the public in that format outside the premises of the library or archives in lawful possession of such copy.
In the UK, authors make a small amount of money each time their book is borrowed (inc ebooks). Cite
It’s not a lot, but it’s not nothing either.
I don’t know if something similar exists in the US.
That means the publishers probably don’t get any extra money from libraries directly, but their writers aren’t very likely to be lobbying libraries to have their books removed.
For physical books, no. Thanks to the first sale doctrine, US libraries don’t owe anything further once they’ve purchased the book for the standard retail price.
It’s a different story for ebooks; the first sale doctrine doesn’t apply to those. Libraries are paying high prices—typically three to five times retail—to license ebooks for a limited period (usually two years).
[quote=“SciFiSam, post:32, topic:948677”]
In the UK, authors make a small amount of money each time their book is borrowed (inc ebooks). Cite[/quote]
That’s very interesting. This American had no idea.
I’m curious where that money comes from. In the US, there’s no fee when a person borrows a paper book from a public library. My guess is that those UK payments come from the same source (taxes? donations?) that pays for the library’s new-books budget. Or are there fees that borrowers must pay?
There aren’t any fees to borrow books (paper or ebooks) in the UK. I’m not sure who actually pays for the PLR fees, but it looks like it probably comes from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which gets its funding from the general tax pot. It’s a teeny tiny amount compared to the overall budget for that dept.
Assuming for the sake of the argument that the Internet Archive is a legitimate library, then an author’s permission or lack thereof is irrelevant. Physical libraries do not need to ask an author’s permission to buy his books.
Napster stored a central directory. This was how/why, at the time, takedown was legally possible. In response, people developed torrent systems that did not use a stored central directory.
Ironically, the central directory meant that Napster could have developed as a paid copyright service, and torrents voided that opportunity. But the music companies are not / were not copyright collection services, they exist to market and promote music. The sin of Napster was cutting the music companies out of marketing and promotion. They did not wish to do a copyright deal with Napster.
Historically, the music companies weren’t able to stop file sharing, and in the end they choose to do deals with iTunes and YouTube. And one of the important services iTunes and YouTube perform is market segmentation, blocking access from different markets.