31–40 of 89 posts
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.
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…
More modern libraries also offer ebooks, so the comparison becomes closer as libraries modernize.
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.
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 man…
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.
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…
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.
The author states: "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 tha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The #1 purpose of file sharing is not knowledge sharing, it's entertainment sharing.
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…
More modern libraries also offer ebooks, so the comparison becomes closer as libraries modernize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.