51–60 of 89 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More modern libraries also offer ebooks, so the comparison becomes closer as libraries modernize.
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.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
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 F…
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.
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…
[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urh...
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…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Confused: you can 'return' the movie AND keep a copy, which you distribute widely thus ruining any chance of the creator profiting by their work. Can't do that with the physical book. Not for free anyway.
You can scan the book and distribute digital copies of it for free. The only investment is time required to scan the books.
Efficiency isn't everything, by the way. 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…
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.
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…
He claims that these are not copyright royalties, but rather a cultural grant.