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from the currently-we-have-no-digital-rights dept.
From the EFF press release:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.
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Ostensibly enacted to fight music and movie piracy, Section 1201 has long served to restrict people's ability to access, use, and even speak out about copyrighted materials—including the software that is increasingly embedded in everyday things. The law imposes a legal cloud over our rights to tinker with or repair the devices we own, to convert videos so that they can play on multiple platforms, remix a video, or conduct independent security research that would reveal dangerous security flaws in our computers, cars, and medical devices. It criminalizes the creation of tools to let people access and use those materials.Copyright law is supposed to exist in harmony with the First Amendment. But the prospect of costly legal battles or criminal prosecution stymies creators, academics, inventors, and researchers. In the complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., EFF argues that this violates their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
Section 1201 of the US Copyright act restricts the Circumvention of Technological Measures: more commonly known as Digital Restrictions Management.
I have always hated how DRM allows copyright holders to restrict what I do with my personal property: while being backed by the force of law.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 23 2016, @04:14AM
By searchable, I meant that the content could be searched, not just the metadata such as titles and authors. Is there some quote you read but don't remember the book it was in? A searchable catalog won't be much help finding that. Maybe you'd like to do some cross book and author comparison, see how often a stock phrase is used? Catalog isn't much help with that either. Searchable content, baby.
> That restriction is reasonable, in my opinion. If a book gets damaged, we replace it if we can, and the only backups we have of them are other physical copies, so it stands to reason that physical A/V media would function in the same way.
But that spoils it. That is totally refusing to use our technological advances. That's like saying we could fly, we have wings now, but it's more reasonable to walk. I'd rather libraries junked the CD altogether and just offer downloads of songs. Being allowed to burn copies from backups is a poor second to that.
Your list of restrictions and requirements on libraries is a horror comedy of waste and unintentional promotion of ignorance, all in the name of propping up a ridiculous and unworkable business model. How much harder all this blocking of access makes doing research, or just informing and educating oneself, the very purpose for which libraries exist!
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday July 26 2016, @02:08AM
I agree that everything should be downloadable and searchable. And that the "restrictions and requirements on libraries is a horror comedy of waste and unintentional promotion of ignorance, all in the name of propping up a ridiculous and unworkable business model."
You have to remember, though, that, while the public in general likes and supports libraries, publishers, as a class, don't like us, and don't want us to exist. And that dichotomy defines and shapes libraries and how we operate.
Long before the 'AAs got into the act, publishers took the attitude that every book checked out was a lost sale. It hasn't been very long since books sold to libraries had a substantially higher price tag than retail, similar to the premium prices charged to video rental outfits for their offerings--and there has been substantial resistance to libraries even carrying videos, music (CDs, vinyl doesn't seem to be a problem), audiobooks and videogames. Fortunately for small, poor and rural libraries, the higher prices have generally gone away, thanks to the library wholesale-and-lease markets and the internet, but even now there are classes of books priced far above their actual value because the publishers know that most of the purchasers will be either libraries or academic institutions.
And publishers are (partially) right to resent us.
I have been using Interlibrary Loan since before Internet Explorer--back when the ILL catalogs came on floppies and you ordered by mail. And each book I ordered was a book I (or the university) needed and didn't have to buy. ILL must have cut into the publishers sales terribly--because libraries were no longer stand-alone institutions which had to buy a bit of everything, they could now develop specialties and rely on other institutions to fill in the gaps.
And now, worse for the publishers, even small local libraries can do the same. My library is in a mini-consortium with ten other libraries--we are independently governed, but choose to share patrons and our catalog, which means we don't all have to buy the latest James Patterson or whatever political "masterpiece" is currently being touted on the telly. My library, for instance buys international crime fiction and movie based on books; another library, close to the state capital, buys all the political books; and the wealthier libraries can keep up with the latest new releases--but my (or any of our) patrons can order them and get them faster than if they had to wait for our one new Janet Evanovich to be returned. And I can wait two weeks and get the most popular "new releases" used from Amazon for a quarter of the cost, once I know there is demand for them, instead of having to gamble on demand as I had to five or six years ago. My buying and that of other libraries is more efficient and less wasteful--and I'm sure it hurts sales somewhat.
OTOH (and the reason for the "partially wrong" above), is that we really aren't hurting their sales, not really.
There are two classes of readers--those that will always, or nearly always buy a book new/retail, and those who will never, or nearly never. We cater to the latter. These people do not buy new books--some will buy used (the publishers hate the used book market more than they dislike libraries), and the rest use the library--they always have and always will; but far from being a drain on sales, they are a source of word-of-mouth promotion, because an enthusiastic reader will tell several people about the books they enjoy, and a certain percentage of the listeners will be new-book people. These (we call them habitual non-users) will almost never set foot in a library, though they generally support us, and we will often inherit their cast-offs or their collections after they die. Adding the word-of-mouth people to the specialty books/materials we buy that no one else will think- or want-to, I choose to believe we are a net positive on sales.
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As to your protest about technological advances, I see your point, but...
I live in a rural community, and we ain't seein' them "technological advances." :)
My library operates one of two wifi hotspots in town, and far from 3-4-5G or whatever, we no longer even have cell service (long story). We have to tell people not to go to Windows 10 for technical reasons (the downloads/updates take so long that they are likely to suffer a system-borking power or internet interruption before it is finished). While we do offer downloads, they've plateaued at about 1/5 of our checkouts. Many people like physical copies, many more don't want or just can't afford the technology that makes downloaded media convenient (I have patrons that still use PCs with Win98, that have cassette players in their trucks and VCRs in their homes, that still use dialup, or don't have internet at all. Hell, I have two patrons that don't even have electricity).
And...
Physical media (and their support structures, including publishers and media and libraries) aren't going away any time soon. Neither are digital/electronic media. History has shown that once we get past the disruption phase of a new technology (when they are fighting each other), the new settles in beside the old--both find a niche and the market expands, not as much as either side would wish, but enough so that they both can survive. Live theatres exist alongside movie theaters alongside video alongside Netflix alongside libraries.
Also...
And right now there is quite a bit of content that is not and may never be available digitally--not because we don't want it digitized, but because 1) it costs, and we don't have budget to spare on it, if we want to do it right; 2) it's time-consuming, and we don't have have etc., etc., 3) copyright is completely f**ed up, and we don't have the resources to navigate that minefield. Despite its flaws, Google can mostly handle all three points above, which is one of the reasons I said I was happy to let them deal with it. Unfortunately, due to 3), Google isn't allowed to have access to everything, and we can't integrate our catalogs with Google Books, and so we will have to wait for the disruption phase to settle a bit, while trying to preserve what we are able to.
It is showing signs of settling a little bit--there is now competition for providers of downloadable content for libraries, where two-three years ago there was none--with the rise of competition, there will be an evolution of the regulations we operate under until we reach a compromise that satisfies no one but with which everyone can live.
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tl:dr - Libraries are behind the curve: it sucks and we're stuck with it, but it is making progress, I promise--we're working on it--and one day it will be better (but will never be perfect). And rural towns have poor technology. :(