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Digital librarian, Karen Coyle, has written about controlled digital lending (warning for PDF), where an artificial scarcity is applied to digital artifacts to limit concurrent access similar to the limitations that a finite number of objects exhibit in libraries' physical collections. This concept raises a lot of questions about not just copyright and digital versus physical, but also about reading in general. Some authors and publisher associations have already begun to object to controlled digital lending. However, few set aside misinformation and misdirection to allow for a proper, in-depth discussion of the issues.
We now have another question about book digitization: can books be digitized for the purpose of substituting remote lending in the place of the lending of a physical copy? This has been referred to as "Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)," a term developed by the Internet Archive for its online book lending services. The Archive has considerable experience with both digitization and providing online access to materials in various formats, and its Open Library site has been providing digital downloads of out of copyright books for more than a decade. Controlled digital lending applies solely to works that are presumed to be in copyright.
Controlled digital lending works like this: the Archive obtains and retains a physical copy of a book. The book is digitized and added to the Open Library catalog of works. Users can borrow the book for a limited time (2 weeks) after which the book "returns" to the Open Library. While the book is checked out to a user no other user can borrow that "copy." The digital copy is linked one-to-one with a physical copy, so if more than one copy of the physical book is owned then there is one digital loan available for each physical copy.
The Archive is not alone in experimenting with lending of digitized copies: some libraries have partnered with the Archive's digitization and lending service to provide digital lending for library-owned materials. In the case of the Archive the physical books are not available for lending. Physical libraries that are experimenting with CDL face the added step of making sure that the physical book is removed from circulation while the digitized book is on loan, and reversing that on return of the digital book.
Online access obviously can reach a much wider patron base than your average physical library.
Previously:
(2020) Education Groups Drop their Lawsuit Against Public.Resource.Org
(2020) Internet Archive Files Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Publisher Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
(2020) Internet Archive Ends "Emergency Library" Early to Appease Publishers
(2020) Project Gutenberg Public Domain Library Blocked in Italy for Copyright Infringement
(2020) Publishers Sue the Internet Archive Over its Open Library, Declare it a Pirate Site
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday May 31 2022, @07:01AM (19 children)
This is pure Evil!
It goes against all technology achievements made by huge effort of several late generations.
It goes against the most important factor of history: it undermines the goal to eliminate ignorance widely as fast as possible.
It goes against Humanity.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @07:11AM (1 child)
Wait until you find out about NFTs! Artificial scarcity is where it's at! Schreli just got out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Tuesday May 31 2022, @04:32PM
You may have written in jest, but this was my first thought too, seriously.
"Controlled Digital Lending" requires artificial scarcity, clearly, and NFTs are just the extreme example of that.
But it also requires transfer transactions - once you lend / give "it" to someone else, you no longer have "it".
Further, authors still wedded to the traditional copyright model would like some form of recompense for the creation of another copy.
To me that sounds a lot like blockchain/*coin/cryto for books/information.
Original -> NFT (hard coded scarcity of 1)
"First edition" -> hard limit on scarcity
Lend / give -> transfer to another (for nominal / zero fee)
Copy -> do "work" in some form (recompense to author/distributor - let's not pretend authors get it all...) to create a new copy
Now all we have to do is stop the actual information leaking out into analogue things like people's heads, plug in blockchain and kerching...
Happily that first requirement is pretty much a permanent blocker, still, won't stop people trying to get to the reward.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @10:57AM
The goal, at present, is to increase and promote ignorance. The freefalling quality of general education is one part of the sordid whole, the paywalling of everything they can, including things legally in the public domain, is another.
People cannot be efficiently and cheaply lied to, if they have easy access to disproof of agenda du jour.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 31 2022, @12:01PM (14 children)
So here's the trouble:
1. In order for a thing to have monetary value, it must be scarce enough and ideally useful enough that it's worth spending money to get it.
2. If you spread knowledge far and wide to anybody who wants it, it's no longer scarce. This is also summarized as "information wants to be free".
3. The way we've organized our economy, the people who create, edit, and distribute knowledge need to get paid in order to survive. And probably want to be paid more than is necessary for their own survival.
Now, we could solve this problem by addressing point 3 somehow, but that would probably involve some sort of public funding of intellectuals and artistic types to create things everyone could enjoy, and that would be socialism so it's obviously out of the question. Instead, we decided to attempt to create artificial scarcity in the form of copyright and patents, and set up global regimes and treaties and complex systems to try to enforce that artificial scarcity. And even then it doesn't work.
It's also why I think some business types hate academic and artistic types so much: What, you can't give what you know or create away to anybody who wants it, you're missing out on a huge business opportunity!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @01:11PM (2 children)
Nothing is more scarce than that which does not exist. We do not have to come up with a solution on how to pay people to create new things, and it is not society's job to create or protect a business model. The way things are now is clearly broken. Hopefully it does not end up with another tech-oligarch gobbling up another industry like what happened with music and is continuing to happen with movies/serials and video games, even if the masses seem to prefer that over the old ways. When NFTs were first being discussed, they seemed like a great bridging step, allowing legal coverage to the owner and a market solution to pricing, while still leaving the moral rights of authorship intact. Now of course, they are nothing but silly collectable cards to brag about on twitter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @09:32PM (1 child)
What a strange thing to say! Of course it is up to us, and it is society's job! Who else? Now, if it is a cabal of Imaginary Property owners, who are rent-seeking, and attempting to exploit society, like parasites, then it is society's job to eliminate them, maybe with some kind of de-wormer. Maybe society is not coming up a solution, but it definitely should be rejecting criminal models out of hand.
And, as for the necessity of paying workers/creators, perhaps is we abandoned the capitalism model of threatened starvation, or loss of health insurance? Marx pointed out that profits rely on surplus value that result from underpaying labor, and is able to do so because of the "vast army of the unemployed."
How about, instead, we have a society where everyone's basic needs are met, not tied to wages, and the "compensation" was along the lines of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", in terms of social "cred", much the way the free software community functioned. "Have skills, will work for Whuffie!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @02:51PM
Marx theorised that based on a proven inadequate approach to understanding value. Labour is not, as it turns out, the only input to value. Context matters - is that farmer in the market up to his nostrils in pumpkins and just desperate for someone to take them off his hands before he has to compost them? Is that chef desperate to have enough pumpkins to stock his restaurant for a pumpkin pie extravaganza? Another factor is the organisation of resources. As much as people like to complain about managers and project managers and all that stuff, chaos rapidly mounts without those functions, and efficiently-run workplaces get more done than the alternative.
If you want to theorise about alternative societies, start by understanding what Marx got terribly, horrible wrong, and move on from that foundation.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @02:02PM (5 children)
"would probably involve some sort of public funding of intellectuals and artistic types to create things everyone could enjoy, and that would be socialism so it's obviously out of the question."
The problem with that approach is that you don't know ahead of time which books will be in demand. Paying the creator after his work is created is better, as is not paying him if the work is subpar. Also, the party that pays is the customer, so your model produces works that flatter the politicians that give out the funding and promotes their causes.
Centrally planned economies are crap. Every socialist country's performance should have told you that from the Soviet Union's on downward.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 31 2022, @02:38PM (2 children)
Who says you have to pay ahead of time in a publicly funded system? You could just as well assess popularity and then pay public funds based on that. Creators still get paid in much the same after-the-fact way they do now, but you've removed artificial scarcity from the system.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @04:21PM (1 child)
I have never heard of a publicly funded system that works that way. The problem with that approach is that it places the risk on the creators should they not succeed just as much as the present free market system would. All the publicly funded mechanisms rely on stable patronage of the artist. Risk is removed for the artist in that manner.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 31 2022, @04:33PM
Nor have I, but there's no reason it couldn't be done that way.
As for placing risk on the creators - yes it does, exactly like the free market which they currently participate in.
The difference are in:
Who is (directly) paying them - which is functionally irrelevant.
Whether society is trying to impose an economy based on artificial scarcity, which comes at enormous expense
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @05:28PM
We must be careful, so that only the right people and the right ideas get the funding.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 31 2022, @11:30PM
So I'm going to throw a big wrench in your ideas here: Some of what we now think of as the coolest art in the world was considered utter crap in or shortly after its time (e.g. Vincent Van Gogh's paintings or the music of JS Bach).
If you want great art, you also have to fund crappy art. Ditto for great science.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @03:16PM
Kinda-sorta. Not really true. Depends on context. Value is relative, contextual and individual.
No. In the first place, "information wants to be free" relates not merely to its distribution among people, but also relates to other elements of information theory such as how, once dispersed, it can't be recovered. There's a lot more under the hood there. As far as scarcity goes, the information as such might not be hard to come by but that doesn't foreclose other aspects of value - more below.
Not even true as far as it goes. Creators of information need means of support without which they suffer deprivation, that much is true, but there's no requirement that they should be paid for their creations, as opposed to any other reason. Many writers, musicians, actors and others support themselves by other means while producing, and in fact many are hobbyists in their fields regardless of their skills because, to take an easily comprehensible field such as music for example, music is a shitty career full of gatekeepers (venues, critics, you name it), terrible hours, irregular pay, the moodiness of crowds and the caprice of governments (Lockdown! No! Maybe social distancing! Masks! Including on singers! Or not! We don't know! Make up your own rules! If you guess wrong we shut you down! Even if our own rules changed!) but can be a very fulfilling hobby when the aim is to please a niche without pressure to turn a buck.
It would be a narrow subset of socialism, but that's not the real problem. Now you want to set up the government (or whoever runs the public funding - the same thing, in effect) as the gatekeeper deciding who is artistic, desirable, important or relevant enough to support. Or do we just fund every five year old fingerpainter because blanket art stuff? Or do we wait until they're twenty-five, and have a degree to have permission to art for money? And how much do they get? Do they get more for a three year mission on a masterpiece, or a constant stream of fingerpainted spam? Does popularity affect this - if so, do porn stars get the big bucks? Or if we're being socialist about it, does the obscure abstract artist get as much as Katy Perry? What about artists with multinational streams of income, given that this is the age of the internet? And for that matter, who decides what is art? Are farts on camera with fisheye cam views of the buttcheeks art? Are they not terpsichorean in nature?
All these are political questions, once it's in the hands of a central authority, and subject to change as government changes which reduces a vast set of uncertainties to one uncertainty, including the preconceptions of the next set of grifters to win an election. It's not clear that this is an improvement, unless you think that politically-based whiplash would be an improvement to the lives of artists.
Yup, obviously the status quo is broken, nothing new there. Regulating what people can do with the contents of their brains is not a winning proposition - moreso when various countries have different, conflicting rules.
Can't say that I've seen that hatred. Perhaps occasional frustration, but that's bilateral anyway.
What I'm really seeing here is a confusion between information, the medium of information as a good, and the provision of information as a service. You can hold a version of a song, or a dance, or a sculpture or whatever in your head (access to the information). You can pay someone to perform or create it for you (a service) or you can purchase a document, or physical object or record of it (a good) and this is what people tend to get confused about in the absence of royalties and licence purchases. If we consider Beando the Fartalicious as an artist, even in the absence of payment for any kind of so-called intellectual property (which isn't intellectual and is only dubiously property) the combination of command performances and trade in artifacts brings us back to a model of support which would not have been particularly strange to Chaucer or Juvenal; patronage.
This is important because every artistic endeavour's returns are functionally from patronage. Google funds youtubers as a patron, in return for pimping their videos out to advertisers. A bride is the matron of a wedding band. A mother is the matron of a photographer doing glamour shots of her baby on a sheepskin with bunny ears. A psychedelic jam artist busking for that sweet stoner cash outside a pot shop in Boulder is drumming up patronage from the passers-by. The socialist approach replaces these patrons with the government - not quite sure how that improves things, other than ease of taxation - but the essence remains of an artist going to someone with a hand outstretched.
Any attempt to rewrite the system would probably do better if it started from the basis of what is actually going on under the hood, in terms of information, goods, services and patronage.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Ingar on Tuesday May 31 2022, @05:17PM (1 child)
This issue had actually been solved a few centuries ago. Creators used to have patrons, who payed them to create.
Copyright has shifted the value from the labor of creating to the creation itself. Profits went from the creator to the patron.
On a more personal note, I've actually been bitten by time-bombed files. My mom has an e-reader she uses to
lend books from the local library. A while ago, it started throwing license activation errors and she can't access her books.
I feel very much like just un-DRM-ing the files.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @05:36PM
A few centuries ago, distribution was limited. Now it's infinite, which is a boon for the taker, but a nightmare for the (potential) maker. Incentive for the taker, disincentive for the maker.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday June 02 2022, @03:13AM (1 child)
It doesn't work because 1) "Information wants to be free" actually means people like to spread information around, and it benefits society to spread information and 2) because it takes an effort to create information, it was deemed best that in a capitalistic society, it would be good for people to earn money for the effort they put in. Patents and copyright successfully bridge that gap. Information is limited for a certain amount of time (so money can be made), thus promoting creation of information. It's still a risk for the person to create this information, so the information should have real value to society. This fits in nicely with capitalism.
Where things go wrong is how long the information is limited. With copyright, lifetime + 70 years is waaaaaay too long. Also, granting patents to obvious items is also harming our society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2022, @03:49AM
Where things goes wrong now, is that it's much, much, much easier to distribute information today, without the creator getting anything at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @04:52PM
I spent many months and wrote a big, elaborate digital book when paperless distribution was still a novelty. Trust in people led me to leave out copy protection, and to charge a more than reasonable price. It was a hit, people were celebrating it, thanking me profusely, and begging for more. Downloads and distribution were absolutely overwhelming and wonderful.
I sold 4 copies.
A life lesson learned. People really are something.