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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: 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.