It was about an alleged loss of revenues which clashes at least with the fact that libraries are a "consolidated" practice, and it ended with a judge decreeing that you cannot provide remote consultation of material just because you have the item locally.
People have been buying books even when those books are freely accessible in libraries - since libraries existed.
- They're delusional about the financial rewards
- It's a hobby/compulsion, they like being an author, etc. even though it pays next to nothing most of the time
- It's a reputational boost for their consulting, speaking engagements, or even regular employment
There are thriving communities of people who do all those things without trust funds, and never getting paid for it either. Or getting paid for commissions rather than for duplication.
Take a look:
Even books and stories:
I know this isn’t the intent, but any time this point is made I always hear it as deeply entitled. “The slaves love what they do!”
I have a generally visceral reaction to anything that argues against paying workers for their work, or that argues that we can remove systems whereby workers are paid and magic will happen. Even if the systems we have are very flawed, replacing them with nothing isn’t an improvement.
I used to believe all that 90s cyber anarchist stuff. Then I watched the trajectory of the music industry. Now when I hear the old slogan “information wants to be free” I translate that mentally as “I want other peoples’ labor to be free to me.”
There is no longer a music industry. There is no longer a journalism industry. Pretty soon there will no longer be a book industry. We’ve decided we don’t want to pay for those kinds of things, so I guess we won’t have them.
… or more likely they will all be ad supported or funded to push some billionaire or government’s agenda. We know what that hellscape looks like.
And yet there's plenty of people making so much great music that you could never listen to it all if you wanted to. That's an industry in all but name.
I do as well. I wonder to what degree though the publishers are still representing the interests of their authors when they go after archive.org. It would be interesting to ask some authors what their feelings are regarding publishers going after book lending, libraries, etc.
Although, let us not forget that the context here is lending, its legitimacy and its impact to industries.
Libraries - including bibliothecae, hemerothecae, discothecae, mediathecae - predate those industrial crisis: people could consult books, periodicals, records and media freely, and yet the industry was running - people bought anyway.
The crisis in the music industry, in the journalism industry and in the publishing industry (etc.) are more probably related to situational factors, involving quality, competition, habit shift, infrastructure.
You cannot in any shape or form argue that artists on Etsy are not getting paid.
The crux is in paying for free duplication. If you stop paying for that, you're not removing all sources of revenue. Commission is older than copyright, just look at the Sistine Chapel. For other forms of expression, other things exist, like concerts for music. The system of paying the workers will remain, even if some parts of it get torn down.
"There is no longer a music industry" despite that the system for collecting money for duplicated music is the dominating way to listen to music (you can't listen to a spotify track without money changing hands). Clearly, you recognize that this system is not working.
This sets up a logical fallacy of false dichotomy: that the existence of certain forms of lending lead to an author never getting paid. So while the answer might be that we’d have far fewer books than we have now, the premise is one that cannot be taken seriously, i.e. the reality is not one where authors never get paid.
I think an interesting question to ask is: how many authors would exist if there were never libraries?
Authors commonly grew up spending all of their time in libraries. It’s what sparked their love of books, and that spark eventually became more books. They’re often the first to tell us how much they value libraries and the role that they play.
Yes, authors should be paid for their work. But applying binary thought to the consideration of how authors should be paid and the role of libraries is guaranteed to lead to an incomplete understanding of the situation.
For example, I can't see one of the big publishers happily publishing a treatise on how they're killing innovation. One of the little ones, certainly. (Beacon probably would).
> But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard?
Do we want only the voices of those who can present their work in a palatable money making way to data analysts and C-suite types to be heard?
We may find out soon enough. Book consumption, book stores ... seem to be circling the drain. I'd love to be shown to be wrong though.
If the entire publishing industry too is in descent, I suspect they will only get more obnoxious trying to cling to their last profits. Of course we'll need Archive.org even more then and after.
Even ignoring AI, the maximum possible market for writers is also quite small: If every single person buys a new book every week, even if this money is evenly distributed so that every author gets £12,000 per year (fantastic if you're living where The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is set, not so much when you're living where the series author is based), that's a maximum of about 34,667 authors worldwide, which I think is about the number of agricultural workers in just famously small and not-agricultural Singapore[0].
Personally I am of the opinion that arts should be funded mainly by government grants, though not entirely from them as free markets do at least help align production with demand.
[0] take with a pinch of salt, the stats (page 72) look like they're rounded to 0.1% and I've not read the details: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2018humandevelop...
That's at least directionally true with most creative fields. (Leaving aside the people working for companies doing creative stuff as a day job.) The exact shape will vary of course. I suspect very few poets are making big bucks.
Government grants can be problematic although probably less so at the local level (on average).
I'm generally not in the "information wants to be free" camp, but I don't think "unlimited digital distribution" was what IA and libraries were doing. Instead, they linked the number of digital copies to the number of physical copies they had, effectively giving them another way to loan out books they had already purchased.
Publishers predictably didn't like that, because they wanted to charge libraries again for the privileged of loaning out ebook versions of the books they already had, at much less favorable terms than they had sold the physical books to libraries as far as I understand.
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that authors and publishers should get paid for their work. I'm much less convinced it's a good idea that they be able to repeatedly gouge underfunded public libraries that want to embrace new ways of lending out their books.
That's what they had been doing, for years. Publishers grumbled, but didn't file lawsuits.
It wasn't until the 'National Emergency Library', when IA decided to unilaterally ignore the 'controlled' part of digital lending, that the suit was filed.
My guess is that the publishers would have sued with or without the NEL; they were just waiting to accrue as many infringements as they could in order to force a quick settlement. If you sue immediately there's less damage than if you wait so you can sue for multiple infringements over the whole statute of limitations (3 years AFAIK).
From publisher's/authors' perspectives, there is a massive difference between "controlled digital lending but we respect copyright" and "digital lending, and we can choose to dispense with copyright restrictions whenever we think it is justified".
One of those was an uneasy peace, based on the idea that IA - while it disagreed with the publishers on some issues - was at least acting in good faith. The other one would essentially have gutted all copyright protections, making respecting IP rights purely a matter of choice. Whatever you think of IP and copyright as a whole, publishers were never going to accept that massive change in approach.
Authorship is centuries older than the modern copyright regime we suffer under. You present a false dichotomy.
I don't necessarily see that as a preferable situation.
Is there a different model that we could work under that allows a person to have a primarily artistic creative profession (e.g. artist, writer, photographer) and be able to make a living doing it that doesn't require the gatekeeping of government or another wealthy patron?
Copyright functionally does not protect the rights of all artists. It only protects artists that are large and well-known enough to retain ownership over their work. The vast majority of artists are not that large. The vast majority of publishers know this, and thus they demand ownership up-front as a policy. Any contractual obligations to return ownership at the end of a publishing period will be subverted in a way that most benefits them and harms the author.
If copyright were inalienable - i.e. there were legal maximums on how much you could transfer to a publisher at once, or the rights reversion regime were stronger - then maybe I'd be on the other side of this debate. As it stands copyright is just lunch money being given to bullied kids.
The IA did not want unlimited distribution[0], they wanted digital first sale. Publishers have been adament that first sale ends where the bits start, and courts have almost unanimously agreed with them. Normalizing Controlled Digital Lending would not do any more "damage" to writers than physical libraries already do.
Which, BTW, is not actually damage. Writers absolutely love librarians because they bring more readers into their back catalogue; publishers hate them because they represent a loss of control. Writers and publishers have different business models: a writer makes money when they sell copies of their work, but a publisher makes money when they control that work. So libraries benefit the writers at the expense of publishers.
Totally agree with you on AI; the discoverability problems that self-published writers already face are getting worse with the ability to generate "genuine fake[1]" spam books.
[0] The National Emergency Library stunt notwithstanding.
[1] "Genuine fake" is a term for "counterfeit goods that look and function similarly to the real thing".
The wider issue isn't over whether authors—or anyone for that matter—should or not be paid for work done (of course they should). Rather, it's over the unfair and inequitable nature of copyright law and how sleazeball publishers take undue advantage of it.
We need to keep in mind how these unreasonable copyright laws came into existence. They were framed in the 1880s by Victor Hugo and cohorts at a time when the average citizen would have had no concept of what copyright actually was let alone have had any notion of violating it.
Aurhors such as Hugo and cohorts were principally targeting unscrupulous publishers (usually printers) in other countries who stole works holus-bolus and published them without paying any royalties whatsoever—they didn't have to as what they were doing in their own country was perfectly legal (as they weren't violating the then weak copyright laws of their own country—and no local citizen's copyright had been violated).
So when the Berne Copyright Convention of 1886 came into force is was essentially an irrelevant treaty unknown to the average citizen (most would never have even heard of it).
You don't have to be Einstein to figure out what wrong here, that is, at least as far as the public was concerned (of course, the publishers made a killing). The lobbying for and creation of the treaty was completely one-sided, the authors/publishers got everything they had wished for—and even by the standards of the day what they ended up with would be deemed unacceptable, that is if citizens of the day had challenged it.
That the 1886 Berne Copyright Treaty started from such a high one-sided base with authors and publishers in complete control 1886 meant that a small group of publishers ruled roost over copyright and publishing for the next one hundred years—until about the mid 1980s when the first 'challenges' to their rule came about with electronic data (actually, the first was a decade or so earlier when the Xerox copier became widely available).
What so affonts publishers is that they ruled supreme and without challenge (except for spats amongst themselves) for a century, so they've never had to conduct themselves in a proper ethnical and buisness-like way—they've behaved so badly for so long they don't even realize how bad their behavior is. Hence, it's little wonder they're now behaving as even bigger asholes than before electronic publishing/the internet.
Even after forty-plus years, publishers still haven't gotten used to being challenged in what they consider to be their own domain—one that they believe they have complete control over.
You also need to consider that publishers have not only been screwing the public with high prices through use of monopolistic practices but also they've screwed authors from the outset. Correct, these sleazeballs have been screwing rotten authors and content creators—those most rightfully deserving of royaltes—for years.
I guess a few would. There are authors with trust funds. But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard?
The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution, which would if normalized end writing as a profession.
Of course with AIs able to generate convincing text on demand it all might be water under the bridge now. That’s going to flood the market with noise at the very least.