I was not aware of the dividend on every loan in other countries. If you can provide a reference to where and how much, that'd be quite interesting.
Ireland has it in place under the provisions of our Public Lending Remuneration Scheme, which is currently capped at €200,000 per annum, paid at a rate of 4.39 cents per title borrowed in 2020. Payments to individual authors are capped at €1,000 with a minimum sum of €2. Authors receive an average payment of just under €32 per year for having their books borrowed from public libraries in Ireland.
Under the PLR scheme in the UK authors can receive a maximum annual payment of £6,600.
I wonder how that compares with the fees US libraries are being for digital lending rights to publishers…
This is the same as controlled digital lending.
> and eventually have to replace them (due to wear and tear or e-licensing conditions)
Physical books frequently last longer than copyright terms and it's not obvious why authors should be entitled to double dip just because someone spilled their coffee, i.e. it should be equally reasonable for a library to print their own physical replacement copy of a damaged book that they already own, because they already own it.
As opposed to an ordinary library, which... wait.
> Further, creators and their publishers will find it more challenging, if not impossible, to bring older titles back into print, whether in physical or electronic form, if they must compete with free Open Library-generated ebooks from IA.
But why does that matter? It's neither providing an incentive to create new works nor making older works available that wouldn't have been, since IA doing so is literally the thing they're complaining about.
> generates royalties for creators under the public lending right recognized by most other developed countries.
This is basically an argument that it can't be fair use in the US if it isn't in some other country, because otherwise people in the other country could get it from the US. That seems like a stretch.
Especially since it falls to the opposite problem: If we're considering laws in other countries then there will be at least one where there is nothing illegal about what IA is doing. At which point someone is going to do it, and what does it matter to anyone which country they're operating from when the internet is accessible everywhere?