[WEB4LIB] Re: Computers in Libraries and the death of copyright

[Richard Wiggins]

There are some pretty ironic cross-currents to this discussion.

Copyright is dead as far as the young Web generation is concerned, or at least many of them.  As far as millions of users of Napster are concerned, "might make right."  If I've got the technical ability to make an MP-encoded CD-R or download to my Rio, then I have the right to do it.  It'll be interesting to see if the playing out of the court case has any educational effect here.  (Personally, my guess is some off-shore Noopster will arise, and we get to ask REALLY interesting questions about obligations to filter illegal transnational content...)

What worries me is a world in which millions ignore copyright, so it's dead for them, but libraries and librarians honor copyright judiciously.  In such a world, the RIAA and Disney et al may clamp down ever tighter with DCMA and copy protection technologies, while libraries continue to honor the letter and the spirit of the law.

At the same CiL conference, I gave a presentation proposing that the Library of Congress should make plans to digitize the full text of all its book holdings. (See http://www.netfact.com/present/rww-cil-digital-lc-mar2001.html) An immediate objection is that there is no rights management system to secure permissions from and compensate the copyright holders, therefore we can't undertake the project.  (LC, for instance, has 29 million books and pamphlets, of which perhaps only 1/3 is old enough to be clearly public domain.)

For good or for ill, Napster is forcing the record companies to consider new modalities that will allow millions to do their downloads, perhaps on a subscription basis.

I call this the paradox of latent value for high-quality, low-volume content.  An obscure book can sit on the shelf in a library forever.  The publisher has long since seen the last dollar of revenue from the book, and the author has long since gotten the last nickel in royalty payments.  Some future grad student who lives on the Web far away from that library might be able to do better scholarship with access to that book in digital form.  But we won't digitize the book, and index it, and make it available over the Net for free, because that author and his/her publisher might demand compensation -- and because our interpretation of the law says it's a violation.

So millions of undergraduate students siphon away billions in value from the recording industry, and it takes them over a year to stop the primary enabler.  Millions of books and journals with very specific latent value sit in libraries, and will never see the light of digital day.

I am a big believer in copyright and the rule of law, but I must be the only author on the planet who wishes those who have published my words would leave them online forever, and not lose the archives.  An article I wrote on "How the Internet Works" for Internet World magazine a few years back fell off their online archives recently.  My hyperlinked list of publications is broken. The college professors who had that article hyperlinked in their syllabi send ME the irate email.  I'll never make another nickel off that article.  Yet Internet.com, the copyright holder, has just turned it into link rot -- and they'd probably sue me if I put the article back online.

I am cheering for the commercial digital content repackagers -- the Ebraries and Net Libraries and the Questias and the Proquests and the Northern Lights and the New York Timeses -- because it isn't going to be libraries that deliver the good stuff in bulk to the folks who could benefit. Who in the library world will be able to force publishers and authors of good, but obscure, low-volume, content, to allow Web-wide access?

Things are topsy-turvy.

/rich


------Original Message------
From: Roy Tennant <roy.tennant at ucop.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: March 20, 2001 5:26:14 AM GMT
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Computers in Libraries and the death of copyright


(sigh)

I'm afraid my pal Walt (one of *my* Library Heroes) is trying to kill 
the messenger. Just because I'm the one to tell you that copyright 
(as we know it) is dead (but not entirely), doesn't mean that I'm the 
one who killed it, or even someone who is happy about it. I just 
happen to think that it is quickly becoming fact through the actions 
of millions of individuals who choose to ignore it, and who *today* 
have ways of doing so without any fear of reprisal or even discovery. 
If copyright "dies", it doesn't take a genius to figure out that 
there will likely be an impact on libraries. If that is going to be 
the case, then we need to pay attention, *whether we like it or not*.

Walt asked if I was saying that "we who write for money [me included] 
are living in a dream world, and should move to the Brave New World 
where all intellectual work is free for the taking?" Well, the column 
that Library Journal pays me for has been free for the taking on the 
web since its inception, some 3 1/2 years ago. Funny, they still pay 
me for it. It's quite possible that different factors are at work 
here than simply "I can control who gets this, so I will charge you 
to see it". It might be "I can provide this to you in an enhanced 
way, or a timely fashion, or in the format you prefer it, or? so it 
is worth money". Or even, "we will provide this as a public service, 
or to garner good will and/or attention for our other services." What 
I think the publishing industries must do is to figure out some of 
these so they can truly understand what people will pay for, since 
paying to simply access content won't work exactly as it has in the 
past.

As an example, consider the National Academy Press. Admittedly, their 
books are not mass market paperbacks, but nonetheless they have had 
the full text of many of their titles online and available for free 
for a long time. They discovered that doing so actually *enhanced* 
the sales of the print versions. If you can get it for free online, 
why pay for the print? Well, I shouldn't have to tell a bunch of book 
lovers why.

The bottom line is that we can scream and tear our hair all we want, 
but at the end of the day, if our current copyright laws are being 
flouted by all and sundry then we do not have an effective system. 
And it's worth noting that we are not talking about a constitutional 
right. Copyright law is an attempt at some kind of compromise between 
society's need to have information available and promulgated and an 
author's (and publisher's, etc.) need to be compensated for their 
work. In the past, or in different countries, different sets of 
compromises have been made. Copryight law is law - it can be 
interpreted by the courts and changed by the legislatures, as we must 
surely know having stared down the muzzle of a more than a few laws 
that make a mockery of the Fair Use doctrine.

Walt ends by saying "I find it offensive as a paradigm for library 
operations." I'm not sure who is advocating that - I certainly am 
not. Perhaps this is the danger of putting up slides without 
commentary, but I'll be darned if I can find where I advocated that 
libraries ignore existing copyright law. What I'm saying is that this 
is an issue that is likely to affect us -- good or bad, but certainly 
not indifferent, and we'd be wise to pay attention.

Again, I cannot overstate this: I am trying to understand these 
changes and alert my colleagues to their possible impact. This does 
not necessarily mean that I think these changes are *good*. But since 
when has *good* and *real* been synonymous?

[As an aside, this discussion illustrates the danger of putting 
slides up without notes for people to see who weren't there. Walt 
knows as well as I that you don't make a slide that says "Copyright 
as we know it is basically meaningless in the music industry, close 
to being meaningless for other types of digital content, and likely 
to be impossible to enforce for popular print items." No, you put up 
a slide that says "Copyright is Dead" to a) get the audience's 
attention and b) help them remember your thesis. Then, you qualify it 
in your remarks, and in subsequent slides. This isn't to say that 
either the creator or the reader is at fault, it's just the way it 
is.]

Thanks for getting this far,
Roy
__________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
http://www.netfact.com/rww  wiggins at mail.com
517-349-6919 (home office)  517-353-4955 (work)  
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