That's a fun comparison. That's discrimination right there, innit? Artists and authors aren't going after the library for copyright concerns the same way they go after torrent sites.
Does the library have some type of licensing agreement with the media it purchases? The article indicates that it isn't the case, but if there was, could that be the reason why libraries aren't attacked but torrent sites are? Though libraries have a lot less traffic and loss in potential sales compared to a torrent tracker.
This type of discrimination happens with website scraping too. Websites don't go after big search indexers like Google and Bing but will and can sue local scrapers who never entered some type of agreement with the website.
> Does the library have some type of licensing agreement with the media it purchases?
IANAL but I think it's called the first-sale doctrine. Once you buy a book, you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don't try to copy and sell it.
Of course, publishers don't like it any more than the MAFIAA likes Torrent users. As more libraries now stock digital items, publishers have taken the opportunity to put restrictions on libraries' right to lend [1].
To this point, content companies hate libraries, but they can't do anything about it because of the doctrine of first sale.
But that's why there were huge public media campaigns decrying any kind of recordable media. Libraries could acquire all this content, and anybody could go to the library, check out a piece of content, and make a copy.
This is also why in the world of objects that only exist digitally, libraries are having such a hard time with digital lending. Content companies don't have to play ball when they own the devices on which lending takes place.
> Artists and authors aren't going after the library for copyright concerns the same way they go after torrent sites.
Actually, the American Association of Publishers, which represents exactly the people you might think it does, has repeatedly and publicly attacked the existence of libraries. They've kind of backed away from it in the last few years since it seems like a poor argument from a public relations point of view, but that's clearly the view they hold: all libraries should be eliminated.
In Sweden (The context of which the author talks about this), there are no such licensing agreement but rather praxis. Libraries are for the common good, and as such, they get treated as such. There's one exception, as there is a law requiring a copy to be sent to the main library in Sweden if a book gets published.
As for artists and authors, normally they don't go after anyone, be that libraries or the pirate bay. Copyright and publishing organizations however, do go after the pirate bay. They also go after libraries, but through the lobbying route. Audio books has come and gone, drm'ed, limits and so on. Many libraries has totally given up on audio-books, as its a loot of trouble for rather small gain.
In Sweden libraries have to pay a small sum to the publisher each time a book is borrowed. The exact details vary slightly depending on a bunch of factors, but it's normally around $0.10-0.15.
In a comment by Rick Falkvinge in the comment field, he explains this point. Basically, only Swedish authors and translators receive any money at all. Its also not a licensing deal between the copyright owner and the library, but rather a money distribution method, using the statistics of book lending gather by the library to grant money to Swedish authors.
I've seen it asserted (I think by Falkvinge himself) that the model of paying a bit per view would be heavily abused on the internet, which I don't doubt. It would be interesting to see how many Swedish authors routinely borrow their own book or books authored by friends and family from the library.
At 10 cents per borrow (no idea if that number is right or not but it seems reasonable enough)...only the authors that don't value their time very much.
The average book will have at most 2-3 copies but even if we assume 10 for arguments sake you'd earn yourself 1$ per library that you visit.
Given that you have to get to the library, spend time checking the books out and returning them and only get a cut of X% of that one dollar to boot it seems like a pretty futile exercise :D
The tricky thing with digital lending is that anything online that is capable of abuse via scale will be subjected to it. If the fee for one borrow is $X and the cost of buying one borrow on Mechanical Turk is $Y, if $X > $Y then someone will arbitrage.
I think the point is that if such a system were adapted online, it would be prone to abuse. It's easier to "check out" content digitally then it is through a traditional library.
The solution they've adopted in Sweden is that each library card is only allowed to make n digital checkouts a month for some low value of n.
Although the problem they where trying to solve wasn't so much abuse as the fact that the service was far more popular than they'd anticipated and legitimate use was high enough to seriously risk their budget.
"Artists and authors aren't going after the library for copyright concerns the same way they go after torrent sites."
> They might if the library would share everything digitally, which would directly compete with the artist's own marketing efforts
"Websites don't go after big search indexers like Google and Bing but will and can sue local scrapers who never entered some type of agreement with the website."
> They don't go after Google because they (supposedly) make something out of getting scraped
I swear I've heard libraries rent out books for e-readers. I might be way off in my memory though as I don't keep up with those types of things (or libraries).
Isn't getting scraped by Google voluntary with the robots.txt?
Also a question for anyone who knows the answer: does Google/Bing/etc use the same amount of resources as someone using whatever to scrape a website (bandwidth, whatever else websites might be concerned with)? Genuinely curious as I don't have much experience scraping and even less dealing with crawlers.
I swear I've heard libraries rent out books for e-readers
At least in Sweden, e-books are licensed to libraries under an entirely different set of rules, and as such it costs the library a lot more when you 'borrow' and e-book than when you borrow an actual book. The result of this is that libraries have been forced to limit the number of e-books people can borrow pr. month.
Any scraper will use essentially the same bandwidth (varying slightly on how much content they actually download). Their can be issues with server load depending on how fast you are getting indexed and how much content your site has, but Google takes care to detect this and you can also manually reduce the speed / schedule via Webmaster Tools.
Does the library have some type of licensing agreement with the media it purchases? The article indicates that it isn't the case, but if there was, could that be the reason why libraries aren't attacked but torrent sites are? Though libraries have a lot less traffic and loss in potential sales compared to a torrent tracker.
This type of discrimination happens with website scraping too. Websites don't go after big search indexers like Google and Bing but will and can sue local scrapers who never entered some type of agreement with the website.