Comment by blakesterz
7 years ago
Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance.
Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)
If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large variety of still-somewhat-recent works would be public domain, and thus creating tools to read them would be profitable. Right now, a "public domain" Kindle would be for what, works that are over a hundred years old or something? Few people will ever encounter public domain works they want to read so it's as if everything fits the rent model.
The crazy thing is that everything is more amenable to "sharing" today, it is merely legal structure that prevents it now. Arguably the true utility of a library is that it would be (or would have been) absurd to duplicate a physical book for every person that wants it, and then when no one was actively reading them they'd take up a crazy amount of space. This is still true today! This world should be strictly better than the past. But instead we have nostalgia for libraries, not due to any essential reason, but because we've created an artificial environment where it is more appealing to potentially wait for a copy of something to become available vs. instantly duplicating it.
It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this work for 101 years after publication, and the domestic copyright will last for 121 years. I will be in my 60s before the copyright expires on a work published when my grandfather was born.
Similarly, works published in 1935 & 1941. For at least one, nearest copy is 1000km away.
They should be out of copyright by now. They are not.
Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot about the absurdity of it all.
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I’m guessing an inter library loan wasn’t possible?
What are you looking for? There’s a decent chance someone here lives near a copy.
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> If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them
Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.
Yes, I believe Charles Dickens was the first to near simultaneously publish in both the UK and US.
Cant imagine the US letting other countries get away with that now.
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>>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them.
Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebook that no one can access is suddenly in the public domain, that doesn't help anyone one iota.
The AAA-class games with a budget of a blockbuster movie? Well, I'm fine with them following the movie locked-up route.
New and original indie games? New Portal? New Monument Valley? Maybe even new Doom? I bet they would live with shorter copyright; Doom was released as free software much sooner than after 28 years.
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Surely then you want them in the public domain sooner to prevent that. Sourcing a 28 year old pc to read some 'ancient' format is workable. Finding a 100+ year old pc to do the same seems less workable.
I thought all the console games get dumped so they can be emulated?
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You can thank Disneys lawyers and lobbyists.
It took the richest guy in the world funding them like crazy to start them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#3,000_public_l... The one in Philadelphia cost the equivalent of $15,000,000 - and that didn't include the land, operation, or maintenance.
I've found this website very useful:
https://archive.org/details/texts
My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc).
I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.
The question is what will stop working earlier: archive.org or the 18th century book?
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The one in Washington DC is now an Apple store.
Wow ... that's .. is that irony? I don't even know.
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The yearly ALA (American Library Association) conference was in the conference center across the street from that library last weekend. I wonder how many noticed the metaphor to what is happening to libraries in general?
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To be fair, it’s not like DC doesn’t have public libraries. Also, the original DC Carnegie building sits on some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
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Not the one in Mount Pleasant!
Different countries obviously have very different founding myths about this.
Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.
Nice shout-out. Truly, the world owes railroad magnate Andrew Carnegie a huge debt.
My own hometown (only 15,000 people) had a Carnegie library.
Andrew Carnegie owed the world a huge debt.
Exactly, dead tree books aren't a solution. I mean if a tiny library at my home or town burns up, there would be serious loss of a unique collection with that too!
IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this case Microsoft), there'd still be a manuscript to fork and re-process into book again through an alternate channel. That's my 2 cents.
Personally I find that I just don't get as much out of digital books. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but the closest I can describe is that it feels like I'm looking through a window at a book rather than actually viewing it directly.
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Have no idea why you're downvoted. Books are quite fragile and very difficult to duplicate in book form.
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IDK, 15m of early 20th century dollars for a sound like it could finance buying a lot of books.
> Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here,
I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse.
It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia
Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.
> Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices
Are you sure you've seen DMCA abuse on YouTube? They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure, and almost all complaints I've seen about abuse on Google have been due to that system.
> They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure
That system is such a scourge. No fair use, no distinction between different countrie's legislations, no appeal.
If you make an educational video, no matter how much effort and skill you put in, if you use some musical excerpt or images or scene, it doesn't matter how short it is, or what you're using it for. Your video will be "claimed", and any add revenue you used to have will go to whoever owns the rights to the excerpt. And if you didn't enable ads, the claim will do it anyway.
I wonder what happens when you use 2 excerpts from different major copyright holders…
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Eh, Google's system is born out of a compromise because of the DMCA. Simply put most large publishers dropped their suits and do not file actual complaints with this compromise.
Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.
The whole point of his comment is that the government is what's enabling that kind of lobbying. There's no such thing as a government that is free of private interests pushing for their preferred policies; the closest you can even get to that is strict constitutional limits, restricting what the government can do in the first place. (And even those seem to have failed quite badly in the case of copyright or patent protection, which were originally supposed to be "limited in time" and to promote knowledge and the useful arts - none of which is the case today!)
My library has the option of "checking out" ebooks. They will "purchase" them and have a set "number of copies". I put all of these things in quotes as I'm not sure how its handled for essentially a digital file vs a physical paper book, or how the author/publisher/etc makes money in this deal.
Penguin Random House charges libraries $35, $45, or $55 for each "copy" and then expires them after two years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Hachette also expires their e-books after 2 years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... See also the drama about "Controlled Digital Lending", where a library makes their own scan of a book and lends it out.
That's plain naked rentseeking. I'd get them charging a nominal sum to prevent abuse (like "why I'd buy any books if I can just check out everything for free in the library" - virtually nobody ever says that but maybe they're afraid of it) but $55 is way over the cost of an average book, let alone ebook, and expiring them makes zero sense since popular book stops bringing substantial income quite soon so they literally lose nothing allowing the library to keep it.
Wow that is repulsively scummy.
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Having seen some of the contracts -- there are publishers which sell them with a lifetime measured in reads, and others with a lifetime measured in years (and you buy N copies), and a very very few who don't impose a lifetime.
In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.
The idea is that a physical book has a lifetime before it has to be discarded due to wear, so they want the e-book to be the same. I think that's dumb, and don't feel we need to be tied to the durability of paper books, but that's their justification.
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I think mine also allows you to watch movies online, but I never tried it yet.
I think most libraries offering this are doing it through Hoopla. It works fine though you can only play them in a browser and the video quality is roughly at the level of a DVD.
As I understand it, the number of copies is enforced using DRM (which isn’t the best, of course), but the books are free and there’s usually a pretty wide selection.
I'm super, super grateful to our public libraries and the amazing resources they offer— coming from an immigrant farm-laboring family in a tiny (<1000 population) town, our equally tiny library introduced me to computers in the 8th grade (which later got me in trouble for, um, "exploring" our police and school district's networks) thanks in part to a grant they received by the Gates Foundation. I wouldn't have the career I do now, or honestly even been aware of it, if it were not in part due to it.
My local library now is much, much more well endowed with resources from different media types and they're even getting a makerspace soon! I thankfully can afford my own books and toys to play with, but as a father of 2 young boys, I make sure we utilize the library often and even volunteer our time teaching the occasional workshop on new media/tech/design.
I think they're woefully underutilized and I'd be worried that they'd start to go away.
Project Gutenberg is really a modern day equivalent and is one of the better things created on the internet.
I prefer Library Genesis.
Don't forget sci-hub, too.
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THANK YOU! I lost the name of the web site and was having trouble Google-ing the right phrase to find it again. Much appreciated.
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PG has the advantage of being legal.
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For what it is worth I love my local libraries.
I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.
I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.
I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.
Once a month I bring back all the books I got.
And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.
From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.
On the flip side, people all over my neighborhood have put considerable effort into building awesome tiny sharing libraries. Perhaps without the issue being "solved" we'd see even more and varied institutions formulate organically.
So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?
Tiny Libraries are cool but they aren’t even a pale shadow of traditional public libraries that come with commitments to levels of service and access to people of all backgrounds and locations and incomes.
Sure, but in a community where there wasn't an actual public library, I do believe one would inevitably come into existence as the effort of the community, in the same way those tiny libraries do. "People have spare books; community centres exist; so why not put the spare books in the community centre?"
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Wouldn't the small sharing libraries also be at risk under a system with more power held by copyright owners?
No copies are being made, so no. Keep in mind we're talking about physical books, not filesharing.
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Insofar as copyright owners are empowered by the system currently in place (e.g. DMCA) a system with less authoritarian power available to lobbyists may have the exact opposite effect. Same caveats as above apply.
Do you use these libraries? I see them around from time to time, but I've never been tempted to borrow from them. Usually there's nothing more than a random selection of popular novels from the last 20 years.
I wasn't really trying to make a qualitative point, but to that notion I have had considerable trouble in some public libraries as well.
The first memory I have of a library was in school where I wanted desperately to find out how one "writes" software. After lots of probably very annoying begging, I was given a book on either COBOL or FORTRAN from the ~60s. It wasn't super helpful.
The last book I borrowed (Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum on UX design, which I found compelling) was lost after I dropped it in the bin. I was fined $104, and upon contacting them was given customer service rivaling comcast's. Until I pay that ridiculous cost I can't borrow from any city library, and can't get a card anywhere else that I'm not a resident. So for me, the tiny libraries are already way over a very low bar.
I've had some generally good experiences, too, but nothing that's convinced me that the current model is either the only way or the best way.
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the only reason they exist now is because they're grandfathered in. We could have the exact same thing, just digitally, but due to copyright that will never happen.
The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no reason they can't cut or reduce their physical presence and publish their entire library online. Except instead of knowledge, it's now "content", and instead of readers, its now "consumers". Everything is a "market" that needs to be "captured" and libraries are a threat to this corporate model. From a purely informational standpoint, pages-bound-with-glue are just low-tech forms of hardware dongles.
There are a lot of things that wouldn't exist if they weren't grandfathered in.
I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines.
And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today.
And then there are guns.
At the risk of sounding too conservative for HN, this 'grandfathering' is an invaluable means of insulating societal infrastructure from the tyranny of cultural value shift.
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general disdain for most things run by any type of government here
Why should that have anything to do with it? Government-run libraries are a much more recent development - the first libraries in America were set up by the churches, and later became private entities such as Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...
Just because it's good for some people or used to be worthwhile doesn't mean it's good overall that it exists. If you could buy a cheap license for time limited access to DRMd copy of any book, to me, that would be better than a library because it would be cheaper in principle, as long as copyright owners cooperated and it didn't suffer from monopolies and things, and far more books would be available to far more people without the physical constraints.
My library does that but the range is quite small and I guess they're paid for by the local government instead of the readers, which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't private goods be paid for by the users and public goods paid for by government? It's good that information is freely available to the public, but we now have the internet for most of that, and physical books would always be more expensive than ebooks so the financial burden on individuals would have been higher long ago when public libraries started before even paperbacks existed.
Idk, some hackerspaces are like public libraries. cf noisebridge which is open to the public at no charge and has a library:
http://noisebridge.net
The thing you can find a book that is hundreds of years old that is still readable, how long would data in a hard drive last in the wild?
And who is to say you can even open the file? Not many ebooks are being written in plain text or pdf after all. Usually it's something clunky and proprietary with DRM.
Yes, this. I'm surprised they're not labeled as scary "socialism" and replaced with public-private "partnerships" with commercial ads, membership fees and overpriced concessions. It seems the public commonwealth is being cannibalized for vampiric exploitation at every opportunity. You can't sit down anywhere, because it's been replaced with a sterile multi-use zoned commercial areas with a Code of Conduct* without buying something. Remember water fountains and public parks? Not anymore.
*I ate at this food truck in Austin that was in a mixed-use commercial area that had a 12 term CoC. These places typically have control-freak power-trip mall (wannabe) cops.
Today libraries would be decried as socialist, when in fact they are a public good. The idea of a public good is malleable, so perhaps the way for left leaning policy makers to advance certain types of legislation is through re-branding as a public good.