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#1 | |
Professor of Law
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Maryland Ebook Licensing Law Ruled Unconstitutional
From Rueters (emphasis added):
Maryland ebook licensing law is unconstitutional, U.S. court rules Quote:
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#2 |
monkey on the fringe
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I agree with the ruling because it unfairly distributes works without permission from the authors and publishers. On the other hand, they only have themselves to blame when their works are pirated because they restrict access or place onerous conditions on said access.
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#3 |
the rook, bossing Never.
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Copyright is about having 100% control of copying, thus selling. There is zero obligation on the rights holder to make it available at all, or in particular formats.
Copyright does need reformed, because an ebook is trivial now to also sell and distribute as the paper book production involves electronic files. Audio books are not trivial and a publisher might not have the rights. Like TV or cinema or a stage play it's a differnent think altogether to ebooks and paper books. It's up to rights holders how to sell or licence media of any kind to a Library, not up to a country, or state or library. The Archive Org and Amazon are little better than a pirate on their loans as they mostly don't buy a library copy. Libraries ought to pay a small royalty per loan as well as buy the copies at a library price set by the publisher. Certainly the repeated extending of copyright and DRM and not having works in print via POD when a run expires and not having ebooks is stupid. Decent Audiobooks are an additional cost to produce and distribute. Shouldn't be conflated with ebooks. |
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#4 | |
Gentleman and scholar
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#5 | ||
o saeclum infacetum
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Only themselves to blame seems a harsh judgment on a rights holder merely exercising those rights. I also have a sneaking suspicion that rights holders may have a better handle on maximizing profit/revenue/market share/whatever than the guy in the bleachers. Not that they can’t or don’t get it spectacularly wrong at times, but eliminating piracy entirely would probably cost much more than tolerating a certain level. |
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#6 | |
Gentleman and scholar
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You can still easily download free MP3s illegally. But not many people do it. Because it is a whole lot easier to use Pandora/Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music or if you want to 'own' it, you just buy the MP3 for about a buck and download a DRM free copy from Amazon that you know is high quality. Last edited by ZodWallop; 06-20-2022 at 12:42 PM. |
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#7 | |
Wizard
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#8 | ||
Gentleman and scholar
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Not sure how you get that.
Argument: Quote:
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Napster made it less onerous to get digital music. The industry overcame piracy by copying Napster and charging what enough people considered a reasonable price (thanks to much arm twisting by Apple and Amazon) to where it was just easier and better to do things legally. So the music industry looked at what the pirates were up to and made improvements on their end to complete. The publishing industry has in fact NOT followed that example (thanks to collusion by Apple and the biggest publishers). I'm not defending pirates. But 'stealers gonna steal' will never fix the problem of piracy. Last edited by ZodWallop; 06-20-2022 at 03:55 PM. |
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#9 |
Wizard
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I confess my brain somehow read her argument as something else. Today is just one of those days, for example I know it’s Monday but my brain keeps insisting it’s Thursday. No idea why as nothing has changed which would throw off my sense of days.
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#10 |
Wizard
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It is really no longer necessary to steal music. Most of my music and even entire albums I can download straight from YouTube and most of it was put there by the record companies! I guess they decided if they can't beat them, they might as well join them.
The other thing is that more and more people are streaming music for free or a small monthly fee. I get Amazon Music as a prime member. Thanks to a Roku stick I'm able to stream something like 2 million songs through my stereo system. That works for me. As for ebooks, there are gazillions of them out there. Some are free, some are reasonably priced. I will only buy a publisher novel if they drop it down to a reasonable price, but I still have plenty to read, and I am adding more all the time. Last edited by cfrizz; 06-20-2022 at 05:55 PM. |
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#11 |
Grand Sorcerer
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Lately, I ‘m finding almost everything I want to read at search.overdrive.com, so refusal to license to libraries is much less of an issue than it used to be, at least to someone who doesn’t read self-published books.
The bigger part of the Maryland law is the requirement to license eBooks to libraries under “reasonable” terms. My first concern is that I don’t understand what is meant by reasonable. Is charging libraries double reasonable? I’m guessing yes. Is changing thirty times more reasonable? I’m guessing no. I was going to post that the Maryland law should only apply to the University of Maryland Press, or similar, but there seems to be no such publisher. |
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#12 |
Wizard
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University Press of Maryland, though they certainly don’t seem to be very prolific in what they have to offer.
As to pricing well if the publisher finds the library doesn’t buy at a given price, the price would likely get reduced. I say likely because I feel that libraries need publishers more than publishers need libraries. I assume we all remember when Macmillan changed their model, which I believe is still their current model now, to one which the libraries objected rather vocally. If I’m right and Macmillan hasn’t changed it then it certainly lends weight to which entity gets the bigger benefit from the other. Last edited by MGlitch; 06-20-2022 at 06:01 PM. |
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#13 |
Grand Sorcerer
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In democracies, you can’t stop a library, or an individual you don’t like, from buying a paper copy.
So if an organization you’d rather not have your book — say, a library, or a harsh critic, or an organization that wants to create a braille version for free distribution to the visually impaired, wants your book, I think you should be required to sell it to them. My problem with the Maryland law is vagueness, and that having different rules in small jurisdictions makes it too complicated for publishers. Ideally, there should be international copyright rules. If somebody wants to stop all library access to an eBook sold to individuals, I don’t think international, or regional, laws should respect that. And, at least for the visually impaired, licensing terms should be quite liberal. |
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#14 | |
Wizard
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Quote:
Also, libraries buy from publishers, it's not terribly difficult for publishers to seriously diminish or eliminate a libraries ability to buy their books. |
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#15 | ||
Grand Sorcerer
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Quote:
As for books, I think I can just trot out the classic freedom to read in support of democracy mantra. It may be that there are a few countries so affluent that few people need public libraries for extended exposure to the widest range of viewpoints, but most of the world is not like that. As for the eBook role here, eReader prices haven't gone down as fast as I thought they would, so that they might become a preferred reading tool for lower imcome people worldwide. Bit it will come as eInks patents expire. Quote:
Thus the issue. |
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