Category Libraries
The Internet Archive’s Copyright Emergency
Sometime last year, I was chatting about digital first sale and e-lending with a highly respected copyright lawyer, someone who is deeply knowledgeable about those issues. We were talking about the library community’s longstanding attempts to get a lending right for digital files in law. We noted that those folks have apparently given up on […]
Libraries Take E-Book Lending Fight into Antitrust Territory
The U.S. library community has gotten involved in the investigation that Congress recently opened into possible anticompetitive behavior by Big Tech. The American Library Association, the advocacy group for public and academic libraries, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week complaining of unfair behavior from Amazon as well as Big Five trade […]
Libraries: Be Careful What You Wish For
Last week we discussed the new “cost-per-circulation” (CPC) model for public libraries — in which they can make e-books available to patrons and pay the publisher per “loan” instead of paying fixed fees to “acquire” titles as if they were print books (the “pretend it’s print” or PIP model). HarperCollins has just become the first […]
Hoopla Digital and HarperCollins Disrupt Library E-Lending
An announcement this week by hoopla digital and HarperCollins augurs big changes in the ways that public libraries make e-books available. It sets the stage for realignment of the relationships between publishers and libraries, and it could have longer-term ripple effects on the entire e-book market. For more than a decade, public libraries have been […]
Readium LCP Set to Launch
The 2017 EPUB Summit in Brussels this past week was the venue for the beta launch and first live demos of the Readium LCP DRM technology for EPUB-formatted e-books. I’ve discussed aspects of the genesis and design of Readium LCP elsewhere: here is a summary that I presented at last year’s EPUB Summit in Bordeaux. […]
Dutch Public Libraries and the “One Copy, One User” Rule
I took a little bit of heat from certain members of the library community who were bothered by my analysis last week of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ’s) decision in the case of Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken (Dutch Public Library Association) v. Stichting Leenrecht (Lending Rights Foundation, the Dutch collecting society for royalties from library lending) […]
The ECJ’s Inconclusive Ruling on Library E-Book Lending
We’ve been looking for a while at the question of whether First Sale rights apply to digital files. If you get an e-book or music download, can you resell, lend, or give it away to someone else — as you can with physical products like print books or music CDs? The library community has gotten excited […]
Copyright Office Opens Inquiry on Digital Rights for Libraries
Yesterday the U.S. Copyright Office announced that it is looking for input into revising Section 108 of the copyright law, the section that gives libraries and archives special rights to copy and distribute materials. Although much of Section 108 deals with making physical copies of materials for preservation purposes, some of it is supposed to apply […]
PTO Weighs In on Digital First Sale
A little-known fact about the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is that it advises the executive branch of government (the president and his administration) on copyright issues — just as the US Copyright Office advises Congress on copyright. Although the Copyright Office’s efforts over the past couple of years to overhaul the country’s copyright […]
E-Books: Subscription Services vs. Libraries
Business model flexibility with digital content leads to a blur between the public good and private enterprise.
Copyright and Technology 
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