Authors Guild Attacks Libraries For Lending Digital Books | Techdirt

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-02-02

Summary:

"It's been a few years since we last had to write about the Authors Guild -- a group that ostensibly represents authors' interests, but really acts more like a front group for publishers' interests (often in opposition to the actual interests of authors). As you may recall, the Authors Guild spent tons of the money authors gave it for dues on suing libraries. Specifically it sued and lost against Hathitrust (a collection of libraries which were scanning books to make a searchable index), and then had the same result with Google and its book scanning project. In both cases, the courts deemed such scanning and indexing as fair use -- a transformative use of the work.

Apparently, unable to comprehend that maybe it shouldn't attack libraries, the Authors Guild is at it again, threatening the Internet Archive and other libraries for daring to start a carefully designed program to lend out copies of some of their scanned works. The system, called Controlled Digital Lending was put together by a bunch of libraries and the Internet Archive to lay out a system that they believe is clearly covered by fair use, by which digital scans of certain books could be made available on loan like any other library book. The whole setup of the Controlled Digital Lending system is carefully laid out and designed to mimic traditional library lending...."

Link:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190128/17205941481/authors-guild-attacks-libraries-lending-digital-books.shtml

From feeds:

Fair Use Tracker » Techdirt. Stories filed under "fair use"
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.authors_guild oa.books oa.publishers oa.hathi oa.digitization oa.copyright oa.ia oa.cdl

Date tagged:

02/02/2019, 10:56

Date published:

02/02/2019, 05:56