Quote:
Originally Posted by bevdeforges
It looks like most of the folks in this discussion are of the North American persuasion. Here in France, various sorts of blank media (blank tapes, CDs and DVDs) are assessed a tax that is supposed to go toward compensating the artists who produce the various works assumed to be downloaded to the blank media.
Frankly, it's a royal PITA to those of us who buy large quantities of blank media to use for strictly IT purposes (copying business files or making restore disks for customers) but I'm sure they could use some variation of the idea to assess a "royalty" to library copies of e-books to cover the right to loan out the books. Or, that idea of simply assessing the libraries based on which books they have available for loan at the first of the year would work, too. (Though that would also encourage the libraries to get rid of e-books that weren't circulating, which might not be such a good thing.)
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We have the same levy for blank media in Canada and I agree it's a PITA. The difference that I see with the library system though is that it's not an arbitrary decision about how to split up the booty because we already have real measurements so the correct author would get compensated.
The model that I'm thinking of is that the government would make a condition of copyright that an e-book version is provided to the government for library loans. In other words it's a condition of being able to sell the book in the country. There wouldn't be a concern with circulation or availability of e-books.
The compensation to the author would be raised from the symbolic couple of pennies we have today to levels equivalent to what they would make off a sale. The money being paid to companies like Overdrive would be directed to the authors instead. You wouldn't need DRM because it would be equivalent to a sale for the author.
The libraries could still limit the number of concurrent loans of new releases but it would be to meet their budget rather then an arbitrary licensing agreement. There wouldn't be any restrictions on loaning public domain books so the library is still providing the service. The public would have access to the same library content whether you lived on a farm, in a small village or in a large city.
In theory I don't see why this couldn't work and I'm guessing that people would get more service for their tax dollars but I obviously don't have access to the budget numbers. In Canada it will probably never get implemented because the libraries are funded through the municipal taxes and something like this would have to be done at the national level.