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Originally Posted by wizwor
A few posts back we were talking about ethics. It would seem to me that ethics would require that public libraries limit their offerings to educational and historical materials.
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Where on earth did you get that idea from?
Again, a library is offered as a public good. The library offers resources to the public to which citizens might not otherwise have access.
In some cases, this could result in sales for the publishers; e.g. I read the first book of a series at the library, like the series, and decide to purchase it. On the whole, though, we can safely assume it results in some lost sales. As a result, libraries should pay for the books, and under different conditions than sales to the general public, rather than have all of the costs of this public service foisted on the publishers.
There is no reason to limit this to what you personally deem as "educational." It's up to the society as a whole to decide what materials constitute a public good.
You may not like your taxpayer funds going to help your neighbor read the latest Stephen King novel without buying it, but that's life. Your neighbor might think that the library should not have Gibbon's
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because they believe it is an anti-Christian text.
Individual taxpayers don't get line-item vetoes for how their tax dollars get allocated. If you don't like how your local library is spending its funds, take it up with your community. I'm sure it will make you a very popular person, by the way.
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Originally Posted by wizwor
I can't, for the life of me, reconcile the conflicting images of 'not-for-profit' IP distributers as 1) pirates, and 2) keepers of "the memory of humankind, irreplaceable repositories of documents of human thought and action" -- especially when those wrapped in the latter make all the money.
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Libraries are not granted unlimited rights to distribute copyrighted material. Nor are they acquiring and loaning copyright material without permission. The publishers are well aware of library purchases, and what happens to those materials.
Equating a library to The Pirate Bay is rather absurd, and misses the whole point of a library in the first place.
In the physical realm, they loan copies of material to individuals who are either on the premises, or are members and thus indicate that they are part of the community that is serviced. The "rights management" is inherent in the physical object.
The digital equivalent is still being worked out. Some people, of course, expect complicated social obligations to appear spontaneously and perfectly within five minutes of the creation of a new medium. Some of us realize these types of arrangements take time, and even then won't please all constituencies equally.