Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
But the tax payer does and the library tracks your check outs in order to make payments (depending on the terms agreed with the rights holders)
But I'm sure you already know that, which made the library post odd.
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In the US, authors are not paid when their books are checked out from libraries. Also, not every use is checked out--it's considered perfectly reasonable and legitimate to show up at a library and read all day without checking out anything. (Depending on one's choice of reading material, this may be the only way to access it; rarer books and periodicals often can't be checked out at all.) Certainly, many students visit libraries to conduct research involving several books, none of which they check out. No royalty payments are made past the initial sale of the book, regardless of how many people use it.
And while state- and city-managed libraries are funded by taxpayers, private libraries are not--and I know many people who have lending libraries of books. Many teachers have a shelf or two of books they intend to loan to their students. The concept of "library" isn't limited to state-funded institutions.
Libraries are entirely legal. Copying ebooks and handing them to strangers is not. However if the essential *moral* issue is, "someone is reading without paying the author," libraries and p2p sharing have the same ethical problems.