Quote:
Originally Posted by MarjaE
My understanding is that they have physical copies, and until the pandemic, they were loaning 1 digital copy for 1 physical copy.
I know there have been battles around format shifting-- e.g. for accessibility for blind readers. I don't know how these have turned out.
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Your understanding is correct.
But it has long been established in US courts that print books and ebooks are not the same product. The publishers themselves have to acquire the rights to each edition *separately*. Old contracts that don't explicitly name digital rights were found to not cover ebooks, only print.
With that principle in mind, owning a print edition conveys zero rights over digital editions.
(If publishers have to pay the copyright owner separately for the right to distribute digital edition, why wouldn't IA have to also pay separately? Paying for one print copy is not buying the right to distribute ebook copies.) It's obfuscation plain and simple, intended to wave off their law-breaking.
Books are no different from other forms of mecia and owning a VCR tape conveys no rights to distribute DVDs, BluRays, or digital copies. Look at Disk sales that do offer downloads and note they sell versions with and witbout and without is always cheaper. Legal digital isn't free.
They aren't the same product and scanning and ocr'ing a print book is not the same thing as converting a Wordstar file to Word or html. The latter is true format shifting, the former isn't. Rather it's the digital equivalent of making photocopies of a book and distributing those willy nilly, which would never pass legal muster. Neither will the IA lending scheme.