
You can't defend public libraries and oppose file-sharing - moviuro
https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/
======
librvf
_Yes, it is different. It differs in efficiency._

Not an irrelevant difference. A public library is funded and maintained by the
same community that uses it. The manual processes required to consume the
material are a natural check in the process and the result is a mild shift in
equilibrium. Communities benefit and libraries are legitimate customers, so
publishers are at least still getting paid.

File sharing's equilibrium is nowhere near as balanced as the library. And
equilibrium matters. It's the difference between a healthy and stable
ecosystem and a rodent plague
([https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk](https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk)).

~~~
dublinben
Do you think that peer to peer filesharing communities are not also funded and
maintained by the community that uses it? I contend that this is exactly the
case.

There must also be an original legitimate customer of the work being shared,
so the publisher is still getting paid.

The difference does only lie in efficiency. In a world of ever-increasing
efficiency, why do we shackle libraries to 20th Century levels of service?

~~~
krapp
Libraries legitimately own _every copy_ they distribute. If they lend 10
copies of a book, 10 copies were paid for. They don't pay for one then Xerox 9
more.

File sharing exists explicitly to deny publishers payment for anything they
distribute. 10,000 copies results in no compensation beyond the original.

------
mikeash
The article assumes that if you defend public libraries, you must defend them
for the same reason the author defends them, and that particular reason
happens to fit well with file sharing.

But there are other reasons to defend public libraries than simply the fact
that they disseminate knowledge and this is worth carving out an exception in
copyright. I think most people would defend public libraries on the basis of
the doctrine of first sale: after an author sells a copy of a work, they can't
control how you use it. As long as you're not making unauthorized _copies_ of
it, you can lend it out or do whatever else you like with it.

~~~
moviuro
How is reading a book different of watching a movie? When I'm done, I can
return the book/delete the movie.

The only difference is outlined in the article: the movie can be watched
simultaneously by different people who got it, whilst I'm the only one with
the book in my hands.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Confused: you can 'return' the movie AND keep a copy, which you distribute
widely thus ruining any chance of the creator profiting by their work.

Can't do that with the physical book. Not for free anyway.

~~~
shripadk
You can scan the book and distribute digital copies of it for free. The only
investment is time required to scan the books.

~~~
e28eta
You can also steal a book from the library under your jacket, and then you
don't have to return it. It doesn't mean it's legal or right.

~~~
shripadk
I was just countering his point on copying physical books: "Can't do that with
the physical book. Not for free anyway."

Stealing a book doesn't amount to copying the book and returning it.

------
dingaling
The author states:

"You would frequently hear that authors are paid royalties when their books
are borrowed from a library. This claim is not true. "

I'm not sure what he's trying to say. In the UK, public libraries are part of
the PLR scheme in which 1,000 annually-rotated libraries provide their lending
details which are then scaled-up in a linear fashion and the royalties
calculated on that basis.

It does mean that low-volume authors might not receive royalties one year if
their loans were not sampled, but the concept is that they'd receive out-of-
proportion royalties the next year when the sample set rotated.

The only reason a sample was used instead of direct measurement was due to the
volume of data; automation could nowadays calculate per-author royalties on an
all-branches basis.

Source: I summer-jobbed in a library back in the mid-90s and compiled the PLR
statistics for the branch.

[https://www.plr.uk.com/libraryInformation/sampleLibLists.htm](https://www.plr.uk.com/libraryInformation/sampleLibLists.htm)

~~~
commentereleven
He claims that these are not copyright royalties, but rather a cultural grant.

~~~
dingaling
Aha that helps, thank you. He's also wrong there, unfortunately.

[https://www.plrinternational.com/faqs/faqs.htm#legal](https://www.plrinternational.com/faqs/faqs.htm#legal)

~~~
scintill76
"There are no working PLR systems yet in the United States, South America,
Africa or Asia." So the existence of this system in some places doesn't itself
invalidate the argument in places without that system.

------
jeffreyrogers
This isn't really a fair comparison. File-sharing has marginal costs close to
zero, so wide distribution becomes essentially free. Public libraries must
hold an inventory that can only be increased by paying for another copy of the
book, movie, etc.

If public libraries had their own printing presses and loaned out copies they
printed from some master edition this would be a fairer analogy, but in this
case libraries would effectively be stealing from the publishers and authors,
as file sharing sites are currently.

~~~
dogma1138
Well to be fair the costs are irrelevant, you can claim the big issue is that
Libraries actually getting their copies for free and in many countries
actually charge (even if minute) fees for people to be able to borrow books
making them more akin to Netflix than to TorrentFreak.

But the setup cost is really not the issue especially considering that you can
setup a new digital library at little to no costs these days and as a very
large portion of the books (I would say probably 99%>) that you would be able
to get a hold on in a public library got digital copies than setting up the
same exact collection isn't that hard.

Another argument to be made is actually the "value" of the information shared
in libraries vs file sharing sites, while you can argue that even the poorest
made film or the buggiest game has some educational value you would be hard
pressed to claim that file sharing sites help propagate knowledge on a level
that is even in the same order of magnitude as public libraries used too.

Yes some people might download a book, even a school book or some documentary
(which today they are pretty worthless sadly) but majority of downloads are TV
shows, Movies, Porn and Games which sorry claiming that they are akin to a
public library is just blasphemous.

~~~
belorn
Movies, TV shows, games and music is all part of our common culture. The
question is then if children who partakes in culture do better than those who
are deprived, and what impact it has on their life.

One thing I am sure of is that there is no single artist in the world that
isn't also a consumer of art. You don't become a great musician if you don't
have access and listen to other peoples music, and you don't become a great
movie director without watching other peoples movies. Same should be true for
games, painting, and writing. If we removed all non-educational book from
public libraries we should see a direct decrease in the number of writers that
exist.

~~~
dogma1138
Yes, but that's not the original argument for the support of libraries. If you
want to claim that people benefit from downloading the latest game of thrones
episode or the latest call of duty in the same way their great grand parents
and great great grand parents did when libraries when public libraries were
being established during the mid 19th century you'll find it to be quite an
uphill battle.

Also since none of your examples actually stated a clear violation of
copyright law on what ground do you even attempt to make an argument?
Spielberg went to the movies last time I've checked.

------
moultano
Of course you can, but it requires accepting that copyright is an imperfect
practical compromise between opposing goals, and not some platonic ideal.

------
Tomte
Efficiency isn't everything, by the way.

Effectiveness is another important metric. Can filesharing give me access to
all those millions of books that have never been digitized?

No? So I guess libraries can do something that filesharing can't.

I won't go so far to claim that filesharing could never give me a perfect
replica of Bembo's "De Aetna". But it doesn't today.

See? I can defend libraries on another criterion than efficiency.

~~~
saint_fiasco
But that criterion can also be used to defend file sharing.

Many people are worried that copyrights last so long that some old movies that
are good but not longer profitable are not being preserved anywhere except by
pirates.

------
joe5150
Any useful comparison of libraries to file sharing ends at believing both are
just places where Stuff Is and you can go and get it for free. It's to our
collective benefit that libraries are much more than that.

------
theoapps
I agree, making information as widely available and accessible as possible can
only be a net positive for a society in the long run. It would be interesting
if business models shifted more towards crowdfunding.

------
superdude
What an absurd title and statement. Of course you can defend public libraries
and oppose file sharing! It costs almost nothing to share digital files, while
libraries have very real physical location costs and costs to maintain
physical books (and maybe even to purchase digital books?). Not to mention the
local community benefits a physical library offers.

~~~
jbob2000
You didn't read the article. His point is that the purpose of a library is
knowledge-sharing (and to your point, the expense of a library is for the
greater good of knowledge-sharing). Since the purpose of file-sharing is
knowledge-sharing, then they are similar in nature.

~~~
nwatson
A "real-world" library's goal of knowledge-sharing is balanced with the need
of the content-provider to make some money to support distribution and
authoring of books. The public pays taxes to fund libraries so that people who
can't afford to buy (or choose to not buy) particular books can still access
them. There's a natural brake on distribution in that each copy can be checked
out to at most one library patron at a time.

The most direct analogy carried over to the electronic space is e-book lending
systems with built-in DRM. These systems usually keep the N-number-of-copies-
available-for-loan restriction in place. Unlimited file-sharing does not at
all resemble the balance between the-good-of-public-knowledge vs the-right-
and-need-for-publishers-and-authors-to-make-money that a physical library
model provides.

~~~
jbob2000
I would argue that the "need for publishers and authors to make money" is
where the issue lies, not in the means of knowledge transfer (libraries vs.
file sharing).

Just like how governments subsidize libraries, so too should they subsidize
file sharing.

------
joesmo
People who value money over educating the public will support copyright, while
people who value public education and free access to culture and media do not.
It's really that simple. No argument's going to convince one side to hop on to
the other. Unfortunately (for this matter), it's not 1850 anymore and the
amount of people in power that value public education and culture (in the US
at least) is virtually asymptotical to zero, thus the current laws we see
demonizing copying.

Ironically, a lot of the people behind those laws, especially big tech
companies, benefit greatly from a technically educated and skilled public that
would not exist, or at least be much smaller, without piracy. Is it wrong for
me to pirate a few thousand dollars worth of software, educate myself, and be
able to contribute many million dollars worth of work to society? Copyright
supporters certainly think so, but I'd argue that the benefits to the public
far outweigh what the copyright owners wrongfully claim as "losses" but is
really nothing more than wishful imagination of profits they would not have
made anyway.

Of course, arguments for public benefits these days are unfashionable. The
zeitgeist is to fight for the copyright holders to the end, despite the fact
that most of the copyright holders are not actually the creators, not actually
the people who would or would not benefit from copyright law. The fact that,
for example, most artists on Spotify make about the same amount whether
they're on the service or not is a whole other discussion and reason to end or
modify copyright itself, but it certainly kills the argument that there would
be no creative works if artists didn't get paid. That's actually the case
currently and it's quite ironic to see the handful of extremely rich artists
pretend to fight for the guy who made two dollars all last year while his
record label and music service raked in millions. Copyright law mostly
benefits scumbags who've never created anything worth perusing in their lives.

------
virmundi
There is a false equivalence. They both "share" a piece of content. The
difference is that a) the library is bereft of an item while checked out and
b) the library, or some benefactor, paid for the item. This means that the
content creator got paid for their content

When a person shares a file, they are not bereft anything besides some
bandwidth for the transfer. They can consume the media as another copies or
streams from them. The same is not true for a library or by extension private
media. Only one person can consume.

If they wanted a true equivalence, you can do it. Putting aside the fact that
the DMCA says that private parties cannot backup DRMed material, I can do what
ever I want with my material (right of first sale). I can read a book. I can
throw it at the dog. I can burn it. I can lend it to a friend. The same is
true if I converted the physical medium into a lockable digital resource.

In this scenario, I have file copied into a server. The server is my only
means of accessing the content. The server is instructed to create a global
lock on the media when consumed. So within my house, only one party can
consume the material at a time. If I made this server public, I would be
effectively allowing anyone to "borrow" my content. Once the content was
watched, the consumer would lose access to the content and the global lock
would be freed.

If I wanted to listen to Abba's Dancing Queen while some other person did, I
would be blocked. "Sorry, that content is locked".

Now I, as a content owner, am bereft of my material. The only way to get
access to it is to forcibly take the global lock from the person, thus ending
their streaming.

So we can take this simple server concept and apply a Popcorn Time veneer
across it. People make their LEGALLY purchased content available. The nodes in
this distributed system file lock. It's searchable. It's free. It's perfectly
legal (except for the DRM bit, but that's another issue).

------
gayprogrammer
Many comments here compare the cost of a physical library to near-zero cost of
the internet, but that's not a fair comparison itself.

The cost of a physical library is physical, not informational. The article
describes a situation where information sharing was challenged by the industry
that has a physical monopoly on media (books). They were not granted
informational monopoly, they only have monopoly on physical manufacturing.

Thus the absence of physical cost (or difference in efficiency) of sharing
information does not change the concept of a library.

~~~
librvf
It's a one-dimensional argument that relies heavily on rhetoric. It's hard to
draw any practical conclusions from such an argument. The point is mostly just
to persuade you that file-sharing is good and anyone who opposes file-sharing
is dumb.

~~~
gayprogrammer
The only practical conclusion I can draw about file-sharing is that it does
not look like it will stop. Information sharing is only going to increase--
that's what the internet was designed for. Publishers will probably need to
focus on physical means of revenue that the internet can not inherently
provide.

------
smacktoward
Falkvinge's argument boils down to this:

 _So we can observe that public libraries and file-sharing differ in scale and
efficiency – and only in scale and efficiency..._

 _That has to be a first in the public debate: Are those people actually
standing up and demanding that public services, such as public libraries, be
made less efficient, to have less output for the tax money spent on it?_

I have to assume he's playing naïve here to make his point, because otherwise
this argument is pretty silly.

First, "differs only in scale" is a ridiculous way to try and erase the
distinctions between any two things. A snowflake and an avalanche also differ
only in scale; that doesn't mean that if you like a white Christmas you'd love
being buried alive on K2. Scale is the difference between a refreshing drink
and drowning.

Second, no public service operates under a mandate of "maximum efficiency at
any cost"; they operate under legal and regulatory frameworks designed to
balance various different public interests. Highways have speed limits and
traffic laws and restrictions on driving while intoxicated, along with
uniformed officers to enforce these. They all reduce the theoretical
efficiency of the highway as a conveyor of traffic, but they're there because
there are other interests the highway needs to serve as well, like getting as
few of the people who use it as possible killed. Different jurisdictions have
different sets of laws that balance these interests in different ways, but
they all try to balance them somehow.

Libraries are the same way. Knowledge-sharing is an important public interest
that they serve, but the public has other interests as well. It has an
interest in authors continuing to want to write books, for instance, and
publishers continuing to want to publish them. So libraries strike a balance;
they pay for their books, they lend them for a limited time, and so forth.
These restrictions allow for wide public access without unduly cramping the
market demand for books.

E-books make the old balance libraries set more complicated, since it's harder
to _lend_ them. Without some kind of DRM, you're not really lending them at
all, you're _giving free copies away,_ which is something very different than
what libraries do with physical books. DRM can address that, but it makes
using the library's resources more difficult and annoying. So the old balance
needs to be recalibrated to find a way to meet all the interests the old one
did. But replacing the world's libraries with the Pirate Bay would be blowing
up that balance completely, not recalibrating it.

------
dikaiosune
I'm curious to what extent this comparison holds true for the content these
two systems share. My (under informed) understanding is that piracy mostly
traffics in movies, TV shows, video games, anime, adult content _ahem_ , etc.
While libraries loan some of those things, they mostly loan books.

If PirateBay was mostly promoting the sharing of fiction and nonfiction, I
might be inclined to buy this argument for an educated populace. But I don't
think that HBO's Game of Thrones or The Seventh Son really provide the same
level of education as many (if not most) books a library would lend.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Books are also widely copied and shared... as audio files or eBook files.

------
kethinov
A related sentiment:
[http://freepubliclibrary.org](http://freepubliclibrary.org)

