I'm not a publisher or an author (I'm an SRE, I've never made income from the sale of anything I have copyright from, and I've many times been on the side of fair use as a hobbyist musician) and I'm willing to make that claim. It's as straightforward, IMO, as the claim that not tipping is stealing. Yes, technically, it's merely not giving them money that they expect, it's not taking money they already have. But the practical effect is that it subverts a revenue stream that, for better or worse (definitely worse, in the case of tipping), they rely on, and it was reasonable (legal and socially acceptable) for them to rely on that revenue stream.
I'd like to live in a world where authors didn't rely on copyright law for their living. I'd also like to live in a world where waitstaff didn't rely on tips to make minimum wage, let alone a living wage. I don't.
> I'd also like to live in a world where waitstaff didn't rely on tips to make minimum wage, let alone a living wage. I don't.
You do, mostly. I believe it's just the USA where obligatory "tipping" is a thing. I learnt a bit about the history of tipping from Adam Ruins Everything S01E05 Adam Ruins Restaurants, highly recommended.
(Yes, his style is a lil in-your-face, but the content is excellent, and often shows onscreen the title and author of papers referenced - how many shows do that?!)
But if you don't have tipping, you don't get to freely download the services of the wait staff or eat free food. You have to pay the restaurant.
for this, to have copyright weakened, you'd really need to make sure authors get compensated fairly for the small time their work is under that law. The problem is people want the creative stuff for free essentially
So, here's my question: which part specifically about the arrangement do you take issue with? Are you against libraries in general? Is it specifically the idea of digital lending that you feel is going over the line? Is it the unrestricted digital lending as part of COVID-19 that crosses the line?
This is what I'm unsure of. I feel like most people have used a library at some point in their lives, and most people don't seem to disagree with the concept of a library (at least, they never seem to think they did anything wrong when they visited the library as a four-year-old and read "Pat the Bunny" for free), so I am trying to determine if the qualms are with the particulars of TheArchive's implementation, or if people suddenly change their minds about things when they suddenly have a financial incentive to think otherwise.
From my perspective, the reading experience on TheArchive's lending experience is sufficiently degraded that I am unlikely to choose it over other options. I tried looking up Endymion by Dan Simmons to see if I could check it out and read on my Kobo. Firstly, I can't without a great deal of difficulty, due to the DRM. Secondly, what I check out is not the same designed-for-ebooks format I would get if I actually bought Endymion from the publisher. It's instead an EPUB/MOBI generated from OCR of their page scans, rife with formatting and typographical errors. Yuck. So my only other option is reading the raw image/PDF scans, in the browser. Which I really can't imagine doing for 12 hours unless I truly have no other options.
Which is to say, I don't think the "piracy" claim holds water, because the experience is so much worse than the regular purchase route that I'm not sufficiently dissuaded from buying the book if I can read it on TheArchive instead.
It is the unrestricted digital lending that crosses the line IMO, yes. (And my opinion is very much not firm and I'm open to being convinced in either direction.)
First, authors get revenue from books in libraries. When you read "Pat the Bunny," the library had to actually own a copy - and in particular your local library had to own a copy, meaning thousands and thousands of copies got sold to libraries. For each physical book, only one 4-year-old at a time could read it, so for popular books (e.g., when you turned 14 and had the same summer reading list as everyone in your school district) each library tends to buy many copies.
So, yes, libraries don't implement a strict "each person who wants to read causes the author to get paid" property, but they do provide a meaningful balance between getting paid for writing a popular book and also making books available in a cost-effective way to large numbers of people. Authors get quite a bit more than $0, even if they don't get money from each reader. And I think that's a good place to make the argument that these aren't lost sales - libraries make books available to people who often otherwise wouldn't pay for them and wouldn't read them.
Second, authors know how libraries work. They've been around forever. When you decide "I'm gonna have a career based on writing," you know approximately how the market works. You know that if you write a book that's about as good as this other book, you'll get this much in revenue from purchases by readers, that much from purchases by libraries, etc., and you expect that to be reasonably stable. The Archive is changing the economics suddenly, and at a particularly bad time to have your career's economics change. I know for my part that I'd be upset if some random non-profit said "During this time of crisis, we've found a possibly-legal way to allow companies to not spend money on SREs and we're gonna do it," and I don't think, just because I don't know how that could possibly work, that my livelihood is inherently more worthy of stability than the livelihoods of authors. (And I'd still be upset with the non-profit even if I didn't think it was realistic that my company would go for that option.)
As a consequence, my feelings are a lot different here with regards to works published by someone who makes a living doing something else like being a professor, and happens to write books, than works published by someone who relies on copyright for their living. I'm also okay with, say, Sci-Hub, because while it threatens Elsevier's business model, it doesn't (as far as I know) threaten the livelihood of researchers themselves.
The website for Controlled Digital Lending justifies the practice in two ways (https://controlleddigitallending.org/): one, it preserves the market properties that libraries have previously relied on, and two, it specifically solves the problem of books unavailable in e-book form. I'm fine with both of those, particularly because they both address the question of whether the author/rightsholder needs to consent to this use. (Because it preserves the market properties the impact on an author isn't different, and in the case of abandoned works, the author or published might no longer be around anyway, and unofficial e-books certainly aren't messing with an existing market.) I am also fine with uncontrolled digital lending with the consent of the author - if the arguments you're making about it not affecting the market hold up (and I think they do, to be clear), why not simply invite authors to join on an opt-in basis?
(I suspect I'd even be okay with it if they said, hey authors, you don't have the rights to make e-books of your work, but that's okay, we have this legal workaround we're willing to try. If you want people reading e-books but your publisher isn't cooperating, we'll fight the legal fight alongside you.)
I‘m neither author nor publisher. And, yes, I think that argument is essentially correct. People on the internet like to get hung up on the differences (zero marginal costs etc) but that doesn’t really matter for the core of the argument: if piracy becomes widespread, writing will no longer be a viable vocation, and new books being published will drop dramatically.
For music, people loved to insist musicians should just get by with live shows. Nothing similar exists for authors, so I’m waiting to see if there’s some other cop-out people come up with.
Has any normal human being who is not a publisher or an author actually made this claim?