If The Public Library Was Invented Today, Would The Gov’t Call It Organized Crime And Shut It Down? http://bit.ly/beIS8N
The story is about a website in Bulgaria has people upload book scans and they’re OCR’d to text. That’s probably a copyright violation, except the site is “open to the public” and in Bulgarian law apparently that makes it a library. Although the law isn’t clear on the matter.
But as Mike Masnick writes:
Either way, all of this makes you wonder: if traditional public libraries were just being founded today, how much effort do you think publishers would go through to shut them down by claiming they were illegal and violations of copyright law?
Every innovative business model bought to the incumbents is made so ridiculous that I can believe they’d go after public libraries if they were started now.
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One reply on “If The Public Library Was Invented today…”
A New Zealand author made the claim that libraries were nothing but theft on his website in September 2009… He met with a very harsh response and deleted his post, but the details are documented on his Wikipedia page along with a number links to various rebuttals and discussions of his comments.
I have absolutely no doubt that if the concept of a library was created newly today that the publishing industry would be fighting it with everything they had.