Dear colleagues,
This is a small excerpt of the
The Copy/South Dossier : Issues in the Economics, Politics, and Ideology
of Copyright in the Global South.
Written and published by the international Copy/South Research Group:
Alan Story (UK) Colin Darch (South Africa), Debora Halbert (USA) , Adam
Mannan (United Kingdom), Akalemwa Ngenda (Zambia), Beatriz Busaniche
(Argentina), Denise Nicholson (South Africa), Federico Heinz (Argentina),
Jennifer de Beer (South Africa), Norah Mugambi (Kenya), Joost Smiers (The
Netherlands), José Antonio Torres Reyes (Mexico), Juan Publio Triana
Cordoví (Cuba), Lawrence Liang (India ), Maud Stephan (Lebanon), Roberto
Verzola (The Philippines), Ronaldo Lemos (Brazil), Shishir Kumar Jha
(India), Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza (Mexico), Carlos Affonso Pereira de
Souza (Brazil), Papa Toumané Ndiaye (Senegal), Majid Yar (United Kingdom),
and Teresa Hackett (Ireland).
Editors:
Alan Story (UK) Colin Darch (South Africa), Debora Halbert (USA)
Canterbury, Kent, UK: The Copy/South Research Group, 2006, pp. 209, ill.
ISBN (printed edition): 978-0-9553140-1-8 (online downloadable edition):
978-0-9553140-0-1.
Obviously, we, in the Copy/South Research Group, do believe that
librarians do not have a moral duty to police copyright. What do you
think? What is your position? Why?
These and many other issues and questionings are addressed in this dossier
and we invite the international community to read this dossier and engage
in an open and public debate on the many issues and threats the whole
copyright system represents for the world at large and the Global South in
particular.
To obtain a copy of the dossier you can download it here:
<http://www.copysouth.org/>
If you need a printed copy you can e-mail us at: <[log in to unmask]>
and we will send you a copy to your postal address.
May you be interested in engaging in this debate, or be interested in
collaborate with our group, you are welcome to contact us here:
<[log in to unmask]>
Thank you for your attention.
Zapopan Martín Muela-Meza
Public Relationships Coordinator
The Copy/South Research Group
-----------------
This is the excerpt from the Dossier, from pages: 100-9:
4.4 How copyright hinders librarians in providing services to library
users
Copyright and intellectual property protection impinges in different ways
on the practices of librarians as individual professionals, on libraries
as institutions of various kinds (public, commercial, and academic), on
the professional organizations of library workers, and to some extent on
‘librarianship’ as an idealised amalgamation of all of the above. This is
almost always in respect of patrimonial or economic rights, and usually
has little or nothing to do with moral rights, either in law or principle.
To the extent that such protection limits or inhibits them from providing
service to users, some librarians, especially in countries of the South,
have begun to express a not fully articulated uneasiness with the way that
the copyright regime appears to favour the commercial interests of
publishers over a hypothetical ‘right to knowledge’. In this section of
the dossier we will examine the hidden assumption that library collections
harm publishing, the idea that librarians have a moral duty to police
copyright compliance among users, the impact on libraries of multiple
layers of protection for digital content, and whether the librarian’s
first duty is to the library user.
Libraries and Public Lending Right
At least some publishers and booksellers have always believed that the
‘free’ availability of their books in libraries constitutes a threat to
their commercial interests, and is likely to harm sales. Logically enough,
those who hold this belief are willing to use copyright law and any other
available mechanisms (see below) to protect their perceived interests and
to recover what they see as lost revenue, even if this could mean that
libraries might not function as well as they would otherwise do. Two
centuries ago, when the first ‘circulating libraries’ (the precursors of
today’s public libraries) were established, the London bookseller James
Lackington (1746-1815) argued against this perspective, writing that:
When circulating libraries were first opened, the booksellers were much
alarmed, and their rapid increase, added to their fears, had led them to
think that the sale of books would be much diminished by such libraries.
However, Lackington continued, the availability of books in the
circulating libraries actually had the opposite effect:
[…] experience has proved that the sale of books, so far from being
diminished by [libraries], has been greatly promoted, as from those
repositories many thousand families have been cheaply supplied with books,
by which the taste of reading has become much more general, and thousands
of books are purchased every year by such as have first borrowed them at
those libraries, and after reading, approving of them, become purchasers.
It is unclear whether Lackington’s optimistic conclusion was supported by
any empirical evidence at the time, but it is certain that in the two
hundred years since he wrote, publishers, booksellers and librarians have
existed in uneasy symbiosis, at least as far as intellectual property
rights are concerned. This is primarily because their interests sometimes
clash: publishers and booksellers are in the business of selling as many
books as possible in order to make a profit, while librarians are in the
business of meeting the information needs of their users.
In fact, Lackington’s argument has been ignored in modern practice, most
especially and specifically by the introduction in many countries of
Public Lending Right (PLR), which, admittedly, is aimed at helping authors
rather than vendors. It is hard to argue against the proposition that by
introducing what is effectively a low level tax on the borrowing of books
from libraries the state is able to redistribute some revenue to those
authors whose books are actually read. Such a proposition appeals to most
people’s sense of natural justice. Whether the author in question is a
best seller like J. K. Rowling or a struggling Grub Street hack has no
bearing on the issue. Naturally enough, in those mainly developed
countries where writers’ organisations exist, such bodies are noisily in
favour of PLR – it delivers cash to members and shows that the
organisation has actually achieved something concrete in their interests.
The problem, however, is that the principle underlying PLR is both muddled
and also has far-reaching implications. First, the unexamined assumption
is that the existence of public libraries does in fact actually harm book
sales. The counter argument, of course, is that without public (and other)
libraries many published works would scarcely sell a single copy. Like the
argument about music downloading through Napster, it is extraordinarily
difficult to prove the first part of the case either way, since it rests
on the extremely shaky supposition that a book borrowed (or a song
downloaded) is equivalent in some linear way to a book not purchased (or a
CD not bought).
The second assumption underlying the PLR is that second or third or fourth
readers of a book are also in some way depriving an author of sales (the
first borrower is presumably covered by the fact that the library did pay
for the copy), and that the author must therefore be compensated. This is
as shaky a proposition as the other, and for the same reasons. Virtually
any copy of any book ever bought that is worth reading has been read more
than once, and by different people, within a family or among friends or
colleagues, or by buyers of the copy second-hand. The suspicion is that if
it were a practical proposition, some kind of tax would be introduced to
cover this too, by analogy, and this suspicion is supported by experiments
with formats for digital content that would allow access only a defined
number of times (one viewing of a DVD, two readings of a text, three
hearings of a musical piece: if you want to know what rights holders would
like to do in the print environment, look to what they are doing in the
digital one).
This matters, of course, because public libraries in practice support
popular education in both a formal and an informal sense, and the more
expensive they become to run, the more likely they are to introduce access
charges or membership fees (as is already the case in Johannesburg, South
Africa, for instance). At the very least, books that might otherwise have
been acquired are not obtained. Thus, the poorest citizens, those who are
arguably most in need of library services, are excluded or are less able
to satisfy their information needs.
Do Librarians have a Moral Duty to Police Copyright?
Many librarians worry about copyright issues mainly because they are
frightened that either their institutions, or they themselves as
individuals, may be held responsible for copyright infringements by
library users, by aggressive and well-funded RROs or publishers. This fear
has virtually nothing to do with offences against so-called moral rights
(plagiarism, forgery, unauthorised publication) and almost everything to
do with offences against patrimonial rights (photocopying or scanning of
content beyond the limits allowed by fair use, fair dealing or local
custom). Historically, it is a phenomenon of the age of reprography:
before the advent of publicly available user-operated dry photocopying in
the mid-1970s, libraries had little to worry about. However, photocopiers
were followed by computers and the Internet, and now high quality scanners
link the worlds of print and digital content, so that any user smart
enough to push a green button can make a complete copy of anything at all
in some unsupervised corner of the library.
The librarians’ concerns are reflected in official statements by
professional associations, such as the following extract from an IFLA
(International Federation of Library Associations) document published in
August 2000:
Librarians and information professionals recognise, and are committed to
support the needs of their patrons to gain access to copyright works and
the information and ideas they contain. They also respect the needs of
authors and copyright owners to obtain a fair economic return on their
intellectual property. Effective access is essential in achieving
copyright's objectives. IFLA supports balanced copyright law that promotes
the advancement of society as a whole by giving strong and effective
protection for the interests of rights-holders as well as reasonable
access in order to encourage creativity, innovation, research, education
and learning.
IFLA supports the effective enforcement of copyright and recognises that
libraries have a crucial role to play in controlling as well as
facilitating access to the increasing number of local and remote
electronic information resources. Librarians and information professionals
promote respect for copyright and actively defend copyright works against
piracy, unfair use and unauthorised exploitation, in both the print and
the digital environment. Libraries have long acknowledged that they have a
role in informing and educating users about the importance of copyright
law and in encouraging compliance.
The second paragraph of this statement is especially interesting, since it
represents a strong _expression of what we might call the ‘policing role’
position for librarians with regard to copyright and intellectual property
rights. Libraries and librarians are presented as enforcers and
controllers on behalf of the vendors and publishers whose economic
interests are supposedly in play, as active defenders of those interests,
as encouragers of compliance. What is missing is any justification or
argument as to why libraries and librarians should take on such a role,
especially if the law is vague or silent, and especially if the role
requires them to act against the interests of their clients. This is not
to suggest for a moment that librarians should become active violators of
the law, of course, and they should be well enough informed to be able to
advise their users on what is permitted and what is not.
We suggest, in fact, that the librarian’s first duty is to satisfy the
user’s information needs (not necessarily the same as her information
wants), and to do so within the law of the land. This does not imply,
either directly or indirectly, any duty to defend the intellectual
property rights of publishers or authors, who must look to their own
interests in the matter. Indeed, in questions of fair use or fair dealing,
it is clearly in the interests of users that librarians should advocate
and ‘actively defend’ as broad an interpretation of what is permitted as
possible, rather than the narrower one normally favoured around the world
in different jurisdictions by corporate rights holders. In the scale of
such affairs, the duty of ‘librarianship’ is clearly, in our view, to add
weight to the side of the user to attain the famed ‘fair balance’ of
copyright discourse between creators and consumers of information.
Layers of protection of digital content
In libraries in those less developed countries with a modern ICT
infrastructure, such as South Africa, Brazil or India, problems are
increasingly arising from layers of intellectual property protection that
are additional to copyright. These include the terms and conditions of the
access contracts to the vendor’s databases (commonly called licences), as
well as technological devices in both software and hardware, and new laws
that criminalise any kind of circumvention of such devices
(anti-circumvention laws). This problem affects all libraries all over the
world, but the point is that it impacts on developing countries
disproportionately, since they probably do not have funds available to pay
extra licence fees, and may not have the capacity to negotiate better
licence terms or indeed to lobby for better copyright laws.
Access licences, like most contracts, can be assumed to mean exactly what
they say, no more and no less. Thus, access to a database of newspaper
articles or academic journals does not confer upon the library permission
to perform the same set of practices that would be possible with a printed
set of the newspaper or the academic journal. Interlibrary loan may not be
possible, for instance, and the access to the back set may disappear if
the current subscription is discontinued. Indeed, if the back set goes far
enough back, some rules may still be imposed even though the journal is in
the public domain, i.e. out of copyright. In addition, digital formats
change rapidly, and long term duration remains a major concern. The
extreme convenience of digital access for authorised users in the short
term is thus offset by a series of difficulties to which the solutions are
as yet far from clear.
Technological protection and anti-circumvention law add yet another layer
of protection to content and make the provision of library services
difficult. Each database behaves differently, requires the user to learn a
different set of protocols for access, searching and downloading, and
imposes a different set of rules on what behaviours are permitted or
forbidden. Librarians are responding by building portals with federated
searching across multiple databases, and simple URL resolvers to allow
seamless downloading of full text content from searches which produce
metadata result lists. Nevertheless, in some academic libraries, for
example, outside researchers who traditionally have been welcome to use
print collections on payment of a nominal fee, are now formally excluded
from access to all digital resources, mainly because it is too complicated
to work out who might have access to what under which conditions, from the
range of licence contracts.
In sum, attempts to co-opt librarians and information workers in defence
of existing copyright regimes should be resisted, at the very least
because such a role has the potential to clash with their primary duty to
their clients. Second, it is clear that copyright rules often prevent
users from easily or conveniently obtaining what they want or need, in the
form they want, especially in poorer countries. That said, authors in
particular have a legitimate interest in protecting their patrimonial
rights from exploitation by libraries as much as from exploitation by
corporations. The trick, as always, is to find a way of doing things that
allows for free access, while at the same time allowing authors to benefit
from their creative efforts. It is hard to see how the present globalising
copyright regime, given current trends, could support such a happy outcome
even in theory.
How copyright makes libraries less efficient: some examples
a) Academic journals
Most academics publish articles and books in order to enhance their
reputations, persuade their colleagues that their arguments are correct,
and to increase their chances of promotion or of obtaining a better
position elsewhere. It is unusual for an academic to receive any direct
payment or royalties for an article, and the amounts earned from the
majority of academic books are negligible – most are published at a loss
or subsidised.
Traditionally, an academic publishing a journal article is aiming for the
widest dissemination of her ideas possible, and access to the complete
scientific record is widely regarded as being fundamental to scientific
method. That is how the system of distributing off-prints developed, as
well as inter-library loan. Most academics are therefore mainly interested
in so-called ‘moral rights’ (being identified as the author, and not
having the text altered), rather than in a revenue stream. Library
networks and photocopy machines are fundamental in this process.
However, things are changing for the worse. Until the 1960s, academic
journals were published mainly by learned societies. The takeover of
academic journals by commercial publishers in the last half century has
created a new and unsustainable model of scholarly communication.
Commercial publishers charge high prices, and in the digital environment
are able to do what they would like to do in the print environment, namely
restrict the free transmission of information between individuals and
institutions unless payments are made. This has an especially severe
impact on libraries in developing countries, which cannot afford to pay $8
or $10 for a single article offprint.
Copyright and licence rules can thus increasingly be seen as preventing
‘learned men and women’ from writing ‘learned books’, as the scientific
record is privatized rather than socialised.
b) Photocopying and short loan services
A related problem exists at undergraduate level in academic libraries in
developing countries, where home-made course-packs are commonly assembled
by local lecturers for use as textbooks in local courses. Alternatively,
lecturers may place multiple copies of texts in library short loan or
reserve departments for student use. In middle income developing countries
such as South Africa, however, institutions are coming under increasing
pressure from local RRO’s to sign up on ‘blanket licences’ for
library-related photocopying activity, which are calculated at high pro
rata rates and add significantly to the cost of higher education. Thus
academic libraries end up paying fees for photocopies that, if they were
made by individual students one by one, would certainly fall under the
fair dealing or fair use exemptions that developed in the 1970s.
c) Libraries and the Internet
The Internet is a delivery mechanism for texts and information. Some
documents are prepared and posted in formats such as the widely used
proprietary Adobe PDF format or the generic Postscript format, that are
clearly intended for print-out. Others, in HTML, may be transitory for one
reason or another, that is to say, there may be good reason to suppose
that a particular Website may not be permanently available.
However, librarians have learned caution in these matters. It may be
unclear whether an author or publisher who posts a PDF text does in fact
intend to allow a library to print it out and add a paper copy to the
collections, especially when the item is also available through the
conventional book trade. Even ‘ripping’ and storing a Website that is
about to disappear may in fact be illegal. Again, such activities cannot
reasonably be argued to represent lost sales in most cases, especially in
the developing world.
d) Access for the visually impaired
Only five percent of visually impaired people in the developing world have
access to Braille materials. This can be partly explained by the fact that
Braille materials are expensive, but in many jurisdictions copyright
legislation further increases the cost of the materials, since permission
is needed to transcribe copyrighted content into the format. The rights
holder may legally charge a fee, adding to the costs, and perhaps making
it completely unaffordable. He or she may even simply refuse permission. A
library – even a library for the visually impaired – may not legally
undertake such transcriptions without permission and payment. Although the
United States and the United Kingdom have enacted legislation to allow
copies for the visually impaired to be made without obtaining the
permission of a rights holder, this issue remains a major problem in many
countries around the world.
Libraries and copyright restrictions in the South: evidence submitted by
librarians
Here are some examples of how copyright laws impact on public and
university libraries in the South. The state sector is generally much
smaller and less well-funded in countries of the South than that which
exists in the North and, as a result, the imposition of stricter copyright
laws often have an even more chilling effect on the use of and access to
books and other library materials. Book purchasing budgets are also
comparatively more constrained than in the North and the increasingly high
cost of books often bites even harder. (Copyright laws give publishers the
ability to limit access to cheaper alternatives, such as photocopying
books.) In other countries of the South, librarians sometimes act as
“copyright cops” and, because of the precarious financial position of many
such libraries, are excessively worried by potential copyright violations.
1) Negotiating a better deal
Subscriptions to e-journals often do not allow a subscriber to keep copies
of the issue they have paid for; rather, it is the subscription itself
that permits access to the archives. So when you stop your subscription,
there is nothing to show for what was paid for. This creates a dependency
on the provider for many years. As one librarian explains, “when a library
subscribes to a print journal and the subscription is cancelled, the
publisher does not drive up to the library and take away the back issues
in a big truck. This is effectively what happens when a subscription to an
electronic journal expires.”
The vendor licences that many universities are required to use allow the
subscriber to save copies of the article; for each additional copy, you
have to make a separate extra payment. If more than one copy is required,
two different payments have to be made, regardless of whether it is for
the same article. These agreements prohibit even making a photocopy of an
article that one has paid for.
Nevertheless, libraries can work together in consortia to negotiate better
prices and access terms with publishers on a national, regional or sector
basis. As a result, model licences have been adopted by many publishers.
The organisation Electronic Information for Libraries (known eIFL.net)
supports the development of library consortia in developing and transition
countries to gain affordable access to electronic scholarly resources and
research material. eIFL.net will negotiate licences with publishers on a
multi-country basis to leverage highly discounted prices, alternative
business models and fair terms for access and use.
The point about licences is that they can be negotiated. But isolated
libraries in developing countries may lack both the confidence and the
skill to undertake this tough process. The answer is probably two-fold:
statutory compulsory licences and building strong library consortia.
2) Colombia
The Colombian Nobel laureate of literature, Gabriel García Márquez, has
written a book entitled “Memorias de mis putas tristes” (Memories of my
sad whores). The book is published by Random House, Colombia, which is the
publishing division of the German multinational corporation Bertelsmann.
On the title page of the book, the publisher has written that all rights
are reserved and that not a single part of the book can be reproduced by
any means. But Random House has gone much further and stated that the book
should not be lent by any public institution, such as libraries, without
the authorization of the author and without the payment of extra royalties
to the copyright holder, that is, to Random House.
3) Uganda
The National Library of Uganda operates a service called the “Digital Book
Mobile” that attempts to make books available in parts of rural Uganda
where they are seldom found. Several years ago a visit was arranged for
children attending the ‘displaced schools’ of Gulu, Uganda ; the 22
primary schools with more than 300 students are called ‘displaced schools’
because the children have been uprooted from their home villages as a
result of civil war and relocated in Gulu. The two-day event was called
“one of the rare occasions when children who in their existence share a
common daily experience of uncertainty converged in one place to indulge
in reading as a peaceful activity.”
For the first time in their lives, hundreds of titles were made available
for the children’s use; their teachers, who knew that most of the books
were far too expensive for local schools to purchase, asked if it might be
possible for some of them to be reproduced for use in the future in
Gulu-area schools. (Reproduction of whole books is forbidden under
copyright law, even if the books are to be used for non-profit educational
purposes. A report on the Gulu event says that the “most favourite title
for children in upper primary (to take home) was ‘Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll.” It continues that “teachers showed very
keen interest in African Writers series which unfortunately is still under
copyright protection and so could not be reproduced or distributed
electronically without permission.”
4) Francophone West Africa
One continuing colonial ‘relic’ in the countries of ‘French-speaking’ West
Africa is that they still use a ‘droit d’auteur’ copyright system which
privileges the so-called ‘moral rights’ of authors; this system
significantly reduces what are called ‘fair dealing/fair use’ exemptions.
It has been reported that photocopiers at a university library in one such
country were being used for unauthorised copying and that when the
university was having its annual inspection as a university, conducted by
the ‘mother university’ in the United States, this fact was revealed. The
African university was evidently told that this had to be corrected by the
time of the inspection in the following year or it might lose its
accreditation. As a result, a senior university official reportedly had
all of the public photocopiers removed from the library.
5) South Africa
Librarians are restricted from digitising a valuable national collection,
which is rapidly deteriorating and will soon be unreadable, because
individual copyright clearance is necessary for the digitising of each
item. Acquiring such permission is a cumbersome and time-consuming process
… and sometimes unsuccessful. Some rights owners cannot be located or
traced; some simply refuse to give their permission; some want to be paid
high fees or lay down strict conditions on the use of the copyrighted
materials.
6) Ethiopia
A survey in the 1990’s revealed that the library of Addis Ababa University
in Ethiopia was forced to cancel its subscriptions to a total of 1,200
academic journals. (The same survey found that the library at the
University of Nigeria and the University of Yaounde’s Medical Library in
Cameroon were forced to cancel, respectively, 824 and 107 academic
journals.) A 1995 study of this Ethiopian university system revealed that
only 4.2 per cent of the total book titles had been published since 1985
and “consequently the vast majority of books held are old and may be
considered out of date.” One of the largest academic journal publishers,
the Elsevier Group, had a turnover of £4,812m for the financial year ended
31 December 2004, a sum greater than the combined national revenues of
Mauritius, Maldives, Madagascar, Mozambique, Seychelles and Botswana.
-----
end of excerpt, to access the full text of the document Openly Access it
here:
<http://www.copysouth.org>
--
Zapopan Martín Muela-Meza, PhD candidate
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield
211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, S1 4DP
UNITED KINGDOM
zapopanmuela*nospam*gmail.com
http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/groups/lib/people.html
"Tiranos y autocratas han entendido siempre que el alfabetismo, el conocimiento, los libros y los periodicos son un peligro en potencia. Pueden inculcar ideas independientes e incluso de rebelión en las cabezas de sus súbditos."
-- Carl Sagan. El mundo y sus demonios: la ciencia como una luz en la oscuridad. Barcelona: Planeta, 1997, p. 390.
"Tyrants and autocrats have always understood
that literacy, learning, books and newspapers
are potentially dangerous. They can put independent
and even rebelious ideas to the heads of their subjects."
-- Sagan, Carl (1997). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle
in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books, p. 362
__________________________________________________
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