> Do we move forward by analogy to create those communities of sharing, or do

> we run up against hard boundaries past which that ideal won't be allowed to go? 

Isn’t that a false choice, though? Libraries have always done both: we’ve always created communities of sharing, and there have always been hard boundaries beyond which we couldn’t go in doing so.

I think what makes things so different now is the ambiguity around the word “share.” During the print era, sharing a book pretty much always meant the same thing: it meant the library bought a copy of a document, and different people took turns using that copy. The legal doctrine that made that okay was clear and unambiguous. In the digital/networked era, what we mean when we say “share” can mean any number of things, including unrestricted copying and redistribution—which, obviously, raises all kinds of legal and ethical issues. CDL seems to be an attempt to use technology to create a system in which the First Sale doctrine can apply the way it did during the print era, and IA is defending it by appealing to fair use principles. It will be really, really interesting to see how SDNY sees it.

But no matter what the outcome of this suit, we’ll still be in a situation where libraries broker and facilitate access to content on behalf of a large group of people, within legal and ethical boundaries that define the ways in which we can do that.

[log in to unmask]