Why does Hollywood have an issue with the Treaty to facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities?

Carrie Russell’s blogs are reliably insightful and fun to read.

Our most wonky of posts this week (month?) - do you have what it takes? Check out Jonathan Band’s legal primer on the DMCA and unlocking mobile devices on our blog.

What might this mean for our consideration of ebooks? Even though music and books are different in some aspects, they would both fall under what the report refers to as an “experience good” so I believe we can (at least cautiously) extrapolate the findings of this report to ebooks. A perennial issue in conversations with the Big Six is the displacement of sales due to library lending. At times, it even seems that the Big Six view library patrons as ebook pirates, so let us then embrace this study’s findings, which show a lack of sales displacement. In fact, libraries are much more similar to the legal music streaming services discussed in the report—and those streaming services stimulated sales.

Also - this blog post is one instance in which the comments are actually interesting rather than groan-inducing, so be sure to check them out if you’re into this subject.

Will libraries that offer online access to the Internet be implicated?  No.

When our director of the Program on Public Access to Information, Carrie Russell says librarians need to know something, I tend to take her at her word.

arlpolicynotes:

An exciting new resource developed by the Video at Risk team, this new report draws on the expertise of working video librarians, together with copyright lawyers Bob Clarida and Melissa Brown, to provide guidance on some of the thorniest questions surrounding application of Section 108 to decrepit video formats.

As is noted at the very beginning, this guidance is grounded in the belief that Section 108 is a supplement to the rights available under fair use, and that where 108 by its terms seems to fall short, Section 107 fair use will very likely apply to protect legitimate library activities. For more information on preservation under a fair use rationale, see Principle Three of the #librarianscode.

Are you following arlpolicynotes? You should be! See above for just one example demonstrating why.