Amateur Megalomania

The Copyright and New Media Law

In an earlier post, I had expressed concerns about the handling of printed copyright media in our nation’s library, raising my long held belief that the system strips the right of the writer to expect payment for his work. A friend of mine posted a link to the argument on a library list server, and the responses were understandably opposed to my argument.

But buried in there was a reference to something I didn’t know about. Admittedly, I didn’t spend a lot of time researching practices in other countries, but it seems this issue has been raised before. The issue has been addressed with something called the PLR (Public Lending Rights).

An excerpt from this Canadian publication.

Canada’s crusade for PLR took many decades to achieve, from its earliest introduction in 1949 by the Canadian Authors’ Association (which proved to be well ahead of its time) to its eventual successful re-introduction in the early 1970s by The Writers’ Union of Canada, which had been founded precisely to fight for benefits like better publishing contracts and Public Lending Right. Its most immediate and vocal opponents were the country’s librarians, who were primarily anxious about the safety of their book-buying budgets. It’s a credit to Canada’s librarians and writers that everybody eventually calmed down and the work of designing a made-for-Canada PLR scheme began in earnest, with more and more librarians steadily coming onboard as the years passed.

And later on in the same report.

Authors have argued that, in freely lending their books to the public without any kind of financial compensation, their property rights are being unfairly or, even illegally infringed upon by Canadian libraries. Publishers have claimed the same right, while librarians have always strongly opposed the recognition of such a right which does not exist in the Canadian Statutes.

Again, I’m not surprised that librarians would be opposed.

PLR is a scheme whereby authors are compensated for public consumption of their work. It seems to exist in most of the Commonwealth nations, as well as Germany and others. A PLR system does NOT exist in the United States, and while I haven’t had time yet to research it in full, I suspect to find no significant efforts to institute one here.

So it seems my objections, ridiculed by many, have been long standing and established, at least to the extent that several nations have taken action to address the problem. May I engage in a moment of self congratulation?

I’ll post more as I find the time to look deeper into this.

Filed under: Copyright