Why Public Libraries and Copyright Laws are Not Compatible
Manage episode 353208990 series 2983642
I explain in this bonus episode my views on how incompatible simultaneously stating that a public library and copyright laws are a good thing is.
It is socially accepted for public libraries to exist so that in principle everyone has access to any book without paying for it in the moment, but this is not coherent with another belief that society simultaneously holds as unacceptable: downloading the ebook for free infringing the copyright law.
I am not trying to argue against copyright law, I am just pointing my finger at a cognitive dissonance I believe to have found in the general public.
The border between owning a book and not doing so is blurred when you take into account that 99% of the time we spend paying attention to a book is when we read it.
If the objective was to 1maximize the revenue of authors and at the same time promote their books by giving them a showcase in which their work can get known so that we incentivize the production of books while 2making their books accessible for the general population, we would be incredibly lucky if the best tradeoff of these objectives were maximized by what we happened to stumble upon with our social conventions.
There is clearly a diminishment in the amount of sales when someone reads a book from a public library, specially among the people with a lesser taste toward owning a book on a permanent manner, why should we subsidize people who happen to have this taste and not focus instead in the less well off people in our society?
I would love to hear your opinions on the so please do comment them on the youtube video of this episode if you wish so.
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