Rent NOT to Own: Solving Copyright, Licensing, & eBook Threats to the Library Mission

Copyright, restrictive licensing, and eBooks are destroying core access, collection development, and preservation activities in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions. Nearly all the major publishers charge libraries higher licensing fees than the consumer prices for the same material, and place strict limitations on how the licensed content can be shared or loaned. And each license does not confer any ownership under copyright’s first sale doctrine – these eBook deals, at best, are temporary rentals. This directly impacts an organization’s ability to serve their communities. As a result, many communities lack meaningful access to books needed for education, research, entertainment, and general learning. And library budgets, often funded by tax dollars, are severely impacted by these excessive licensing fees, and libraries simply cannot loan and preserve these books for their patrons. However, states such as Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Maryland represent a new hopeful front in the eBook licensing problem: state contract and consumer protection laws that protect the library mission to provide open, non-discriminatory, access to works. Join this session for a discussion of these new bills, laws, and litigation and learn how you can help to get your state to harness state law to assert the library mission through “reasonable terms,” recalibrating the very weapon that has been used against libraries for decades: bad licenses.