Walled Culture has already written about the two–pronged attack by the copyright industry against the Internet Archive, which was founded by Brewster Kahle, whose Kahle/Austin Foundation supports this blog. The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried …
The “middle ground” is for publishers to back the fuck off and let libraries do their goddamn jobs.
Why is that position in the middle? Because the extreme position is that the publishers have broken the social contract – which was for Congress to grant them the privilege of a temporary monopoly in exchange for enriching the Public Domain in the long run – and thus no longer deserve to have copyrights at all.
Digital is a completely different paradigm. If an online library has unlimited copies of a book, why would anyone buy it? New books won’t be written is no one pays for them.