Have you checked out an ebook or audiobook from the library lately? Since COVID, record numbers of readers have. And that comes at a huge cost to your public library, because they can’t own those digital materials, only “lease” them from most publishers.https://t.co/Uo5bPsLQM7
— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) September 13, 2021
Daniel A. Gross, at the New Yorker, explains “Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do”:
Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.e., “digital content.” In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as “heart-wrenching stories” from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: “The responsible thing to do—and the best way to serve our patrons right now—is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19.” The library added, “We will continue to offer access to e-books.”
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
There are a handful of popular e-book venders, including Bibliotheca, Hoopla, Axis 360, and the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America. But OverDrive is the largest. It is the company behind the popular app Libby, which, as the Apple App Store puts it, “lets you log in to your local library to access ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines, all for the reasonable price of free.” The vast majority of OverDrive’s earnings come from markups on the digital content that it licenses to libraries and schools, which is to say that these earnings come largely from American taxes. As libraries and schools have transitioned to e-books, the company has skyrocketed in value. Rakuten, the maker of the Kobo e-reader, bought OverDrive for more than four hundred million dollars, in 2015. Last year, it sold the company to K.K.R., the private-equity firm made famous by the 1989 book “Barbarians at the Gate.” The details of the sale were not made public, but Rakuten reported a profit of “about $365.6 million.”
In the first days of the lockdown, the N.Y.P.L. experienced a spike in downloads, which lengthened the wait times for popular books. In response, it limited readers to three checkouts and three waitlist requests at a time, and it shifted almost all of its multimillion-dollar acquisitions budget to digital content. By the end of March, seventy-four per cent of U.S. libraries were reporting that they had expanded their digital offerings in response to coronavirus-related library closures. During a recent interview over Zoom (another digital service that proliferated during the pandemic), Potash recalled that OverDrive quickly redirected about a hundred employees, who would normally have been at trade shows, “to help support and fortify the increase in demand in digital.” He recalled a fellow-executive telling him, “E-books aren’t just ‘a thing’ now—they’re our only thing.”…
… In 2011, HarperCollins introduced a new lending model that was capped at twenty-six checkouts, after which a library would need to purchase the book again. Publishers soon introduced other variations, from two-year licenses to copies that multiple readers could use at one time, which boosted their revenue and allowed libraries to buy different kinds of books in different ways. For a classic work, which readers were likely to check out steadily for years to come, a library might purchase a handful of expensive perpetual licenses. With a flashy best-seller, which could be expected to lose steam over time, the library might buy a large number of cheaper licenses that would expire relatively quickly. During nationwide racial-justice protests in the summer of 2020, the N.Y.P.L. licensed books about Black liberation under a pay-per-use model, which gave all library users access to the books without any waiting list; such licenses are too expensive to be used for an entire collection, but they can accommodate surges in demand. “At the time of its launch, the twenty-six-circulation model was a lightning rod,” Josh Marwell, the president of sales at HarperCollins, told me. “But, over time, the feedback we have gotten from librarians is that our model is fair and works well with their mission to provide library patrons with the books they want to read.”…
Libraries now pay OverDrive and its peers for a wide range of digital services, from negotiating prices with publishers to managing an increasingly complex system of digital rights. During our video call, Potash showed me OverDrive’s e-book marketplace for librarians, which can sort titles by price, popularity, release date, language, topic, license type, and more. About fifty librarians work for OverDrive, Potash said, and “each week they curate the best ways each community can maximize their taxpayers’ dollar.” The company offers rotating discounts and generates statistics that public libraries can use to project their future budgets. When I noted that OverDrive’s portal looked a bit like Amazon.com, Potash didn’t respond. Later, he said, with a touch of pride, “This is like coming into the front door of Costco.”…
To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N.Y.P.L. sent me its January, 2021, figures for “A Promised Land,” the memoir by Barack Obama that had been published a few months earlier by Penguin Random House. At that point, the library system had purchased three hundred and ten perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought six hundred and thirty-nine one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these digital rights cost about as much as three thousand copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about eighteen dollars per copy. As of August, 2021, the library has spent less than ten thousand dollars on two hundred and twenty-six copies of the hardcover edition, which has a list price of forty-five dollars but sells for $23.23 on Amazon. A few thousand people had checked out digital copies in the book’s first three months, and thousands more were on the waiting list. (Several librarians told me that they monitor hold requests, including for books that have not yet been released, to decide how many licenses to acquire.)
The high prices of e-book rights could become untenable for libraries in the long run, according to several librarians and advocates I spoke to—libraries, venders, and publishers will probably need to negotiate a new way forward. “It’s not a good system,” Inouye said. “There needs to be some kind of change in the law, to reinstate public rights that we have for analog materials.” Maria Bustillos, a founding editor of the publishing coöperative Brick House, argued recently in The Nation that libraries should pay just once for each copy of an e-book. “The point of a library is to preserve, and in order to preserve, a library must own,” Bustillos wrote. When I asked Potash about libraries and their growing digital budgets, he argued that “digital will always be better value,” but he acknowledged that, if current trends continue, “Yes, there is a challenge.”…
Don’t know enough about the topic to have an opinion, but here’s a suggestion from the Internet Archive:
4/ Library coalition leader @LibraryFutures says there is a better way forward. It’s released a new paper on #ControlledDigitalLending outlining #libraries‘ right to own & lend digital materials.
This matters to every library user:https://t.co/bLk8Hb5aM6#empoweringlibraries— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) September 13, 2021
Baud
E-books are great. I hope they find a sustainable model for libraries.
I also prefer the original overdrive app over Libby.
Math Guy
I love sitting in my study with a glass of wine, surrounded by my e-books.
MattF
I think public libraries should be offering access to ‘standard’ academic e-references, like the OED and perhaps JSTOR— in fact, my local library offers the OED as do many others, e.g., the NYPL. I wouldn’t object to paying a fee for that level of service.
ETA: Perhaps I should note that my own e-library has over 200 items, including a number of publicly available PDFs. And yes, I’m something of a packrat.
WaterGirl
@MattF: If you could describe what you are saying in English, I might just agree with you!
Scout211
I volunteered at our local county library and e-books that are borrowed through the library are definitely misunderstood for library patrons. They often would come in angry at us because they couldn’t get a new release from Overdrive right now.
Our county system belongs to a group of smaller libraries in Northern California that share the cost of the titles that are available to patrons through overdrive and other e-book services. It keeps the costs down a bit for the libraries but makes e-books much harder to get for patrons. All of the e-book titles available to the patrons of all the libraries belonging to that coalition have to compete for the one or two copies that are available. So the wait list is very long for new releases, sometimes up to a year
The patrons had imagined that e-books were millions of digital books floating out there in the ether and all they had to do was log in and download one. They assumed that the supply was unlimited, like the supply of Kindle books—just free, because this was the Library.
When they realized the cost to the library for just one or two copies shared with a large group of libraries, they reluctantly added their name to the wait list for a library hard copy. The new releases were 1week loans so their wait list was a few weeks versus many, many months for the “free” e-book.
Yes, e-books through the library are convenient, but not not free. Thank you for highlighting this.
MattF
@WaterGirl: Didn’t realize I was being obscure. OED is the Oxford English Dictionary, a project of legendary scholarship. It aspires to record the detailed meanings and the first recorded uses of every English word. Been going forward for over 150 years. JSTOR offers access to a very wide selection of academic and non-academic publications.
Scout211
@Scout211:
correction:
not not freenot freeMath Guy
College students can rent e-texts for marginally less than the cost of a print version. I’m sure this is highly profitable to the publisher, but I find it frustrating that the students renting e-books (or renting print versions) do not have that text on hand as a useful reference when they take advanced coursework.
Maybe I’m stuck in an outdated mode of thinking and working?
Scout211
@Math Guy:
My husband retired from teaching at private university that got rid of mostly all of their books in the large university library about 5 years ago. They replaced the stacks with hang-out areas for accessing digital media and socializing. The retired profs were scandalized. But it seems to have worked for the new generation of university students.
WaterGirl
@MattF: Okay, this time I only needed to look up JSTOR. Progress! :-)
Math Guy
@Scout211: Many of our journals and periodicals are now e-subscriptions, a move forced on us by increasing costs for print versions and decreasing state support for higher education. I have adapted out of necessity, but I do miss just browsing the shelves; it is, I believe, a mode of thinking.
I hope your husband is enjoying his retirement.
prostratedragon
Thanks for posting on this important topic. I’d figured the libraries must have some kind of rental license, because of having to wait for a book, but good to see it explained so clearly.
Citizen_X
@Math Guy: There’s a whole ideology around “get rid of physical things, they can all be virtual or digital now.” But I don’t trust it so much. It seems it always leads to privatization and restriction of access, and lots of more obscure books, movies, albums etc becoming less available.
OzarkHillbilly
It’s a brave new world, one I’ll be happy to exit when the time comes.
Jeffery
Was aware of the 26 book limit for lending ebooks. It should be raised much higher for libraries.
I have read lots of library ebooks. I usually select the available now filter to find something immediately. If I want to read something specific I know it may take a few weeks or months to receive a notification it is available.
Bard the Grim
I’d be interested to hear about how this affects authors, and what they think of it. Has Covid/rise of e-lending been a boon for them, or a ripoff?
Kirk Spencer
@Math Guy:
Who kept textbooks past the end of the semester?
My memory (I’m old) is that we didn’t keep textbooks back in the day unless we couldn’t sell them back or we were told we needed the book for another required class.
Most of us back then didn’t keep a library in our dorm room of anything but the texts for that semester.
Well, not till graduate school, and even then only some books were kept.
lurker
@WaterGirl:
Thought he should have written it in American was potentially the joke. However, him writing about the nipple (NYPL) would be scandalous regardless…
; – )
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Bard the Grim: As I understand it, in the US, authors get nothing from library loans of physical books other than whatever royalty they earn from the purchase price of the book. I don’t know how that transfers to ebooks or audio books but my best guess is it’s the same. Others may know better than I do.
In the EU, the author gets a tiny payment for every library loan.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kirk Spencer: Textbook publishers ask an author for a new edition every three years or so to get around the used book market.
Emma from Miami
This is my bailiwick as I just recently retired after what feels like a lifetime (first professional job 1985) of being an academic librarian.
Part of the reason why academic libraries were happy to embrace the e-book is that library budgets remained static or crashed (depending on the institution) during the 1990s as prices were going up, both for hardcover books and for professional journals. One of my favorite examples was a medical journal subscription that went from $4,000 to $12,000 in a single year. Universities believed the e-book and e-journal provided more access to expensive materials without having to spend moneys in libraries that would be needed for glamour sports and business departments. Librarians saw the caltrops down the road but, from experience, University administrations didn’t and don’t care. Mostly, they assumed that students would somehow find access since “the Internet was free” or that the library “would manage.” Well, libraries did but they’ve been trying to walk through the minefield since then.
Sure Lurkalot
I use Overdrive to borrow ebooks from the Denver Public Library and then use Kindle to read. There’s usually a wait for books I’d like to read and it’s uncanny how if I waitlist 2 or 3, they become available at the same time. I’d say half of the books I look for they don’t have period.
I wasn’t aware of the behind the scene business of borrowing ebooks from the library so thanks AL. Something tells me KKR will not improve things.
Kirk Spencer
@Bard the Grim: “It depends” is the best answer.
The big four traditional publishing houses were late to the e-book table and until forced have treated it as a minor supplement (same for audiobook).
The big “independent publishing” movement that started 15 or so years ago built from e-book out. That’s put them at the forefront, with their problem being library purchasing process intended to wisely spend limited dollars using tools that ignore their works.
Of course with the supply chain disruptions it’s getting even more interesting – I posted this in an earlier thread but I really think it’s useful for the authors and bibliophiles. Kristin Kathryn Rusch on how covid vs supply chain is affecting authors.
FelonyGovt
Fascinating post, AL. I’m a frequent and enthusiastic user of the LA County Public Library system, but have not been inside a physical library since the pandemic. I never realized that my ebook borrowing habit was costing my library so much money. :(
Math Guy
@Kirk Spencer: In STEM fields when you take a course that is a prerequisite for advanced courses it is helpful to hang on to those textbooks for those occasions when the prof would say something along the lines of “Of course you all remember the classification theorem for non-Noetherian hodospheres that you studied back in Intro to Obfuscation 101.”
Matt McIrvin
With old classic titles that are in the public domain, you might be better off getting them from Project Gutenberg– they will typically have reasonable editions in several formats (including Kindle) that you can download for free and keep forever.
schrodingers_cat
@Math Guy: FWIW I agree with you. I have all my textbooks of all the classes I have taken and I go back and refer to them.
debbie
What comes around goes around, I guess. Back in the day, publishers and authors (and their agents) grumbled about only getting paid once for books that were read by many people.
J.
@Bard the Grim: Another author here. Many smaller and even larger (in terms of book sales) authors and publishers use Ingram to distribute physical and digital books. In many cases, it’s the only way to get books into bookstores and libraries. Ingram, which is controlled by a Republican family in TN, takes a huge chunk of change for distributing books, giving authors only a tiny piece of the action. And they screw bookstores and libraries too. And those publishers that still distribute books themselves also are charging customers (bookstores and libraries) a lot for ebooks because they are so easy to rip off, and the publishers are probably worried about losing money. But something’s gotta give. (I only make money from my ebooks sold on Amazon, and I don’t make that much.)
eclare
@Kirk Spencer: When I was in college we sold the textbooks at the end of the semester and used that money to buy booze.
I am amazed when I run into people who still have college textbooks.
Anyway
Interesting post. I had no idea.
As a fiction junkie, I am a frequent user of my local public library. Though I have a Kindle I borrow the dead tree version and was a regular user of their curbside pickup service. They opened the building to the public 2 months (?) ago.
Library books are the only curbside pickup service I have used in the last 18+ months :-)
MazeDancer
Big Libby user. Would be even bigger if my Library system had deeper selection.
Just sign up for something and it shows up eventually. Not going to complain about when. It’s free. Enormously convenient.
debbie
@MazeDancer:
My only complaint is that the borrowing time for ebooks is 3 weeks, while it’s 4 weeks for paper books.
Anoniminous
E-books are one Carrington Event from non-existence.
JaneE
@Math Guy: I graduated college in ’66, and half of my book collection is textbooks and other books bought during my college years. I have lost at least one, and others I have multiple copies of. Yes, I was too lazy to dig last years out of the boxes stored at my parent’s home in the attic. Every once in a great while I dig out one to reread, if only to see just how far the scholarship has advanced since then. More often than not the same subjects are still being argued, at least by some. I am thinking specifically of the origin of the proto-Indo Europeans, although I think we are up to proto-proto by now. Not too surprisingly, it is still in the same general area it always was, only now they are arguing more locality.
Scout211
@debbie:
For all the Libraries in my area, paperbacks and hardbacks are 3 week loans, except for 1 week loans for new releases (for both) in my local Library. 4 week loans must be your local Library’s policy.
Another Scott
Agreed – interesting topic.
I’m reminded of Borland software’s old license agreement – You “buy” a copy then treat it like a physical book. You can put it on as many computers as you like, as long as only one installation of the software is used at a time. You can’t copy it for sale and Borland retains all publication-like rights. But it doesn’t stop working, there are no annual fees, and they won’t show up with the FBI to make you delete it.
Naively, perhaps, I think eBooks should work the same way. Library buys 10 seats, they can loan out 10 copies at a time, it never expires, no fuss, no muss. Just like a paper copy. Nothing actually prevents someone from cutting off the binding of a real book, running it through a scanner, and printing their own copies for sale. It’s not that hard to do any more – not that much harder than copying a PDF and printing it. But most people don’t do it because it’s not worth the trouble, in addition to being illegal.
If publishers make their eBooks too onerous or too expensive, then people will eventually work around them just as scientists and funding agencies are increasingly working around high fees from journal publishers. Publishers really shouldn’t want to piss off enough people to have Congress have even more reasons to revisit copyright, trademark, and patent rules.
Dean Baker working paper – Is intellectual property the root of all evil?
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Scout211:
I’ll stop with the whining then! ?
sdhays
@Another Scott: I (naively!) assumed this is the way ebooks worked now – that libraries could allow users to borrow their ebooks as long as they used a certified platform (like Overdrive) which guaranteed ebooks were checked out the same as physical books. I just didn’t believe that libraries would be willing to spend on a different model.
It seems foolish now – of course the middlemen are milking taxpayers dry.
Another Scott
@Kirk Spencer: Some of us hated to give up our books. I just, finally, got rid of some old physics books going back to my first year of college last weekend. (snif!)
A guy I knew in grad school wrote in big letters “NEVER FOR SALE” on all of his books. Saved his bacon when someone stole them from his school office and he went to the local used book megamart and said – “Those are my books – see that?”
Cheers,
Scott.
Scout211
@sdhays:
Yes, it seems like Libraries should be able to buy multiple cheap Kindle books, for example, and loan them to patrons like they do for hard copies.
But did you know that Amazon doesn’t allow their e-books to be sold to libraries?
StringOnAStick
@Math Guy: I’m glad I’m not the only one who loves just poking around the stacks to see what catches my eye. I admit that I miss card catalogues. Decades ago when I was a hydrogeologist, digging through card catalogues was one way to find tangential information sources that I’m sure I can’t get from electronic catalogues. Like a paper about a totally different topic but it has a map in it that is useful.
Another Scott
@StringOnAStick: + eleventy billion.
There’s something about physical paper magazines and books that make it easy to browse. I still haven’t gotten the hang of that in most electronic versions. I guess Twitter and YouTube tries to encourage that, and maybe some of the science news sites, but there is just a firehose of information out there…
Speaking of card catalogs… When I was a tyke in the ’60s, my mom worked for an office supply distributor (that also distributed things like bicycles and all kinds of other stuff). She would take us in to work with her on the weekends to save money on a sitter. One of her jobs was updating what seemed to be a database made up of racks and racks of metal cabinets with thin drawers. She would slide out a drawer then flip up a big card to update it by hand – it wasn’t just a cabinet of index cards (as I remember it).
It’s amazing how things have changed, in so many ways…
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@debbie:
You can reader faster because you don’t have to turn pages.
Steeplejack
@StringOnAStick:
I feel the same way about bookstores. I miss poking around in them and finding interesting things not only on the “just released” tables but on the shelves. It’s hard to do that on Amazon when the “algorithm” peppers you with stuff that it “thinks” you will like, or five other things exactly like the thing you are already looking at.
MomSense
I miss going to our local library. They have a reading room with a stone fireplace and really comfortable leather couches and chairs. On a snowy day, it’s the best place.
Baud
Sorry to go OT, but LGM has a very interesting post up on rural politics, in case anyone is interested.
Scout211
@MomSense:
Things are changing in our local libraries. All the e-books keep so many former patrons out of the buildings now. Our Public Libraries are having a difficult time bringing the patrons in now, and the number of patrons in the building justifies the county or city allocating funds for the Libraries. Our Library started (as many are doing now) maker spaces for kids with hands-on learning and fun activities. The activities bring kids and parents in and shows the local government that the Library is being used.
For a period of time we had to count how many bodies were in the building and which activity they were taking part in. The Director had to present to the Board of Supervisors why she needed funds to sustain the Library when, for example, the Sheriff’s Department needed two more Deputies.
So quiet reading in a comfy chair is kind of a thing of the past in most libraries now. They are now full of kids and activities and lots of noises that used to be met with Library staff expressing mean faces and making loud shushes. (Or maybe that’s my memory from my own childhood). LOL
debbie
@Steeplejack:
I wish. I’m the slowest reader I know.
NotMax
One thing have found regarding e-books which rankles is how rife with misspellings they are.
Speaking personally, each time one is encountered it immediately yanks me out of that special place wherein the book and I are communing.
Tehanu
@FelonyGovt:
Me neither, and I’m stopping right now. I’m a former librarian and this is a disgrace. If I have to schlep over to the local branch and put in an order and wait for a hard copy, fine, there are lots of other books I can read in the meantime.
Frank Wilhoit
I have been using and enjoying ebooks, but they are a central part of The Great Forgetting.
billcinsd
@Kirk Spencer: I have every textbook, I ever purchased. I have always thought selling knowledge I might need in the future was not very smart
billcinsd
@Scout211:We see this as an opportunity to invent a new approach to help expand readership and serve library patrons, while at the same time safeguarding author interests, including income and royalties
I think the only author royalties Amazon cares about are those from Bezos’ autobiography
billcinsd
I assume this is another consequence of the very poorly done DMCA
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Books are written by authors, who have bills to pay, and they (most of them) like to live inside and eat food.
The Internet Archive did not acquit itself during the pandemic[1], which is annoying because it provided ammunition against itself, risking what should be their primary focus of archiving the publicly accessible internet.
[1] Why authors are so angry about the Internet Archive’s Emergency Library – Authors are suffering under the pandemic economy, too. They say the Emergency Library will make things worse. (Constance Grady, Apr 2, 2020)
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: oh no! I have finally found something to disagree with that Baud has said! I happily abandoned OverDrive for Libby, as OverDrive needed an Adobe Acrobat account to work.
Kayla Rudbek
@Kirk Spencer: I am still annoyed that I lost my electricity and magnetism textbook from undergrad when I moved to Northern Virginia.
Kayla Rudbek
@Math Guy: yes, or when you’re later on in your STEM career, it’s useful to remind yourself of what the state of the art was back in the day…
narya
I use the points I get from my credit card to buy ebooks. That way the author gets their cut, and I don’t have to deal with not even being able to tell whether the library has an e-version of the book(s) I want. I do miss roaming the stacks, but I do NOT miss schlepping 15 books on the el. I don’t have a car, so that was a pain (and it is not in me to limit the number of books). I love libraries, so I am a bit torn about not using them–and Chicago Public Library will send any book you want to any branch, which is awesome–but I also love being able to haul a bunch of books around on an iPad. I originally got it for long trips–again, no car, so it reduced the weight I was hauling
ETA: I also don’t buy physical books much any more; I don’t want more Stuff.
Adam L Silverman
The only model worse than this, which is an outright scam, is for academic journals. Most, though not all, university faculty and graduate students are required to do research and to publish it. The companies that own the journals then sell both hard copies of this work, for which they did not pay a thing to those who produced it, back to the universities. They also sell digital versions back to the university as well through a variety of interfaces like JSTOR. So the people who generate the research – the articles – are not paid by the people that profit from the research product all while those profiting from it do so by charging the universities where these people work through the nose for the privilege of having their own faculty and graduate students work available in their libraries.
Mr. Longform
@Adam L Silverman:
I just want to clarify that, while your comments about the academic journal scam are right on the money, JSTOR is a relatively benign player in that arena- a nonprofit and a fair vendor compared to the real villains (like Elsevier)
different-church-lady
I’ve never read an e-book and I hope I die before I’m forced to.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: I see an article like this and wonder if I’m the only person in the world who still borrows physical books from the library and simply can’t be bothered with e-books.
With the exception of Project Gutenberg texts, which I read on my laptop.
grubert
@Another Scott:
I’ve been decrying the overreaching “intellectual property” regime since 1995.. it just keeps getting worse and people are told it’s supposed to be good.
Of course creators need to get compensated.. but IP is more about lining the pockets of middle-men.
Thanks for the link..