monkeys fall out

Books Brian Edwards, New Zealand author, believes that libraries, that's public libraries (and academic libraries I suppose) are promoting the left of copyrighted material with authors losing due payment for their work because one copy could be read by hundreds and hundreds of people. In other words, Sefton Park Library is like a real world Pirate Bay for books:

"But there’s a principle here: when one person buys a book and lends it to another person to read, they effectively become an accessory to theft. Their generous act amounts to little more than stealing the author’s work. When a public library buys a book and lends it to thousands of other people to read, it’s grand theft copyright and really no different from illegally downloading music or movies or copying CDs or DVDs on your computer."

Of course his argument breaks down because he studiously fails to mention academia as though there's any real difference. You can't say public libraries are evil without properly addressing all of the other varieties. Perhaps its because Edwards is a journalist who throughout his career will have needed to use some kind of library for research. Would he be pleased if every time he needed to look at a document he had to pay for the privilege? No. Which is clearly why he's trying to make the distinction.

You can enjoy a couple of dozen other people picking holes in his argument and Edwards's resulting righteous indignation in the comments to his post and where I found it at The Inquisitor. Don't get me wrong, I love it when writers rattle cages to see if the monkeys fall out and to an extent he isn't wrong. People do borrow books from libraries and read them for free rather than pick them up in libraries. Authors will lose some revenue as a result. But do we want to live in a world were people are deterred from reading because sometimes they can't afford to do it?