Duke University Libraries Blogs

> There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.

Yes, the difference is the political activism of librarians is institutionalized [0]. You don't view the absence of Jared Taylor's "White Identity", or any similar book, from school libraries, as "suppressing societal critiques", do you? Why, because it's done quietly and tacitly?

It's so funny seeing the same people complaining how every institution is systemically racist or whatever-ist (including math [1,2] - I made sure links are for the US, since apparently that is such a special case that critiques of institutions in even the most closely related countries are completely inapplicable to it), then turn around and claim that "no, this institution that does what I like is beyond politics, driven by pure expertise", even in a field as fuzzy and political as child education.

> The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England.

Thank you for this uselessly reductive interpretation. While yes of course libraries in those other, lesser countries are politicized and in need of correction, libraries in the US are objective and beyond reproach - unless [3] that [4] reproach [5] comes [6] from [7] the [8] left [9,10,11].

When activists lobby to change institutions how I like, this is good and necessary - those institutions are systemically racist,…

I'm not sure of the exact arrangement, but I presume that Yale University's Beinecke Library had them sign a contract in return for the physical access to the book, and that contract put conditions on how many books they were going to create.

Copyright of copies of public domain artworks is odd: the original artwork is not under copyright, but a photo (and possibly a scan?) of the artwork can be. The US legal theory (I don't know about elsewhere) is that a photo of a public domain artwork can itself be an artistic creation, deserving of separate protection.

For example, the photographer might have made an artistic choice to use a diffuse white light without glare, to have the entire frame in focus, and to crop the photo at the edge of the artwork. It is commonly thought that a mechanistic scan fails to meet this ridiculously low threshold of creativity, but this defense has not been well tested in the courts.

So in the absence of a contractual agreement to the contrary, if you make a copy directly from the original, you are likely legal. But if you made a reproduction from a reproduction that could be considered itself an artistic work, you could be infringing on the copyright of that reproduction.

I don't know what the rule would be for making a copy of an authorized "slavish" physical reproduction, but given the low bar for copyright, I'd guess it would still be considered infringement? Anyway, here's an overview of the legal situation in the US:…

What historical classical music demonstrates is that we don't need the lure of becoming independently wealthy from a few hits to motivate talented artists to produce good music. This can be seen in other media as well. Many painters and now-famous authors were poor, never having been appreciated in their lifetimes. Shakespeare wasn't poor, but the money he made wasn't from copyright royalties, and he would have been a copyright infringer[1].

Your other concern (in a subcomment) of the music industry ripping off and selling artists' music in the absence of copyright merely demonstrates that there might need to be copyright protection against commercial resale, and perhaps commercial advertising or rebranding, as opposed to the wide net of current copyright law which criminalizes a significant portion of the population and puts an even larger proportion at risk of lawsuits.

Consumers will buy music even if it's available for free, because even with complete discographies of the most popular modern artists available for free online, those artists are still getting rich despite piracy and despite the music industry's creative accounting.

I think part of the blame for less popular artists not making a decent living lies with the major record labels for focusing public attention so narrowly on the music of a few pop stars, to the exclusion of other music that's less polished and perhaps less catchy, but (arguably) musically superior.

[1]…

It depends on the circumstances and the publisher. In many cases publishers permit authors to host the accepted version of the paper (but not the final version that includes revisions based on reviewer feedback) on their personal/institutional website and to email copies of the paper on an individual basis to people who request them.

For example, see https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright (under "Author Rights") for what Elsevier permits you to do with your own work.

On the other hand, publishers have sometimes filed lawsuits against sites where authors share their papers, e.g. ResearchGate: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06945-6

Elsevier have also sent takedown notices to universities where academics have made the final version available on their institutional websites:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/19/how-one-publisher-is-stopping-academics-from-sharing-their-research/

https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2013/12/elsevier-takedown-notices/

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/elsevier-takedown-notices-a-qa-with-peter-suber/

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/01/28/setting-the-record-straight-about-elsevier/

> There is a theory that says people will be inoculated against fake news, if only they're exposed to enough of it.

Rwanda is possibly the best most recent counterpoint to this argument. Granted that the medium was radio as opposed to internet, and that there are therefore different regulatory mechanisms that can be applied (public airwaves vs TCP/IP) - but it shows the danger of getting people into a warped reality bubble.

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2013/05/10/radio-in-the-rwandan-genocide/