To read more about Controlled Digital Lending, please see this White Paper by David R. Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney available at https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper

You may also wish to listen to a previous episode of Copyright Chat, where I hosted Mike Furlough as he discussed the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service https://www.library.illinois.edu/scp/podcast/mike-furlough-explains-the-hathitrust-emergency-temporary-access-service/

 

 

 

 

 

Hello listeners, and welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. In keeping with the themes of previous episodes during COVID-19, I am doing a solo produced episode, with just myself, Sara Benson, discussing a current, and necessary copyright topic.

So for today's episode, I actually took to Twitter to ask you, the public, what you wanted to hear about the most. And the two most pressing issues that arose were Controlled Digital Lending, and not far behind, E-Reserves in libraries in the time of COVID-19. So today, I am going to address the first issue, which came up with the most votes in my poll on Twitter: Controlled Digital Lending.

Now I did not come up with the term Controlled Digital Lending. In fact, my colleagues Kyle Courtney and David Hansen wrote a white paper all about Controlled Digital Lending, which I'm linking to from this episode. And based on their understanding of it, and their explanations in the white paper and my own understanding of it, I'm going to explain it to you. And of course, I take no credit for their white paper, of course, and any misunderstanding that I tell you in this podcast episode are my own, but I think I have a pretty good grasp on what they're arguing and what libraries are operating under when they are engaging in Controlled Digital Lending in the way that, for instance, the Emergency Access Library from HathiTrust is engaging in it. And so, without further ado, let me dive into Controlled Digital Lending from my own understanding.

So first of all, under the copyright act, we have a right of first sale under section 109 of the act. So that's Volume 17 of United States Code, Section 109. And under the right of first sale, anyone can sell, give away, do whatever they wish, with a book or other item that they purchase in physical format from a publisher or an author. And so when I publish a book, let's say I'm publishing a current book from the American Library Association, when the ALA sells my book to a reader, the reader then owns that particular copy of the book. And so the reader can lend that book out to friends, the reader could sell that book on Amazon, could put it on their front yard in a little free library, they could sell it in a garage sale, etcetera, etcetera. They own that particular copy of the book, and they have extinguished ownership right of the publisher upon the sale of the book. So the publisher can no longer garner any kind of compensation from lending of the book or the sale of the book, right? So when you sell in your garage sale, you don't need to offer any remuneration to the author or the publisher at that point. And so, that is what most library lending is occurring under, section 109 of the copyright act. When we purchase a physical book, we lend it out as many times as we would like, and we don't have to pay any fees for that lending. And that's the same type of thing that an individual can do in their home library, or little free library, for instance, or the public library, for that matter.

Now important aside is that this has to be from a work that is in print or in a physical format, such as a CD or a DVD. And another aside, or important fact, it does not allow you to make a copy of the work. It allows you to sell that particular work. And so, you don't own the copyright, right, you can't do all the things that a copyright owner can do, such as make reproductions, but you have the right to that specific piece of property, that speci