The New York Public Library is DRMing Public Domain Works
Yet another library is following King County’s (the county Seattle is in) horrible path of distributing public domain works with private DRM and this time it’s the New York Public Library. Jon of Exhibit5a has written them a letter pointing out just how unfortunate this trend is.
Furthermore, I notice that your collection of non-audio ebooks include the works of Dickens and Twain, among others, which are part of the public domain. You offer them in a proprietary format - and the restrictions and download limits that those formats entail. Why offer material that should be free for unlimited use to the public through these restricted formats?
Indeed. Check out the rest of the post at Open Letter to Michael Ciccone. Here’s hoping it doesn’t fall on deaf ears. Some major library system needs to take the path of public interest on this, and soon.
Previously: Public Library is Distributing Public Domain Works With Private DRM
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Understand your point. My reaction is that while the source works are indeed Public Domain, the Artists’ performances are not.
That is to say, you could have Joe the librarian read the performance into a wav file, and that’s fine.
But as a voice artist and producer, you damn well better believe what I do is copyrighted and not “free”. That’s what I think the conflict is… I am not going to do a great read of Chaucer and not get compensated, much like you wouldn’t create something artistic and not get compensated (unless there is a prior agreement of course).
Okay, back to searching for triplet porn.
I’ll cross-post this at 5a
Chuck,
You’ve missed it. They are DRMing pure text. Not just audio. Pure electronic text of public domain works, not a performance of that text.
Just don’t mess with my audio. I will hurt you.