 So, should we introduce ourselves first? My name is Kyle Courtney. I'm a Copyright Advisor here at Harvard Library. It's my distinct pleasure to be here. I also codified what is known as Control Digital Lending in an article in 2018 called a White Paper on Control Digital Lending of Library Books. So that's why I'm here today. I'm Brewster Cale, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. Oops. I'm Brewster Cale again. Is this now amplified? Yeah. Guys in the back? Good. Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, a large library on the Internet, archive.org and openlibrary.org, out the 300th most popular website. Out there, we've got 100 petabytes-ish of digital materials, books, music, video, we're probably best known for the Wayback Machine, which we have a very large number of web pages. I'm Rebecca Tushnet. I teach Copyright and Trademark Law and Advertising Law. I'm here, I suspect, because I wrote an amicus brief in the ongoing Internet Archive versus Hachette litigation about the pandemic lending program and CDL in general. I also work with the Archive of our own, which is a fan-run non-profit website that hosts fan fiction and other fan works. So I have a tow in the archive waters as well. I guess the why I'm here is, I think I can probably bring it down to one word. Help! We in the library world are completely under attack. If things don't go right, the future of libraries will be very, very different and I'd say the future of the Internet will be really steered in a direction that no one intended. So the program that Brewster runs and has been running for a decade or more, I remember the first article on it said, libraries have a novel idea or something along those lines. It was based on the concept that libraries have been doing what we refer to in the trade as collection development, meaning buying materials and placing them in our collections for long-term preservation and access. We're talking hundreds of billions, maybe of dollars spent in libraries over time. Now, a lot of those works are in the public domain. We're not here to worry about those. Things that are in public domain should be digitized and spread throughout the world. Some of them, however, are still under copyright. Libraries have a special relationship with copyright. It's a fun one. We buy something once and then we can loan it many, many times until the book turns to dust, really, under an exhaustion doctrine, which is great. Materials that are on our shelves, that are still under copyright from 1926 forward, we can make available to others. The concept of control digital lending is, what if we replicated what happens at the circulation desk where you check out that book, but in the digital space? Because everything's moving to digital space. In fact, that's a very important part of a lot of the movement in libraries, is that people want to access things digitally. The Open Libraries Program, I think, did just that. We're going to replicate the checkout desk for the modern reader. We're going to make these things available. We're going to purchase these books, and we're going to put them in a place where they're inaccessible and replace the physical one with a digital file, and that can be loaned to people under certain guidelines so we can talk more about that later. That is basically digitizing our collections that are still in copyright and making them available to the public for use, and that's the purpose and mission of library searching. One reader at a time. Yes. The idea is like, okay, we have a physical book, we're not circulating it, we digitize it, and we lend it to one reader at a time, and we put DRM on it, the same DRM for these dusty musties, these scan PDF things as the Harry Potter's of the imprint whatever it is from the publishers. Yeah, we started this 10 years ago. That's amazing. Boston Public Library. Actually, Tom Blake was there then. He's in the back. When this all went through, and 80 libraries working with the Internet Archive, so the Internet Archive helps those libraries lend their non-circulating books that have been digitized and lent, been going on for 10 years, and that's just 80 that have been working with us, and now there are hundreds more like working with HathiTrust through their systems and also libraries are doing it independently. Yeah. Can I actually? You can do whatever you want. We're the guest of honor, sir. Oh, I am. All right. So, libraries. What we do is we buy, preserve, and lend, and in the digital realm, I run the Internet Archive. We've been trying to buy e-books from publishers for 15 years. I would do cartoony things, like I would stand in front of publishers and just start throwing hundred-dollar bills on the floor and say, sell us e-books, please, and they will not do it. They'll license them under these really bizarro weird terms, so that basically you never really have it. Often, you never even get a digital file from them. This has the right to go and use their thing to go and rent it to your patron. So, they wouldn't sell e-books to us. So, we buy what we can, scan what we have to. We made a whole system around doing books or the big boys didn't come along. They wanted to own and control everything. Every reading event is a permissioned event. I've had real lawyers go and look at me, say, reading is copying. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Reading is reading, copying is copying. It's like, no, no, no, reading is copying. That blur in the digital world is really coming back to haunt us in a serious way. So, they wouldn't sell us e-books. So, we've been digitizing and making these kind of crafty PDFs out of, well, everything. And we lend them one reader at a time. It was going along fine. We stay away from the last five, the first, the most recent five years books, and if some authors or publishers complain loud enough, then we take them even out of the lending. And so, it's been going along fine. But then we got sued for doing this long term practice, widespread practice that the lawyers went on call, including this guy, called the Control Digital Lending. He's like, okay, there's a name for it now. So, there's Control Digital Lending and they wrote a white paper and a position paper and lots of libraries, library systems signed on, on and on and on and on and on. But now they basically singled out the internet archive and said, we're gonna sue you guys over 200 books or something like that. 125. 125 books. Because you are doing this for 125 books, we're gonna demand that you delete, burn three million books. So, because you're doing it for these 125, we're demanding that you burn all your digital books that you have made, just kind of horrendous. So, they're basically arguing that the three things that libraries do, buy, preserve and lend, we're not allowed to buy in the digital space and we're not allowed to actually take a digital thing and make it digital. We're not allowed to preserve, except under any terms and weird things that they say, which is like you can't. And we cannot lend. So, what they're basically saying is libraries cannot do the functions that libraries have always done. And this is, and it gets around the whole digital ownership issue that has Jason Schultz has written a good book on the subject. And so, it's, we may be going into a time of a Netflix of books, where you don't actually have books in your collection. Your library doesn't have eBooks in their collections. And they can be changed or taken away at any time. And every reading event is a permissioned event. So, they can go and say, you guys, you're okay. Those people, not so much. And you can't move things around. And you say, gosh, they wouldn't not do that. They're just capitalists, right? They would just, nope. It's completely about control. And they're doing these things. So, they were trying to get it so that libraries could even, they were taking away the libraries couldn't even license under their weirdo terms at all. So, there's no libraries, all those people aren't allowed to actually see these books. We're just going to put them in these distribution channels, not through the libraries. There was a law that was proposed and passed in Maryland that just said, okay, license us under weird terms, but you have to license us under some reasonable terms. This was beyond the pale to them and they sued to get that overturned and they actually succeeded. So, we are not in good shape out there. Yes, you've been reading about the book Bannings Things. They're very real. And so, Mouse, the book Mouse, which a graphic novel, Holocaust, great book. We've been lending that one reader at a time for, I don't know, five, six years. The government in Tennessee went and said, hey, I don't think we should really have this on our library shelves, so they took it down off the library shelves in Tennessee. And then the publisher went and sent us a note saying, you have to take it out of your library. So, it's like, wow. They said actually in the letter, it was really kind of odd. They said it was, well, it got really popular so it sold out of Amazon, therefore we want it out of your library. And so, but the alignment of sort of government pressures and these very large corporations that are five major publishers, soon to be four maybe. So these publishers are going to basically try to stay in good with as many governments as they can because there's so few players out there. It's not your old, they're not the mom and pop publishers that a lot of people think of publishers as in terms of what's dominating. These are media conglomerates. One of the companies that's suing the Internet Archive is owned by Rupert Murdoch. So it's sort of, you can sort of get the kind of international scale and scope and the cross-media type. So the idea of a Netflix of books is not alien to the upper ranks of these companies at all because they may own things like Netflix. So, that's sort of a point of view the way that the Internet Archive views these issues and then lawyers tend to sort of take it in a different direction. Sure, so you just drew a very big Venn diagram of e-books, access, culture, the mission of libraries, the role of libraries in a capitalistic enterprise. But let's take it back to your initial problem here with control of digital lending first before we get on to the other stuff. And as Rebecca mentioned, she had filed a mixtree if I certainly would like to hear. Thank you. Your point of view on that aspect of what's going on in the district court in the southern district of New York where the control digital lending case is happening currently. So, my involvement is a little unusual. And first of all, it's unusual to have amicus briefs in the district court and there's actually a little bit of wrangling over this. So, strategically we decided to emulate the federal rules of appellate procedure which are the only federal rules that actually specify what goes on with amicus briefs. And we all put in our amicus briefs seven days after the parties briefs were filed. The Hachette side decided, well, since there are no rules we can just get them in whenever. And which is sort of reflective of where people think there's play in the system. So, in some sense, the Hachette side is saying basically like there's no rule against it so we're gonna do it which is how they see the legal system as opposed to how they see libraries which is as spaces that should not engage in innovation in that way. So, part of the way I see this case is it's about the under provisioning of public services and the recruitment of other sources to make up for under investment. So, if libraries were willing to enable to flush $4 billion more down the drain every year they probably would get at least some more licenses. But they don't have that and so it's not worth it to the publishers. And so the sort of difficulty of presenting this is it looks like we're saying authors, subsidized libraries because first of all people do the synecdoche of the author and the publisher when in fact it's really the publisher but it's rhetorically quite powerful to say you're recruiting authors into that. Or serving authors. Yes. No, I understand but so part of the reason that I was involved is to talk about the role not just of libraries but of sort of the non-commercial sector in a functioning information environment and how they do things that the commercial sector can't and won't ever do. No matter how many billions of dollars they have because the priorities of the non-commercial sector about what they collect and why are just fundamentally different. And so the Amogus brief I wrote focused in particular on the role of non-commerciality in the fair use analysis because since we don't have a physical copy anymore we aren't in exhaustion land anymore. So now we're asking the question can fair use be used to replicate the practice of exhaustion in ways that sort of carry out the purpose of exhaustion? And so one view of fair use is yes it is designed to be flexible and respond to situations where there really should be an exception. So we make one. And when exhaustion disappears because physical copies disappear we then use fair use to make sure that the overall system remains in balance. But the counter argument that you deal with is well Congress should just enact digital exhaustion if they want it, otherwise it's ours, say the publishers. And these are just two contending views of the world. Yeah, I'm in full agreement with that. I've always imagined the role of the publishers and the role of libraries coexisting for a very long time. Certainly libraries buy publishers books and we put them on our shelves. And study after study says that people that check out books and read books are more likely to buy those books on their own therefore solving that. So certainly libraries satisfy the side of the copyright mission which is incentivizing creation by purchasing stuff, buying stuff. But we also promote the progress of science and useful arts, that's the statement in the constitution with copyrights on that side. I think libraries do an excellent job of doing that by providing access to those that can't necessarily afford these things. And our mission is one of long-term preservation. Most of the publishers I've dealt with, they're not in it for preservation. They're in it for whatever the next most popular book is that's going to sell well and therefore serve their for-profit and their investors and the corporation. So those two missions co-existing as you pointed out is just, it's very troubled recently. Certainly the authors argue are one of my favorite of all time. Certainly libraries don't pay authors directly. We never have. We buy the book from the publisher. The publisher and the author have a contract and that determines how the author gets paid. I mean, most to all of the libraries I have worked with, we have had author talks. We love our authors. Heck, I think Berkman must be doing so many author talks coming up because that promotion of knowledge, creation, and then dissemination is very much part of that mission of both higher ed and libraries. So I think there's trouble in that co-existing market and it's reflected by what Brewster initially said what somehow libraries are prevented from entering the digital space. In my mind, there is a very strong argument for a transformative fair use to take books that we already have on our shelves, things that we have purchased, that we have accessed, and that are hidden away or in an offsite repository and making those available if it's not going to curtail the current market. Using technology in a way that does not curtail the rights holders market. And I think libraries do that. We're allowed to put ourselves through the lens of that, oh, what we're doing is a fair use here because we're not harming the market. We're buying these books. We absolutely positively will buy these books and we'll continue to buy these books as long as they're made available. What we will not do is subsume our mission for rentals. And the difference that was talked about here initially was licensing appears to be the answer for the future of access. Controlled on their platforms up to the terms. Most of the e-book licenses I have read are not reflective of the library admission. They're not. They prevent us from doing preservation, interlibrary loan, access, reading, heck even checking out to certain people. If there is a license, this is the best part, a number of publishers sometimes refuse to sell, sell, sorry, to give a license to people. And that's an idea that I can't get this, right? We're at a world-class institution here and we can't license certain works because they just will not sell to libraries because they're threatened by that mission. And I understand why, right? It's easier for a library to buy one book and loan it a thousand times. It's much better for the publishers to license a thousand individual licenses. Economically. We're realistically 200. Yeah, realistically 200 at exorbitant prices, right? So the book costs $19.99 for a consumer and a library it's $300, right? And, you know, why? Why? Because they're fearful of that loaning. So again, those coexisting models are different modes of thought, I think, and they're combining and colliding in this litigation in New York. So, I find, because I'm on the ground, I sort of get an idea of how are these things actually happening? What is it, how does the world actually work? And I was involved in the early, early internet of going and getting the ARPANET to transition to the internet and I did a system that came before the web, right? Because all of, since 1980, when I went to MIT, I wanted to go and build the library, but I had to go and get computers that worked, networks that worked, an open protocol, publishers on board, then we could start building it. So, while the internet archive is 25 years old, 26 years old now, that's just the latest phase. So I've helped get a lot of industries online. Was the one that put the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Encyclopedia, Buchanan, all of these were the first on the web. And I put them there and worked with the folks. And none of the laws were clear at the time. So it was always kind of scary to people in the whole realm, but laws don't seem to be done well in prospectively. They're often done defensively to defend something that you want to actually still happen. So you need somebody to make some steps. So the internet archive, by going and starting to crawl the worldwide web and making that available in the Wayback Machine, I remember Pam Samuelson, the copyright attorney at Berkeley, she said, you're being brave. And you never wanna have a lawyer call you brave. And so just the idea of making copies of everybody's webpages and copying them, storing them, just that act, there were a lot of people that thought we would just, lawyers would reign on us like frogs. But it worked. And then we turned around and did the Wayback Machine, where we then made it publicly available. And it's worked. And so it's sort of step by step, we take things down. We also did this with television recording. Television, the Library of Congress was supposed to. They got the exclusive right to do so in law. And then they didn't. All they did is 25 years later, they wrote a report on, oops, that was, okay, that's my synopsis of there. 25 years. There's about a hundred pages, but sure, oops, there's a good summary. Yeah, it would have been a great idea if we actually did our jobs. And so I hit the record button. Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, 24 hours a day, DVD quality started in the year 2000. So it was before the 2001. So when 2001, September 11th happened, we went into action. This is four years before YouTube. We took the one week of television news from around the world and put it all online to just go and show what people thought. Lawyers thought we were just going to be diced. People were in good behavior. And in 2009, we now made all television news searchable so you can get clips. And if you want to borrow the whole thing, we print it onto a thumb drive and send it to you and then you have to return it. Emulating, lending. Again, working. 78 RPM records and cylinder recordings. These things basically nothing's out of copyright in any of this stuff until just last year, which we helped get a lot through, I think large part because we were doing it. And we've been making these available and it's working. So basically just trying to get things to work and having the publishers, and that's actually, I don't think it's the publishers, I think it's the AAP, the American Association of Publishers which really motivated the publishers to do something that I don't think they would have done on their own, which is sue libraries. In this particular case, the AAP has a habit of suing libraries. But we're, so I think there was some just general bad behavior and I think courts are the wrong place to go and figure out how these trade-offs should be made. But the idea of you need a law before you can go and do something, isn't actually the way new innovations happen. And when the legislators try, they often get it really wrong because they're surrounded by very expensive people or at least people with very expensive shoes that are basically going and telling them fictitious hypotheticals and they come up with really bad laws. So I think it's actually now is our time. This is being challenged to win it in court and win it in Congress. And do you think that's because the, so there's some differences in the parallels that you just drew there. And by the way, the Internet Archive is filled with all those delightful things that you mentioned that you can find and use and access and that's a public service, right? Libraries have a public service mission. But I think certainly with new video, as you said, we did this before there was a YouTube. Like that's amazing, right? So there was no legacy of what we do with this stuff previously. And I think that's why the challenge of CDL is interesting because the publisher is the right socialist saying, well, we do this and we've been doing, you know, eBooks or at least a version of it since the 90s and this is our space. Your challenge, our long-term legacy in this space. Whereas they weren't so together for the taping of all the world's news and that was relatively new. So I'm wondering if that has something to do with it. And of course, I've been talking for a while now. I didn't know if you were welcome. Thank you. I apologize. I was teaching. I hope everybody knew that, but I was in class. Framing future minds for these exact problems, right? Contracts for us. Contracts for us. Excellent. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to join the conversation. Thank you for coming. So because you mentioned contracts, we were talking a little bit about how the framework for publishing nowadays is through license and Brewster mentioned something that I wanted to highlight here, which is the Hulu or Netflixization of America's libraries. Because libraries are used to buying and collecting and preserving and giving access. I think my fear in the slippery slope in which we are offered licenses from publishers now, which prevents us from doing our mission, is that a public library would give a notice out to patrons and be like, last day to check out this book is August 31st. Like you see on Netflix and Hulu, last time to watch this series, last time to take a look at this. And that's just so foreign to the library space, archives and others. And I think it was Heather Joseph, who's the executive director of PARC that said, my concern is that we swap out the library card for a credit card, which is a brilliant kind of way of looking at the problem. So some of the work that's been going on the state level has been to make e-book contracts more relevant to the library mission. So, you know, and you know, we had some failures in Maryland and New York where these laws were passed and then overridden because they had copyright concerns. But I don't know, I just kind of throw that out there. Is the library mission special enough to get something special out of these rights holders and publishers that's more reflective through contract law, through licensing that is in aid of the mission? I don't know. I'm just gonna throw that question out there had the answer to that, then I can go forth and do the rest of my job. So it's more person this morning, Larry Lessig, says, okay, if you're going to license whatever it is to somebody, okay, you now have a license to this, then you don't get a copyright. Sure, that's fair. That be interesting? Right now they're getting both. And they basically corrupted copyright end of just being this bizarre awful zone, right? The last way too long, it's, you know, it's way too enforced, it's way too much. That wasn't bad enough for them. They now say, we're gonna give up on copyright, so there is no fair use, there is no first sale, there's no exemptions for the print disabled, there's no termination, there's, you know, no, there's this. Yeah, you have to buy your collection every two years or every 26 checkouts. So, again, that's a, so that was a, I don't know if that works. Can you basically say, well, you get one or two other? So, IP owners are comprehensively against the doctrine of election, right? And so I think they would clearly push back on this. One of the things that I think about is, so it is possible to have a copyright system that has a lending right. So, you know, Europe has a lending right. The library pays publishers and of course it has all the allocation problems of all collective licensing schemes, right? So, if you can avoid the collecting authority becoming corrupt, which, you know, in 80% of the cases you can't, but it's not an inherently bad idea to say that, I suppose the question would be, you know, is there, you know, could we get certainty by getting a lending right combined with an obligation to actually sell the book, right? And then, so, you know, during the pandemic, there were lots of ideas on the table. You know, some people in Congress were actually interested in doing something, but it got crushed. And, you know, you, at this point you don't get copyright policy made without horse training. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, actually I don't have any faith in Congress to actually write it well, but I do sort of wonder, is there a world in which, you know, we join other countries, give a lending right, but say there is therefore an obligation to actually sell the book to the library. Hmm, yeah. That's the trade. It could be. It's not a very American thing. No, it's not a very American thing. And I think- The horse trading is? The horse trading, absolutely. The lending right, not so much. I think part of the challenge, and I was just listening to you, Brisser, just kind of give the history. And you're chagrin at having to ask permission to do something that seems consistent with what reasonable people expect would be done or available on the internet. And I think a number of things. First, the publishers are consistent in their opposition to any change in the narrative that what they do is bring knowledge to the American people. So part of what's going, at least I can say that when the America's Treaty negotiations were going on, and for those of you in the audience, America's Treaty is the treaty that mandates that visually impaired persons can access copyrighted works. And it's a mandatory exception, and it's the first, and so far, the only mandatory exception. So what I would do instead of a lending right is a mandatory sale. Now, part of what's happening is I realize this maybe a little, I was very hostile to the publishers and very annoyed by some of the foolishness that was going on. But I realize that there's this deep love for the printed word that goes all the way back to our kind of sense of the DNA of the American spirit. And for many, many years, just like the publishers in England, I think really capitalized on the importance of knowledge and the elite having access to the printed book and use that relationship to fashion, what rights they would have. I think you're seeing a little bit of this playing out that the publishers don't like libraries and the fact that they just don't. And I think we just have to sort of own that. I mean, I realized that I was stepping into the debate with this idea of we should all get along, publishers, published books, libraries make sure that they're read. I mean, this is what the system, these two institutions have been a part of copyright since the very first copyright statute, libraries and booksellers or publishers. So this is not a recent relationship. But I realized that there really is this competition for the image of who is doing public service. And the reason I want a mandatory sale right is because I think this is consistent with the requirement way back since the Statute of Anne that you mandatory have to deposit a book in the library. This is one of the requirements that our earliest copyright statutes had. Now Undertakings Challenge. Now Undertakings Challenge, right? Now being challenged in the U.S. So the system is essentially being re-engineered, not just not through horse trading, but by this clear competition for who, what is the instrument of the public welfare and who gets to control it? Is it the publishers who quote-unquote represent the artists and the writers who are slaving away at typewriters or whatever they're slaving away at now? Or is it libraries who are these intermediaries making knowledge available to the public? That's the narrative that is under reconstruction. And I think that's going to be key in figuring out is the appropriate response, a lending right, or is it a mandatory sale right? Because if publishers could get rid of libraries, libraries would be gone today. It wouldn't exist. Yeah, I don't know, I would say they actually put that in their brief at in the complaint, Kruster, which read like a press announcement for Trump's election. They were like, our existence is for education and the spread of knowledge. And I thought to myself, like libraries are in the dissemination of knowledge, like we're actually, I don't have a stockholders that need to answer for my lower sales by working in a library, right? So there's definitely a mission difference. But you're right, the coexistence of that. But it's gone south over the last decade. I used to be able to count on one hand how many libraries have been sued by publishers and now it's getting up there. So I don't, I want to say hello also. Apologies for running late, I was teaching. There's a lot of that going around. Jay-Z, I'm going to actually preempt you just for what I really wanted to hear. So I think there's a, there was an opportunity by these major corporations. This is different from publishers. When you think of publishers, you usually think of relatively small scale, you know, that the Boston sort of history of all this. These are mega corporations. With the digital transition, they've consolidated their media assets into these licensing pools. And they think about them in these sort of, these trans media type licensing structures. And with the digital transition, I think they thought they could get away from all that pesky old stuff like, well, libraries, or people actually owning books that they would pass down to their kids or any of these things. And their briefs are all about, oh, the libraries are the ones being radical here. It's like, no, we're being pretty ordinary in how we treat this new media. It's along the lines of the old media. The Canadian courts up through the Supreme Court, now just reaffirmed the term, I think is an interesting one. It's technical neutrality. Technical neutrality, which it sort of rhymes with net neutrality, but a technical neutrality is with a different technology, you have the same rights as you had in the older technology, right? Basically it sort of moves along. And so you can do kind of format shifting, right? If we weren't able to take things off of floppies, and we do, and if we waited for 95 years to get it off of a floppy before we made the first, we're toast, right? It just doesn't work, right? You have to be able to move things forward. The same right now, and I think COVID helped us by demonstrating we have to get things out of print and onto online. Or we're going to lose the 20th century. The 20th century gap is real. It's not online, it's not in Amazon, it's not in HathiTrust, it's not in the Internet Archive yet, is a gap, and we have to basically, or we will have amnesia and we'll have forgotten a very impactful century. You may think of actually some of the problems that we're seeing in our political sphere is actually not having to be able to draw on, well, what happened during the 20th century. So technical neutrality is a concept here that I think is a way of moving things forward rather than allowing them to draw completely new and different rules in the digital sphere than what we live with in the physical world, and the physical and the digital world is not that different. John Perry Barlow, is I? Anyone want to capitalize on that moment? Or ask questions? I really like the Floppy's example because it shows how an archive can enable the public domain to exist as a thing. Like one of the things I'm very afraid of is moving to a license model where because they are blocked by DRM even when they do become public domain, it's still illegal to break them and get the material out. And so I feel like the importance of an archive is that they take the initiative to make sure the material is available so that someday it can be made available. And the question that I have about lender's rights, because I would love if we can't have for a sale doctrine, then what rights do we have, is even with lender's rights, what guarantee does that make that the material will enter the public domain and that we won't have a bias toward new material? So if there is no incentive for publishers to build equitable collections, then are they really upholding their obligation or their unwritten obligation of making sure that materials are available? And so I guess specifically as a question, are lender's rights enough under those circumstances of public domain, diversity, and for sale rights? Unclear, like, so one of the really interesting things that is happening in music right now is actually a greater share of music revenue right now is going to artists from 30 or 40 years ago than ever before, right? So having the archive may actually be biased towards the old, right? So one of the things that music companies have actually succeeded in doing is getting all the stuff that people have nostalgia for onto the streaming services. And that may just be the sort of pig in the Python that when it's digested, that money will go away or stop concentrating now as culture sort of disintegrates even more. But if you, there's actually a conflict between like lots of use of old stuff versus funding the new stuff. Because we've all got a limited amount of attention. Like there is a physical limit to how much music I can listen to. And don't think I haven't tried. And so I'm not sure that we'll ever get a handle on the problem at that level. And we may not be able to. So I tend to think that we should look for sort of medium justice. Because if we try and get the incentives right, we will fail and we will always be vulnerable to people who say, well, more rights in the market will take care of it. So I guess now, of course, I also think if you're going to have collecting societies, you need public oversight. There's a huge worldwide problem of collecting societies enriching themselves and enriching the hit artists. But there's also, like there's an inherent problem which is Taylor Swift is always going to get more money, right, than like my friend who has one song on Spotify. And in fact, it can make sense to give more to Taylor Swift even relatively more. To the extent that she's actually higher value than the one guy. So these are not stable or resolvable conflicts. They have to be done with oversight. They have to be done with transparency and accounting obligations, I think. So one thing to think about this is first, there isn't a single public lending right which is the start of the problem. So to Rebecca's point, how you design the lending right might ameliorate some of the concerns you have about, well, do we get more work in the public domain? And one possibility is to do what some countries do which is don't connect the lending right to copyright. Like it's not a copyright right. It's a standalone system that is meant to address some of the market failure but not to, it's not tied to any of the rationale or justifications for copyright. So that allows you to do better design, allows you to tie it to say a sale. But it just gives you more to work with because you're not constantly having to go back to justify the nature and the scope of the right. So it will be difficult to talk about the public lending right in any kind of uniform way because countries come at it so differently. You do have countries that view it as essentially a necessary evil to copyright. So for some countries, PLR is to copyright, what fair use is to copyright here. And that's another level of the problem is that to the extent that PLR was designed to ensure that libraries as intermediaries are able to function as libraries, the whole point is not so much the public domain but access and that's the other problem that you're seeing is in countries that have strong PLR rights related to copyright, they also have a lot of kind of moral rights that don't ever go away. So the idea that the PLR is kind of part of the incentive structure really kicks in whereas countries that do it as an autonomous regime, I think do better. But here's part of the challenge. So public lending right, this is, we get the first public lending right, 1941 or 1914. We get the public lending right is very new. I mean, in the history of copyright law, it is not as old as the copyright system. And if you look at the countries that are the first to implement it, many of these countries are in fact paying the cost for the library. So this is not something that's being born by the libraries. It's a way the government subsidizes access so that the library gets to function as an intermediary to make that access available. The way we talk about public lending right in the US is completely different. The idea is to compensate copyright owners for loss that is in theory occurring because someone is reading a book instead of buying it. So hence the music analogy that the book is raising. So part of this I think is we're not going to avoid the discussion about and to Rebecca's point, we're not gonna get legislation that does not involve some sort of trade. So what are we willing to give up for libraries to be able to do their job, to be the mission-driven, mission-minded? What are we willing to give up? That's the question. We have actually a very interesting audience here because there are some libraries represented here that have been doing controlled digital lending and have experienced sort of what's the ins and outs of it. There's my library, which I can tell you it's a very different thing than lending a book like it's not a substitution for sale. People are in and out of these books in minutes. They basically they're in and out and it's almost all within minutes. They're using books kind of as web pages. And that's how this whole thing has sort of unfolded. It's sort of interesting. It's a very different thing than a substitution for a purchase in our experience. I don't know if a couple of the folks that are in the audience could speak to how their libraries came to adopt controlled digital lending. Are you up for it? Yeah. Hi, I'm Tom Blake, formerly at the Boston Public Library. So we, I don't know if we were the first library to really embrace this, but we're definitely one of the first. It really came down to, I mean, access was our driving factor. We adopted controlled digital lending. We started with genealogies. We went on to cookbooks. We actually did get legal advice moving forward. It just made the trustees feel better. And the important thing was we did not go to our legal team and say, can we do this? We said, we are doing this. We are mission-driven. Like the, if I'll do respect to the lawyers in the room, your job is to keep us out of a lawsuit, not necessarily to win one. So we basically said, we are doing this and we got guidance saying that the controlled digital lending was likely fair use. And more importantly, the lawyer who actually wrote this memo for us was an author himself. He's a working author. I can tell you that in the 15 years or I guess 10 years when we're, as we're doing controlled digital lending, we did not get one takedown complaint from anybody, except one independent genealogical, self-publishing family. And once, and it became, it was not litigious. It was not nasty. It became a conversation. We explained what we were doing and I remember they said, that's a really cool idea, actually. We'd still like you to take it down for now, but let me, and I offered her, I said, you probably don't have PDFs of your own work. So that actually turned into a good relationship. So that's how it started at the BPL. We were able to give access to parts of our collection that were, as Brewster said, we're musty and dusty and nobody would ever physically come to the library. We have to meet people where we have to meet our users where they are and this is a way to do it. So one of the things you'll notice is, because this debate we had when we were negotiating the America's Treaty and one of the things that you'll notice in the treaty, first is that if you carve out visually impaired persons and their ability to access works, you don't have to have a public lending right debate. I mean, they have access and this is why I think it was so important in both our happy to trust litigation in Google Books that this was called out. So visual impairments, any kind of disability, you can have a straight, in some countries as a state's statutory right, in some countries it's just straight fair use, but now with Marrakesh it's a right to access the work once you say that you're visually impaired. So I think that because that has been the history of access that it has all, especially with libraries that there's always been the notion that the library doesn't close its doors, doesn't close its doors. Everyone gets to go to, I tell people all the time, some of my students know this, that books raised me. I mean, they were my saving grace as a child. My mother was a librarian, I lived in libraries and in the very racialized hostilities of the 1970s in my private school. I just lived in a library, those books were my friend. And speaking of the lending right, one of the things I think, and the reason why I work with the libraries on this issue is when you think about our current debates, whether it's critical race theory, whether it's evolution, whether it's climate change, you think about whatever theory you're thinking of, one of the intermediaries that facilitates access to different perspectives and knowledge from different perspectives or libraries. Libraries allow you to learn in ways that are very different from the controlled learning of the classroom. So I think of controlled digital lending in some ways, it's interesting, depending on how it's done. There's a difference between classroom learning and when I go to a library and I'm looking at a bookshelf and I'm pulling out five books. So just to drive it home, I was doing some work for the library association that I had on maybe it was a couple of years ago and was distraught about how many books you could actually get on controlled digital lending. Why? Because when I was a kid, I would take a garbage bag to the New York Public Library. And back in those days, they had no limits. And so, since that's where I lived, I would borrow 20, 30 books at once and I'd be this tiny black girl on 112, 112, 13th Street in New York and I would be dragging these bags of books. I mean, I just devoured them. I mean, and it paid off and law schoolated, but at the time it was just, those were the worlds that I was hiding in because of what I was going through as a child. And the idea that libraries themselves are being transformed by this battle because you have to think about a design that ultimately affects the user's experience. It ultimately affects how users get it. So for some libraries, if you have digital lending, some libraries only allow you to get the books a couple of times. You can only have so many. There are all of these, Jessica Lipman talks about the right to read and my co-author, Julie Cohen. I mean, they're all of a sudden, it's a different experience. It's a very different experience. And that ruins me as much as the copyright question because if the idea of a lending right, for example, becomes the mechanism that we decide to trade with, we're saying something implicitly about what the publisher's rights are. That is in fact a space to get to the control and I think that's what we really need to be careful of. I'm not moderating, so. I see all these hands up. I just got out of class. I'm not calling anybody. We have, yeah. You have to do a supply. Okay. That's the hot mic. So I'm now at Harvard Law Library, formerly at another law library, which my, I'm not gonna name the library. They'll go unnamed. They'll go unnamed. But my role there was to run our digitization, one of my roles was to run our digitization department and one of, we worked with Brewster in the Internet Archive and I think one of the use cases that we presented to him when we proposed it was something like prison libraries, creating a universal legal library so that not just law students or law faculty, but the world at large would have access to legal material that was useful for their needs, including like a prison library. So that library has been doing control digital lending since 2014, I think, so a long time. And unfortunately isn't able to completely publicize that, but hopefully that will change. And I think it's important that the former director of that library was an early, one of the earliest proponents of control digital lending. So. So it's happening. It's happening. And were there a lot of problems that came up around this that you could, you know. No, and I can echo what Tom said. I don't believe we had a single takedown request ever. The way that it's limited now is in discovery and that was a challenge for the internet archive. They were quite gracious in solving that challenge in terms of it being a little bit more segregated than other of its books. But hopefully again, that will eventually not be the case, so. And there was no problem because you were just replicating what happens at the CERC desk, right? Absolutely. And one of the battle cries that we've invented here is let's make control digital lending boring. Let's make CDL boring. It's just an average transaction of an average book that your average reader would do is just in the digital space. And in case. I think it's appreciative of that. We never got a takedown, you know? In case people don't realize that, you know, one of the cardinal tenants is that you don't lend the digital and the physical at the same time. And, you know, that's pretty critical to the whole legal theory around all of this. And so in that institution, we put the books in storage and kept very, very close control over what was digitized and being lent electronically and versus what was being, you know, and make sure that that was not also being lent in a physical version. Thank you. But part of that then depends, requires that the library is, you know, so how many copies the library retains. So for example, if you've purchased five copies, I'm assuming you could lend up to five copies, right? So parity, exactly the ratio of that. One thing that it doesn't do as well is the books that don't get the reference books, right? Books that you can access but can't take out of the library that students could sit around a desk and work from. So it's hard, there's some things that are just hard to mimic. But the parity principle is really, really crucial. Now, the challenge that that gets is globally, right? Because what are the questions and again, I see the wisdom in being narrowly tailored. Most authors want to be read. So I don't expect to see lots of takedown. So to your point that this is probably being pushed by the publishers. 100 and some odd books. There are three million up. And they're suing about these and they say everything has to come down. So come down, yep. And that's the over breath that you're doing. That's just horrendous. And the level of creep that this can have into other internet areas is huge. If every reading event, if every viewing event, if every listening event is a permissioned event where you can redline anybody at any time based on whatever criteria they want to, whether it's geography, race, long play, and they want to take away a certain book or change it without notice. If all of that is the world we're going into, this is not just a sort of weird little dispute between publishers and libraries. I went into this to go and get the internet to be the library. It was the original vision for a lot of us what the internet was, what it was for. I run a library, but it's a much bigger thing that's being litigated. The Maria Bostillo's titled an article is the publishers are taking the internet to court. I don't think that's overstretching it. It's not taking a library. It's taking the concept of how the internet has functioned to court to make it so that there is no need for a DMCA, nothing's copyrighted anymore, right? It's all permission. And if we go into that world, the way back machine's gone, Wikipedia is large part gone. You can't refer to things. It's, if we end up in a license only world, we're in deep trouble. So I'm, this is my sort of way of appealing to you guys trying to give sort of what's at scope. And what I've learned out of this is it's just so freaking clever to go and say, oh, we're just arguing with just the internet archive, just about these books. And, but what I'm told by lawyers is, no, this is just their way of wiping out all libraries and all users, right? Cause if libraries can't own things, then people can't either. Then also, and it's across all media types, not just all books. So the level of creep that this can have makes this, I think, a pretty important, important case. Maybe one of the, hi everybody. Jay-Z, before you say it, Professor Tushnet wanted me to offer apologies. She had to go teach. I think there's a theme to the theme. A lot of that going around. Yeah, it's kind of like the looking glass nuclear airplane. There's always one person teaching at all times. So we had a changing of the guard. I find myself wondering how much we can get out of this poor and potentially worsening equilibrium or disequilibrium through incremental efforts, even quiet ones, let's make it boring, versus some kind of sweeping grand bargain or concordant that really tries to reboot the system and provide for sufficient incentive either as a one-off or ongoing to those legacy players that have financial interests and see what they can do, which also gets at some of the questions of what are their incentives? And in the incremental sense, it seems just bad turf generally to be trying to solve this through litigation. I mean, we're in a law school like litigation is adversarial. It's not generally about let's sit around the table and figure this out, unless you're in settlement negotiations under the specter of uncertainty of how it's going to turn out. And I worry there isn't enough uncertainty here. And a lot of the incremental stuff is somehow trying to test out just how fierce and over what the plaintiffs would be. I heard in Leah's description of the unnamed library, something that Tim Wu wrote about years ago called a theory of tolerated uses. He was looking at the digital millennium copyright acts takedown provisions, which were very unpopular among most of the sort of cyber props at the time. But what Tim liked about it was that you actually had to single out the work and affirmatively ask for it to be taken down. And until you did, no liability was accruing so long as the takedown was effectuated expeditiously after being identified. And it wasn't at the time even, and all others like it. It was like really one instance at a time. And if it's really true as has been, I think emphasized even more recently in the antitrust examination of the merger of the big publishing houses, if it's really true that you've got a tail or swift or two and then you've got 10 million pieces of spaghetti that never stick to the wall, if the default is flipped to it goes up and is it really even worth it to take it down, maybe there wouldn't be so much, including just thinking about the internal bureaucratic dynamics of a publisher. It's one thing to allow something if it's your right to use it or lose it, or if you're having people coming and asking you for permission. It's another that is just happening out there. You haven't said anything. And at any time you could, even if one of those pieces of spaghetti unexpectedly leaps back up to the wall and sticks. At that point you could say take it down. And that solves the problem if those... We've been dealing for the last 10 years. And then they sprang up and said, nope. Right, so one question is could we somehow help create that incentive so that they're not feeling that they have to offer an affirmative answer because if they do, it'll be the most conservative protective one rather than not having to say anything until they're ready to say something about the works they care about. The other kind of thought I had was with this evocative picture of Professor O'Kedige taking the sacks of books back and forth. In some ways, the library was one of the only games in town. I mean, NBC, CBS, ABC, like they were all pretty boring. And there was the library. And that when you've got Candy Crush beckoning you at all times and all of its counterparts, if you have to even undertake the smallest of speed bumps to get to something else, I think a lot of people wouldn't find their way there. And that's like a huge problem even if we were to deal with some of the just kind of licensing issues. And finally, I just wanted to maybe put on the table if it hasn't been put there yet, a way in which the physical configuration of libraries and books pre-internet was a natural bulwark supporting the integrity of the works. And by the integrity of the works, I mean, once the book is published, it's out there, it's distributed among a bunch of .orgs and .edu's for which they're not gonna take it off their shelves if you tell them to. And they're certainly not gonna like rip out a page where page 16 is said to have something defamatory in it until you fully litigated that case and talk about a Streisand effect like that wouldn't be a good idea. But now that you've got the opportunity, including potentially through controlled digital lending depending on how it's implemented, of having everything root back to a gold copy in the hands of the publisher, it's a feature that could be updated at any moment to fix those annoying typos that creep in because people don't seem to use copy editors anymore. But it's also a huge threatening bug that you could retroactively come up with version 2.0 and 2.1 and 2.2 of the book that is automatically then the new canonical copy of the book. And it's just up to whether you remember that. I don't remember this story ending this way. That's a rather, gosh, I thought they were the bad, that's the kind of thing for which there was just a natural, almost like laws of physics, defense for which depending on how that any digital lending right would be implemented. And if there is none, it's even worse that I don't know if today's Kindle copy is anything like yesterday's on my own Kindle. And we actually asked the Amazon lawyers if they would be game to share with our Lumen project which tracks takedowns and demands on other platforms so that we could know when changes were being demanded and then made wholly short of litigation because it could now be really worthwhile to demand those changes because they could be effectuated. And I think the basic idea was they make so many post publishing changes it would be a real effort to try to track them which I thought was sort of proving my point but it didn't result in a yet voluntary disclosure of such. So the ways in which libraries are built ethically, structurally to preserve integrity of works strikes me as something we are quietly giving up and really could regret it. Some of it I think is the library's fault. Let me see if I can fall on a sword here, or our sword here. Yes, thank you. You get to be the other, I guess you get to be there. All right, we all get to be, all right, here we are. Okay, early internet. Before the internet there were libraries that had paper, microfilm, microfiche, nobody liked the microfilm, microfiche. And that, so publishers would go and send out a bunch of copies, they would start working on the next generation of whatever and the libraries were the abundance model mechanism of getting things out there and preserving them. And we were very much part of how the system worked. During the mainframe era, we transitioned to these database products often sold to us by for-profits or non-profits that acted like for-profits. And we libraries just started subscribing to these. And we, and many times, and the law was actually one of the earliest that sort of transitioned over, medicine transitioned over, and the libraries stopped owning things. They started licensing things. And it was part of the digital wave but actually somewhat predates this sort of licensing wave. Then we were, I think we're coming at the end now of the mainframe era, we're into the internet era, which can be an era of abundance, right? It's that type of distribution works really well on the internet. Witness Wikipedia, right? They're $120 million a year organization, way too little money, but it's kind of awesome. And they give away their product. A lot, internet archive, again, sort of gives away its product, if you will. We're non-profits, it's a little hard to quite say that in a straight face. But we just give away things and the abundance model works. But we libraries then, and during this internet era, a bunch of us tried to shame publishers into being their own archives. So we expect the Atlantic to go and spend all of this time going and finding the back issues, which they often didn't have, going and digitizing them and making them available. We tried to shame government agencies into going and making their archives available permanently, the SEC, da, da, da, da, da. I think we were wrong. We were wrong. And we libraries should have stepped up and said, no, the libraries are going to actually go back to what it is they did before, spend a lot of time and effort building collections, going and making it so publishers could work on the next generation thing. But by now, we have all of these publishers thinking that they're supposed to be the ones that keep things, their old stuff, available. It doesn't suit them very well, they're not very good at it, but that's the expectation. We run into this with a lot of the periodicals because we're digitizing the periodicals and they say, no, no, no, we've just spent a bunch of money doing our old and they have it in some weird flash viewer that doesn't work anymore. Really, it's only for subscribers. It's just odd, crafty things because we libraries didn't do our jobs of going and preserving and providing enduring digital access to these material. I think we can fix this. And I think we should, but we've now got some momentum and some investments on the part of these publishers towards building archives that they're terrible at. The Internet Archive by Building the Wayback Machine, we are the cleanup crew to just try to like, because these companies go out of business all the time, not just book publishers, just any website. Or they stop, or they fumble, or they put in a new system and it doesn't work anymore. And that's kind of what libraries are for, is we go and make things and preserve them and keep the formats moving along so that they're relevant to the next generation. So we libraries, I think we have to spring into action more to go and do our function more, but we've got to face down the publishers because they are not good custodians and stewards. This is not a role they're very good at, to the extent that they will say they are and they always do. I think it's provable, provably laughable, but it's a structural problem that if we don't solve this, we're gonna end up with a digital future that doesn't have preservation built into it, doesn't have reuse in new and different ways that the publishers didn't anticipate. They'll be the only copy, the golden copy, and they can change it, they can just say how it's going to be distributed, and that's not a future that we can or should be working towards. And unfortunately, this case is central to that discussion. If I can just say two things, and then I may have to schedule, but just a couple of things we serve about that. First, I think it's important that at the international level, there have been efforts to actually negotiate a treaty on this issue. So to protect libraries and archives and musics. And the publishers have proposed this effort strenuously. So in fact, I'm leaving for Geneva in a month or so to have a conversation about where to go, where the treaty is concerned. I think one of the things that I'm particularly fond of, many years ago, this building was actually a library. The Lewis International Law Library. It was an awesome library. I interned here in this building. It was an awesome library. If you were looking for stuff on Saudi Arabia's first draft constitution, like stuff you couldn't find anywhere else you could find this year. So one of the things that I find that libraries are not doing as effectively is capturing the breadth and the uniqueness of what libraries do globally. This is not just an American problem. And the inability to preserve. I mean, there's a reason UNESCO has its, cultural heritage sites, right? It's tagged as something that needs to be preserved. And libraries used to do that. And that meant libraries could gather not just the golden copy, they could gather so much because part of the work of the library is preservation. So I think I haven't fully read all the briefs, but I would push libraries not to be in a defensive mode because I think the story has not been fully told. And that's one of the issues. I think the second is the subversion, right? The idea that copyright is a business and digitization has affected the business. And whenever a business is affected, it is the job of the government to figure out, do we need to bail them out, right? As we did some years ago, do we need to give funding for retraining? There's this instinct that when technology upsets the equilibrium, then in fact, something unfair is happening to copyright owners. And therefore we need something to intervene and the litigation often is a starting point for that. I think that one curiosity for me has been this idea of publication. So for those of you who are copyright folks, you know that historically in the US and actually in many parts of the world, publication was what actually triggered your copyright interest. Because the system was designed to incentivize not just authorship but this closed authorship. So no library is gonna come digging in my cabinets for unfinished manuscripts. Libraries make published works available. That's what they do. And so there was always in the history that when you get a copyright in a published work, the public will have access to it. That was the grand bargain. And so part of the publication focus in copyright was you don't have the right to say to a roomful of people, you don't get to read my book. Once you've published it, once you've made it available to the public, then it's available to the public and the library became a place that mediated that. And that argument got lost, actually it's gotten lost on a lot of these digitization cases because the defense posture is we're doing things exactly the way we used to do them physically. Or some other variation of that. But in fact, when works were published, the access prong that was part of that bargain was the expectation was that if you chose to publish your work, which by the way you don't have to. But once you choose publication and it's available, that's why first thing, this is where the line of exceptions for sale coming because it's once you choose to make it public and you sell it, you can't unsell it and you can't unpublish it. And this is why there's still some difference in the copyright section. The way we treat unpublished works, the way we treat anonymous works, very different. And I've often wanted to kind of speak to some lawyers who are defending some of these mass digitization cases to say there's something about the structure that has not quite been articulated in a way that gives libraries better freedom to think about doing something more than just, well, this is how we did it in the physical world. Because it means that libraries won't evolve in the digital world. I mean, that's exactly what it means. That you will not, it won't fall to the digital world. I think we have time for one more question from Huli who's been very patient. And in this last time, if you wanna reflect on some of the questions that we have on the boards, you have sticky notes and pens in front of you, you can put up your thoughts as we are leaving. But Huli. Put it back. Thank you. I'm not a lawyer nor a librarian, but I have an open access publisher. So I wanna ask what do you think is the impact of a big publisher acquisition? I'm particularly thinking about random house trying to buy Simon and Schuster, roughly the only competition that they have. And so there was going to be one enormous publisher, being random Penguin Schuster, whatever it is that they're gonna do if they end up going away, getting away with this deal. What would happen there? Would that make it harder to kind of fight one big publisher? Or would it make the argument that they have a monopoly over all of these publications more reasonable? Not that it isn't, but. I like games with many winners. So you have, and if you have a choke point, kind of any, and as Larry Lessig sort of pointed out, if you have a choke point in any place, such that there's only a few that control some part of the chain, they can run it backwards and forwards and cream everybody out. And that's what's happening with the book Publishing Industry. It used to be a many, to many, to many, to many world. And it was sort of formalized in the early 1600s with the royalty structures, and it ran really well until things like Ingram came about, and Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and we had these basically, and then we had fewer and fewer publishers pumping into these very narrow chain. The worldwide web success, I would suggest, in the early days of it, was because we had lots and lots of websites. We're now having kind of a few. There's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's, you know, who needs another store? We have Amazon, it's just, and when you have that sort of collapse, innovation just stops. It's, they're very litigious. They start playing defense rather than innovation. You know, yes, let's resurrect antitrust. I'm really glad that the government is actually pushing back on an antitrust case. Thank God, it's a lot easier to go and stop people from merging than it is to try to break them apart. So stop them from merging, make it a really hard thing to do. And I run a non-profit, and it's interesting, people say, oh, you know, why are they merging? It's like, oh, synergies. It's like, well, no. It's you're making a few people that are the decision makers extraordinarily rich. And, well, how can I prove this? Well, if you take away that incentive, which non-profits, you basically can't have exact directors make bazillions of dollars because they just merged their non-profits. They just don't merge. Some only the synergies mark idea just doesn't happen. So the antitrust is right, but the idea of five is gonna be enough is the wrong number of zeros on that. We really need lots and lots of enabled and powered people to publish, make their works available or fee over the internet, have them sell it that we could have a integrated app on your phone that could go and borrow or buy books. And when you buy any book, you own it in the same sense that you own physical books. That that kind of a architecture where you have search engines. Actually, there's a fellow here, Mech, that runs one of the search engines of books and is working on the book server architecture. He's a fellow now at Berkman, so. Pardon? Affiliate or something, whatever. Anyway, so there are architectures that can make a game with many winners that we have so few, actually led those big publishers to abandon the concept of book server a number of years ago, because they thought they could monopolize and distort the environment, which frankly, they have. Brewster, I find myself unsurprisingly agreeing with you, but I wanna just sort of red team my agreement and test it out. And I'm just trying to figure out first what is a book? I'm starting to get confused about what that is these days. What is it that makes a monograph a monograph, rather than just a screed or a lot of words that somebody came up with? Is it the physicality of it? Is it the fact that some intermediary deemed it worthy of sticking between those covers? Is it a book is what you find on a shelf in a bookstore or a library? Because exactly the abundance you're talking about is at hand and weirdly enough, I mean, I can't believe I'm about to utter this, but anybody can do a Kindle single, right? And I don't like the many tentacled grip of Amazon over that process, but it's not like there's limited shelf space, there's limited attention space. So if we fast forward ahead another five, 10, 15 years, is it that just we really want there to be a physicality to books and there are bookstores and the only way to get into a bookstore is to have a publisher that gets you there. But again, what we're learning is the only reason they commission as many books as they do is because authors will write for almost no advance until they become famous and because there is no way to predict what will become successful, so it's worth pushing a little bit to a lot of people in the hopes that some alchemy happens. But all this is to say, why couldn't we subsidize and create for the future? Putting aside the issue of dealing with orphaned and inaccessible works in the past, something that would entice most authors who are uncertain about whether anybody wants to read their work. So this is not like some biography by somebody that's already famous, autobiography. Why couldn't we create a system so that if I'm wanting to write a book, it's more tempting to go kind of the dot org route and know that it can find an audience and get out there. Is there something those publishers are offering other than prestige that still makes it worth it to go with them rather than something we could together move a car off the lot today and come up with something that would let people self-publish and collect? Oh, here it is. It's the platform versus protocol debate. Which I would suggest is, if you haven't heard this particular... The protocols are supposed to be the right answer to that. Yes, the protocols are the right answer where you can, as an author, go and set up your little word, press something or other, advertise your book and go and make it so that you have control over going and making that and make it go. Or, and then you can be discovered with search engines and you can make a system that is based on the rule of law, not the rule of contract. Now, let's take your example of, hey, I'm free to go and make a Kindle one-off edition or whatever it was. Then you're playing by Amazon's contract rule. You are on their platform. And to the extent that you, to be able to be your own author means that you have to play by their rules, means you're under rule of contract, not under rule of law. And you are then in platform land. We had that happen in iTunes. And we have platform after platform, platform. Yeah, I want a band camp for books. Or a lot of band camps. I like that. A lot of band camps. Yeah, yeah. Small individual authors that are the bands of band camp. And you're able to be discovered and independently. That is a way that you can have a lot of flowers blooming. But if you put somebody in control of, I, it all has to go through my app store. My app store, it all has to go through my book store. If there's the, if there's that kind of problem. I think you agree. Then we have a problem. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, I just wanted to thank you all. This has been a rolling, roving, deep and wonderful conversation. So thank you all so much for engaging it. And thank you all for joining. Do you want, is there a final word? One last. Final, final pitch. Okay. So we have all sorts of interesting issues around music. In 78s, we have every copyright trademark, probably not a lot of patent issues that come up at the internet archive. If you would like a handful of interesting problems to think about. We now have lawyers that are employed at the archive and we work with groups and individuals around some of these issues. So if you'd like to get an idea of how these things are kind of going, please play a role. Also, I bought some Tuscany in the ice cream, put it on some dry ice. And it's out, if there's any. Maybe it's not that much left. And I'll be around for as long as anybody wants to talk. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.