 All right, thank you. PowerPoint's ready to roll. Thanks, everyone, for coming today. It's just myself. I'm going to be talking about online-only media. And I'm from the University of Washington in Seattle. I've been working on this project, which I'll define later, for a couple of years. I've had an NEH, Digital Humanities Startup Grant, and then most recently an IMLS grant. And so Cliff very nicely invited me to come and talk about the issue. And what my colleagues and I have been doing in regards to it. So a little bit from that abstract here. Let's just clean this up. Today's music and movie industry is increasingly favoring online-only direct-to-consumer distribution. No longer can librarians expect to collect music recordings or videos on tangible media or first-sale doctrine applies. Instead, at an ever-increasing rate, librarians are discovering that music and video recordings are only available via such online distribution sites as iTunes and Amazon. These distributors require individual purchasers to agree to restrictive end-use life-saving agreements, or ULIS, that explicitly forbid institutional ownership and such core library functions such as lending. So I'm going to run through this in my overview for today. And I also like to keep this as conversational as possible. We're pretty small groups, so feel free to interrupt me. It's pretty warm in here, isn't it? I'm trying to keep most of my clothes on. Definition. I'll give you a definition of what we're talking about. Lay out the issues as best I can. Give you an overview of the NEH and IMLS grants. Talk about some of the initiatives we've looked at as part of those grants. And then, most importantly, in my opinion, is getting your feedback on some ways forward with the issue. So what is online-only media? Refers to media that is only available on license, as a licensed download or stream via the sites I just mentioned like iTunes or Amazon. And it's not available on DVD or CD or even vinyl. And it's not necessarily born digital media either. It could be turn of the century, turn of the previous century media that's been re-released as something to purchase on iTunes. In fact, the Library of Congress just released some recordings from the American Folklife Center on iTunes exclusively. And as we know, I'm preaching to the choir here. You probably already know this. But online-only media is growing phenomenon lauded by many for its convenience and omnipresent accessibility. As we see here, in 2014, on-demand streaming services declined while CD sales plummeted. That's surprising. And vinyl has eaked up a little bit, but it's only with a pretty small niche hipster market. That doesn't really count as much as I love it. And in the world of video, we're seeing something very similar. A recent study indicates that by 2016, streaming will exceed Blu-ray and DVD sales. And then by 2017, streaming sales will also eclipse movie box office sales or revenues. And that sounds great on the surface, of course, for many consumers. But as librarians and archivists, I do think we have something to be concerned about. Northwestern University music librarian DJ Hook was among the first to raise concerns about online-only music, in particular in 2009, with this issue of American libraries. In his article, Hook described his attempt to purchase an online-only Ryan Eno album and also an LA Philharmonic do-it-and-mell recording on iTunes. But he read the terms of use, unlike most people. Being a librarian, though, he read the good librarian. He read the terms of use and checked with his campus council and they decided that they couldn't actually agree to the terms of use. Hook went to Apple at that point and asked them to represent it from Apple about their opinion. And they wrote back saying that the terms of use dictate that iTunes is for personal use only and that libraries are not permitted to purchase music through the iTunes store. A few other points from his article that are pretty interesting. He talks about subscription services, such as Noxos or Friegel. But he points out and I agree with him that they come over some of their own issues, of course, too. They require us to compromise collection development, kind of buy what you get and you get a big package of stuff. And then there's the issue of preservation. So we're not really fulfilling our mission to preserve this material. And I like this quote, if libraries are unable to acquire, download only sound files, and this is download, of course, this 2009 was talking about, so streaming is really taken off since then. The preservation of our culture is left in the hands of record companies. So what does that mean? Well, here's a picture of the unfortunate universal studio this fire in 2008, in which nearly 100% of the archive prints that were kept on the lot were destroyed, along with 5% of the universal music groups recordings, including primarily big band jazz and the decalabel. And then also videotape recordings of many TV shows were also lost. So the challenge to sum it up is that libraries are not able to purchase and collect online-only music and video due to these ULAs. And they forbid institutional ownership and lending. And by way of proof, I want to visit a handful of industry ULAs, which have the power to double as a naturopathic remedy for insomnia, especially with this heat. But they do have a side effect of increasing your irritability. So here we go. I won't read through them verbatim. And you've seen them before. iTunes, I highlighted the part in red that makes me irritable. You may not rent lease, lend, sell, redistribute, so forth. And it's a violation of the rights of the licensure, et cetera. Amazon, very similar, personal, non-commercial entertainment use, not available for any kind of redistribution. And they actually say he may not lend explicitly. Spotify is very similar, non-commercial, personal, again. Can't share your password or your account with anyone else. Ardio is also similar. No renting, no leasing, no adapting. And finally, Netflix, which also says you may not distribute, modify. And it's for your personal, non-commercial use. So the takeaway is this. ULIS forbid libraries from buying, lending, or saving content for future generations of listeners, viewers, or scholars. And if the mission, at least in part of research libraries, is to preserve and provide access to materials for future generations, what are we to do? Relinquish our mission. Not quite yet. Maybe go and get a couple of grants to look at the issue. So here we go. So first grant we receive, Anne Lally, who's a colleague of mine at the University of Washington. We recoup PIs on a digital humanities startup grant to look at the issue. And I think it was kind of unusual. It wasn't the typical digital humanities grant. But they gave us some funding to hold a meeting and kind of write up a white paper on the issue. And then the second one, which we're just wrapping up now, is with Judy Sal at the Music Library at the University of Washington. And that was for quite a bit more money. Cliff was involved with that. And some consultants, too, were able to hire. And they each wrote position papers on the topic. And we held several meetings as part of that. So let's dive in. I'll give you a little more detail here. So the NEH grant, we essentially had a meeting of Music Librarians. So we're all in agreement and on the same page, just kind of echoing each other in a sense. But it was good to at least pull ourselves together and articulate some of our concerns on the topic. As part of this, I also contacted Apple and Amazon Reps and knew somebody at Amazon. And they were in the digital download service. And they asked their colleagues. And essentially, they came back. Both Apple and Amazon said they were sympathetic, but that the ULAs were dictated by the content industry so there was nothing they really could do. So the next, I thought, well, let's go to the content industry, those providers. And I contacted the LA Philharmonic about the Duda Mel recording. And they ended up very quickly sending me to a Deutsche Grammaphone in Germany and then bounced me back to a universal music group in Santa Monica. And at first they said there was nothing they could do. That was it. No institutional use allowed. But then they kind of started to think about it. And they agreed that they would license us up to 25% of the material on the album. For no more than two years worth of use. And then the processing fee would be $250. And then this other licensing fee would be more than $250 on top of that. So we declined to pursue that. Didn't seem very tenable. But a good exercise anyway. And then the IMLS grant, there's a lot of text on the slide. I'm not going to read everyone's names, but I wanted to give everyone some credit here for participating in the grant. There are a lot of people helping out. Some people you may recognize. And as I said, we hired consultants to help us articulate the issue in more depth and actually propose solutions to the problem. I tried but failed to recruit industry lawyers to help us out. More than a couple said it would be a conflict of interest to work on this grant. Though they too were very supportive in a sense of the issue and understood it. So we had three meetings. One at the Music Library Association in Atlanta. Kind of a town hall style meeting where we got everyone to contribute their ideas. Then one before ALA in Vegas where the consultants and the participants sat down and worked out over the day some issues and some approaches to the problem. And then just a few weeks ago, Judy Selle and I presented at the National Recording Preservation Board meeting at the Library of Congress. And they gave us some spot on their agenda so that we could talk about the issue. And that was Sam Berlowski, his chair of that was instrumental in making that happen. And that was really great because we had a record industry representatives there. So let's take a look at some of the approaches that our consultants recommended. And I should just say that there's not, no one agreed on one single approach to the issue of course. It's really like a whole bucket full of solutions or approaches to try to remedy this. So beginning with a copyright reform. Many of our attorneys spoke about the possibility of copyright reform and creating a library exemption in copyright code that allows for non-profit and educational use of this material. I heard that the industry has effective lobbyists so that might be a challenge. And then there's a real concern held by many at ALA that if you start opening up the law and try to make something that seems library friendly, you'll actually end up with something that's much more restrictive. And I think we've seen that to a degree with the section 108 working group. I should note that Eric Harberson from the University of Colorado is actually working with his local congressperson to craft some legislation to do exactly this to create copyright reforms. And I'm not sure how far along they've gotten but they actually have some text in mind. We'll see how far that goes. Another approach recommended by some of our consultants in particular Eli Nyberger from Ann Arbor District Library. He just said, forget the music industry. Just leave them, they're doomed and work with artists and distributors. They're willing to work with you. So do direct licensing with bands and independent distributors and collect their material for your collections and provide free and open access to these materials for your users. And so he's worked with Magnatune among others. That's some weird stuff here. To do this and other, so public libraries are really leading this effort, including of course Ann Arbor but also Iowa City and then my hometown of Santa Cruz is also piloting this kind of project. And so there are challenges here, of course, as with any option. Possibly a limited catalog of artists who are willing to do this and then it's time consuming but then again, I think any of these options that can be time consuming including the grants themselves. So what does direct licensing look like? I'm not gonna read three of these but Eli was nice enough to provide kind of a general overview of what he tries to get when he licenses something from a musician or from an independent distributor. And then we've had some success locally in Seattle with a sub-pop records and we were able to license this album from La Luz which is a local band and this is gonna be your musical interlude for this presentation. That's if I can play music with a PowerPoint which can always be a joke. I tested it so many times. Oh, failure. All right, forget it. They're kind of like an indie surf rock all-female band and they've had most of their stuff on sub-pop which also releases a lot of vinyl but a few of their recordings are only available through iTunes. So sub-pop has been open to discussing the issue and thinking about ways to work with libraries pretty much kind of on an individual one-on-one basis. And then Vimeo, also here's an exciting screenshot of my email. There was a movie that we wanted to purchase as part of course reserves and it was only available as a download on Vimeo and so I wrote to Vimeo and they basically said just go directly at first they said no, there's no way that you can collect this work and I wrote back and said isn't there anyway and they said we'll just go directly to the artist themselves or the filmmaker in this case themselves which I believe we did. So even the industry is also suggesting that we work directly with the artists. A lot of the, it's a bit of a creative, there we go. A lot of the consultants at our pre-ALA meeting also recommended doing more in the way of public relations and public pressure, communicating the issue, doing something like the read posters but listen perhaps. And let people know that libraries want to pay for this material, we don't want to pirate it, we're not interested in that. What's more, not only do we want to pay for it, we want to keep paying to preserve it and to provide access to it which is value added to this material of course and in my mind that we're preserving it oftentimes for the record companies that made it originally or produced it originally they'll come back to us looking for this material. So a lot of consultants suggested gotta do a better job at PR. And then some consultants suggested we just break the law. Well, not exactly break the law but really flex 107 and 108 and it exercised those rights even though this is really contract law that we're talking about. Many consultants still thought that there were ways of, there we go, ways of using 108, 107 to acquire, preserve and provide access to this material. So Brandon Butler in particular talked about open 107 and 108 as being open and flexible doctrines that may be helpful in the situation even though or precisely because it was not foreseen by lawmakers and then here are a couple of possible applications of both 107 and 108. So if we came into possession of some files and the terms of use didn't explicitly forbid preservation or lending or access, then perhaps we could provide access and preserve them in our libraries. Secondly, fair use could also be asserted if we purchased, if we acquired files but then we also got say public performance rights for that music or some other kind of separate license that gave us the right to make this music available, then that may actually protect us. We say, well, we had to actually download and buy it in order to perform it. Does that make sense? Yeah, okay. So you have to choose your, I think what they're saying is kind of have to choose your battle carefully and look at the terms of use. And if you go to a test case, choose a license, choose a ULA that's really kind of has some gray area. And this is a quote from Corrin McSherry from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She was also one of our consultants. And she just writes that libraries are simply attempting to fulfill their mission of preserving our common culture in our highly, we are highly sympathetic defendants where the purpose of the use is to archive music and make it available to patrons for non-commercial research purposes and in particular where the copyright owners refuse to license it for said purposes, a court is likely to find the use to be a lawful, fair use. So she's really saying, let's go get sued. And so what would this look like in a library setting? I know many libraries already lend iPods or iPads with eBooks, is that right? People are still doing that. So why not music? Those two have, many of those eBooks have restrictive view lists. So we could just do it with music and movies too. That's one possibility. And then we have these archival jukeboxes, as we call them at UW, where we have library use only collections that have lots of problematic rights issues. So we could put recordings on there to make it super inconvenient for our users, but at least allow them to come into the library and listen to them, and perhaps take it into the classroom too. Another thread among our consultants was preservation and really to highlight the fact that libraries are here to preserve this material. And so we discussed possibilities of putting it into deep-in or locks, maybe even create a regional network of archives in coordination with Library of Congress where regional centers were collecting music that's representative of their area, provide access to that music on their premises, but then uploaded also to the Library of Congress or some other entity where it's all preserved as one giant cache. And again, there are challenges, of course, with preservation, as we've heard today, can't really sustain preservation without access of some kind, and it's expensive. So the Music Library Association is in conjunction with this grant creating a kind of a statement of best practices. And this is what they're ending up with. And they hope to influence, of course, the practice of music librarians around the country. So they're looking at crafting model legislation, creating this lock-style archive, raising awareness via PR campaign, and then kind of trying to keep a list of this online-only media, which I think it's gonna be very challenging to do. And they purposely sidestep the issue of fair use completely. And I don't think they wanted to wade into that issue and start recommending fair use of this material for better or for worse, they avoided it. And then, as I mentioned, we had a meeting with the National Recording Preservation Board a few weeks ago, and that was really positive because they actually formed a committee, a subcommittee, to look at this issue, and then we have representatives from NARIS on there. So I'm cautiously optimistic that we may be able to work something out for these larger reporting industry like ULAs, but we'll see how far we go with that. And that's really all I have today. I would love, though, to get your suggestions and feedback on the issue. And what you think about this, is it something to be concerned about? Is it, is everything gonna come out in vinyl, so no big deal? Will libraries start to be concerned once e-books kind of hit the same issue? Thank you.