Staincliffe, Paul (2006) The nonsense of copyright in libraries : digital information and the right to copy. In Proceedings LIANZA Conference 2006, Wellington (New Zealand).
Abstract
The notion of copyright is deeply entrenched in the psyche of librarians, who remain one of the few groups who consistently support or uphold it. Given the growth of digital information and consequential change in the behaviour of information creators and users the paper posits that copyright administration in libraries has become a cumbersome burden whose “time has come”. Changes in information provision by libraries towards delivering more digital information have ironically highlighted the paradox libraries face between providing the best possible service and upholding copyright. The notion that there exists in the digital environment a “right to copy” is put forward. Copyright is legally complicated, controversial, subject to a number of misunderstandings and generally not fully understood even by the librarians whose daily tasks include administering it. To better understand the current status of copyright and its impact on libraries the notion of copyright is briefly outlined, along with what exactly copyright is, its historical roots and its suitability in the current environment. In examining the legislation the paper critiques its aims and how it fails in these; compares arguments in favour and against its retention, investigates how it serves to restrict creativity rather than encourage it and in closing suggests why libraries should abandon the struggle to uphold copyright. Examples from New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK are used to highlight inconsistencies that support the argument that copyright in the digital environment is a nonsense that no longer works.
So at my house I have two computers. One is my laptop, the other an old desktop without a monitor which I use as a simple server. I download Bittorrents on it, and it serves up video and music over Samba to mine and Xuan-Yen’s laptop.
Yet, what if I am in the wild and I need to listen to music? I could just copy all my tracks to my laptop, but what an unnecessary use of space. I could cue up VLC to send music, but that would take too much configuration each time.
Enter edna, the simple MP3 streaming server. A small Open Source python script, after a one time configuration it sits on a port and waits. When you point your browser to the server and port, you get a nice HTML list of all your directories. If you place albums in directories as I do, they are playable with one click. Clicking opens a m3u playlist file depending on what subset of tracks you selected (one track, one directory, multiple recursive directories; ordered or random). Then your default music player opens and plays the tracks. [I had a edna screenshot here but removed it for plausible deniability.]
If that wasn’t easy enough, enter Songbird. Songbird is an Open Source music jukebox (like iTunes), actually based on Firefox. While it is still struggling to reach a good level of stability and responsiveness (although it is totally usable now), what it has that iTunes lacks is a web browser. Big deal? Well, whenever you browse to a website, Songbird cues up whatever MP3s it finds there and puts them on a streaming playlist (with an option to download). While it comes with a directory of preloaded sites, music stores and music blogs, what happens if we point Songbird at edna?
That’s right, it is as if my library were right with me. All the tracks get loaded automatically and I just press play. It’s all self-contained, don’t even have to open Firefox if I didn’t want to, and I don’t have to deal with another media player.
If I had to recommend one, edna is the most wonderful of the two. Songbird is great, and getting better, but edna is just pure simplicity: it does what I want, does nothing else, and does it rock solid.
[I've removed the address to my computer in the screenshots. Sorry if you wanted a test]
