bombs in bottles
Finding myself today at the intersection of three very different ideas about whether or not "information should be free":
What's sticking for me today is this: Libraries and librarians are committed to protecting freedom of access to the information we collect, catalog, and provide. Yet librarians also tend to staunchly defend copyright, both as a broad concept and in particular instances.
"Generative AI violates copyright by plagiarizing what it scrapes from the Internet" is a prime example. Of all the arguments about AI I've seen go by on various librarian listservs in the past six months, this one has the most staying power among members of the profession. Similarly, when Trump won in November 2024 and librarians got bombarded by folks panic-ordering us to make digital copies of all the "banned books" before the administration burns them, librarians in those Reddit threads and other social media conversations tended to fall back on "that's a violation of copyright."
I'm wondering: Why are librarians so pro-intellectual property law? Not just in general, but in specific? Why are we so okay with backing copyright law as it exists currently?
I haven't taken a side in this fight yet. I have a long history of dealing with copyright in my work, both for written works and for music (where copyright is at its most byzantine). I understand how copyright law works, generally, and I can debate at length about the pros and cons of the current US system.
It's weird to me that librarians are so pro-copyright. I'm trying to unpack why it's weird.
It feels oddly...conservative, in a profession that skews not only liberal but straight-up subversive. (Yes, the middle-aged cat lady in the strawberry print cardigan is undermining the current social order on the daily.)
Are we just "rendering to Caesar" here, recognizing that paying due homage to IP is our tithe to the US's only true deity, The Economy? Do we do it out of an understanding that holding the IP line is required for the powers that be to allow us to continue to exist at all?
Is it a matter of quality control? If so, why do we focus on copyright and not, say, on the pedigrees of publishing houses? I mean, we do focus on the pedigrees of publishing houses - I've seen acquisitions policies that explicitly skip over vanity publishers or self-publishing setups like Ingram and Snowfall, for instance. But at the end of the day, we put more stock in reviews and awards than we do publishing imprints. A book from one of the Big Five can still be crap, and a book from a small indie outfit can still be outstanding.
Are we protecting our own sanity? Copyright, after all, creates a single "official" or "default" version - the one to which copyright attached - which becomes the one we can acquire and catalog with impunity. We don't have to worry about cataloging and tracking the infringers if we can dismiss them as illegal or inappropriate. Nor do we need to worry about knowing enough about them to know which variant to recommend to patrons.
I'm still turning this over in my head. But it feels like a weirdly conservative kernel to find in an otherwise staunchly pro-freedom of access profession. Makes me wonder if we're not voting for the leopard at this point.
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