INTERVIEW
Know your rights: the key to eBook access
Maintaining the status quo for public libraries – to build collections, preserve and lend them – is now seen as a radical and frightening mission, according Ben White, PhD researcher at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management, Bournemouth University and co-founder of KnowledgeRights21. Here he speaks to Rob Mackinlay about why not challenging the methods used by publishers to protect their content will damage not only libraries, but also threatens research and innovation.
“PUBLISHERS can’t refuse to sell paper books to libraries, but they can and do refuse to sell them eBooks. And all we want to do is to be allowed to do what we’ve always done, to keep the status quo, to be allowed to build collections, preserve and lend, so it is strange that the solution sounds a bit frightening and radical,” says Ben White who has been immersed in the legal minutiae of intellectual property across Europe for decades. He was Head of Intellectual Property at the British Library from 2005 to 2019 and now, while researching for a PhD in AI and intellectual property, he chairs LIBER’s Copyright and Legal Matters Working Group and has an advisory position at the UK Intellectual Property Office, LACA and IFLA. He sees licensing as an existential threat to libraries, saying: “I’m serious when I say we’re looking at the death of the public library as we know it. Digital has changed the dynamics because rights holders have decided that they will not rely on copyright law in the digital age. This has undermined libraries’ position in law and their societal function. We’re just asking for those posi- tions to be reinstated by allowing libraries to purchase, lend and preserve digital con- tent as they have done for millennia.” The law, or our understanding of it, is the
34 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Senior Reporter, Information Professional.
biggest threat to a fragile status quo, Ben says: “The goal posts have been moved, sometimes by licensing and sometimes by less-than-helpful law changes, particularly in the UK.”
Which is why he, Barbara Stratton – LACA’s (UK Libraries and Archives Copy- right Alliance) international spokesperson, Stephen Wyber from IFLA and Vanessa Proudman from SPARC Europe, are setting up the KnowledgeRights21 programme (KR21). KR21 will operate in Europe, including the UK, and has already received €3m funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin in what Ben describes as “the biggest grant ever for libraries to work on intellectual
June 2021
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