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Swedish Library Offers MP3s Online
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posted by mpawlo
on Tuesday February 24, @03:15AM
from the wonders-without-copyright dept.
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The municipal library of Lund, Sweden is offering downloadable MP3 files on its home page. Illegal and Outrageous? Have the library officials been paying to much attention to Lessig during Lessig's Stockholm visit? Nothing of the kind.
The library is offering 362 works of classical composers, who passed on more than seventy years ago. Yes, the copyright has expired, even in Sweden, even under the strict new European Copyright Directive (deriving from the same sources as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act). The library is co-operating with eClassics.com, the proprietor of the digital rights to the Naxos catalogue of classical music.
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The aim of the library is to become a digital portal for media such as music and books. Just like a library, only in the 21st century. It may sound like a dream from the dotcom past, but this time the web portal might actually work.
In order to download MP3s you need to have a library card with Lund's municipal library. A PIN number is printed on the back of the library card and used for login. You may burn your own CDs with the downloaded files, but the library does not, according to a news item in Swedish daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet, want you to spread the files on the Internet. I guess this is a condition stated by eClassics.com and Naxos to make the files available to the library and I guess (without being able to confirm it, not being a customer of Lund's municipal library) the condition is binding the customer through a clickwrap agreement.
One interesting issue is of course if the library may make such a demand for works that are no longer protected by copyrighted. Will the courts enforce such a condition and is the library - being a municipal library, funded by regional tax money - allowed to make the claim on behalf of the proprietor? Even though I applaud the decision to make the library a digital portal, I resent the way the claim is made on files that should be part of the commons. If contract law is used and enforced this way, Lessig's complaints over the Mickey Mouse extension - fifty years goes seventy - is nothing. Contract law may make copyright perpetual, should this work in practice. But then again, I doubt it, without having precedents to back me up.
Read more in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (however only Swedish).
Visit the home page of Lunds Stadsbibliotek.
More information regarding Lund's Stadsbibliotek.
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