The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

As a student I've spent a lot of time in libraries these past few years. But they were all reference libraries with lots of non-circulating tomes - nothing to be checked out for a bit of pleasure reading. It was rare that I ever graced the doorway of an ordinary public lending library.

Which seems strange given how much I liked libraries when I was young. My local library, like most of public libraries I've been to, always had a particular ambience: a soft quietness punctuated with the soft, rhythmic sounds of the checkout counter. (My youth predates barcode scanners; in my day checkout was all handled with removable cards that were date-stamped by a machine that made a wonderful "thunk.") There has always been something about the atmosphere of the library that made it an enjoyable place to be physically.

And then there were the books themselves, enabling lots and lots of pleasure reading. An early reader - I think I was four when I got my first library card - I tore through books voraciously. But somewhere along the line that enthusiasm for gratuitous reading dried up, probably around the same time that any time I might have had for it also disappeared. In recent years any pleasure reading that may have taken place has therefore been limited to blog posts and periodicals. Except for the occasional Harry Potter book I don't think there's been a speck of fiction, and certainly nothing that would have required more than a few pages' worth of an attention span.

But as my life has recently gotten increasingly stabilized more and more time has opened up for this thing known as "pleasure reading." Lately I'd even begun to entertain the notion of actually coming up with books I'd like to read. However I was nearly stymied in this effort when I realized I didn't have the financial means to acquire all these titles from Amazon. What to do, what to do...

It was almost a bolt from the blue when it dawned on me that there was an alternative: the library. It turns out my town - like so many other towns across America - in fact had a library. And, as a resident, I was entitled to a library card, simply by showing proof of my address. Moreover, and more importantly, with this card I was apparently allowed to take books home!

Conceptually I understand how this works. After all, I used to do it all the time. But even this week when I deigned to checkout no fewer than three books I still felt like I was pulling a fast one when they told me I could indeed take all these books home for three weeks, could call to renew them if I wanted to keep them longer, and could do this all for free!

I don't mean to sound facetious, but so rarely had I visited libraries in recent years that I'd pretty much forgotten that they were there and that they worked this way. More seriously, though, I think I'd started to absorb all the rhetoric of the content cartels that if you are going to enjoy someone's creative work you must have paid for it. Enjoying anything without paying for it according to them is *stealing*.

So the other day when I went to the library and checked out my books I felt distinctly embarrassed, like I was doing something wrong. In fact even taking the three felt distinctly gluttonous. I was practically furtive with guilt as I traveled its aisles searching for all of them. It felt like such a foreign experience, not just because it had been so long since I'd last done it that I'd gotten out of the habit, but because of how much I've passively absorbed the idea that what I was doing was somehow ripping off the author.

Which is, of course, utter nonsense. Public libraries exist for exactly this purpose, so that all people, regardless of their means, can enjoy the creative works our copyright system is designed to foster. In fact libraries exemplify the raison d'etre for having a copyright system in the first place. It does no good to promote the sciences and useful arts if people can't then freely enjoy the results. But in a system where all access to creative works depends on payment, that societal benefit can't be realized, which defeats the purpose of having a copyright system at all. Its object is not just to encourage people to create things; the object is to make sure that society can benefit from their having been created.

Ben Franklin, father of the American library system, understood how important this unfettered access was. From what I remember reading long ago he had some important ideas about how and why we should have public libraries, ideas which have increasingly been ignored in the rush to commercialize all consumption of creative works. There is, I'm sure, much more to say about his attitude and how it needs to be included in any modern dialog on copyright policy, but I'll need to research it further before I can articulate it more fully.

Research which I can certainly do - at the library.