Hi Gabriele,
The quoted law just says that public libraries in Italy have the right (or better: the duty) to ask reproduction fees in order to cover the expenses involved in the reproduction process.
I suppose that eventually this might be handed over to the lawyers to discuss, or those with some insight into the legalities — so let me say outright that I am not a lawyer and do not speak for the website.
The subsequent discussion on the
thread you mentioned indicated that while the right (or duty) to ask for fees existed, there seemed to be no method for it to be successfully enforced (in the U.S., at the very least). If there are rights involved, it is owing to separate domain-specific laws involving reproductions, with an unusual intersection of intellectual property rights and public domain works. (This was clearly spelled out as three separate types of intellectual property identified by Choralia in the first reply there.)
Our digital library is intended as an extension of our physical library: that is, you can read online, wherever in the world, our digitized documents at no charge, exactly like when you sit in our reading room. If reading the document online is not enough for you and you want to download a document from our digital library you are, in our view, asking us for a reproduction, and this is the reason why the library is asking you for a fee payment.
The method used by Generoso to make a permanent copy from a viewed image is possible because displaying an image on a remote computer screen (whether or not there is a convenient “link” to “download” the image) creates a digital copy
anyway : bureaucratically, if a payment was demanded then it probably should have been requested at a point
prior to the library server allowing the client to see the image. Again, the fact that Generoso or any other user of the image chooses to use a screen capture or some other method to make a permanent copy of an image of a public domain manuscript or painting that they see over the internet probably cannot be proscribed as illegal in all possible jurisdictions. An agreement on the part of the viewer to respect the relevant Italian laws when they look at one of the library’s images again looks only weakly enforceable.
As a result, this looks like the case of the horse and the unbolted stable door — if the idiom is unknown in Italy, I’m sure someone will give a more appropriate simile.
It is the nature of the internet that while setting up the technological infrastructure has large costs associated with it, the generation of extra copies is in effect extremely low cost: essentially, the per usage cost of the infrastructure support, bandwidth and server utilisation for a single page view is driven sharply down over a very large number of hits on the server. Administratively, it is arguable that the library should be making reproductions for
itself as a means of preservation and or restoration of its holdings as an act of responsible stewardship of its treasures: if some terrible fire, flood or other disaster destroyed the physical library but left an off-site backup of the stored data and images unharmed, then those digital copies might be the only remaining records.
Obviously if the system of paying
before viewing were in place it might arguably reduce the level of use of the system (indeed it could be argued this would have a much more negative effect than the existence of some PDFs being made freely available at IMSLP). The question then should be asked, are the digital reproductions being charged at a fair rate compared to physical printed copies, or is the digital system being designed to essentially pay the way for the preservation efforts and the infrastructure?
Interesting questions. I gather the system has a few problems currently:
At the moment, in fact, due to bureaucratic problems (
http://www.consmilano.it/index.php?id=370 ... that's Italy :-) payment of such fee is not possible, and for this reason download is not possible too, but the store system will be available again before September.
So perhaps this indicates these issues needed to be considered a little bit more carefully. One method to differentiate the freely viewable image from the purchased downloadable copy might be to limit the screen resolution of unpurchased internet copies to say, 300% rather than the full 800% resolution, if the library wishes to insist on asserting its right to charge for reproductions.
Best regards, Philip