Fight for Your Right to Digitize with New Zine

What if digital library lending wasn’t just a right covered by a narrow section of copyright law and restrictive licensing agreements? What if, instead, we could expand digital lending rights into the areas of free speech, disability rights, state sovereignty, and more?

Know Your Rights: Radical Digital Lending for Libraries, out now from Amanda Levendowski, Becky Chambers, and the Intellectual Property and Information Policy (iPIP) Clinic, aims to answer just such questions. The zine expands our understanding of what copyright law entails and introduces novel ways to think about library lending and civil rights.

Using novel and new legal concepts and theories, the zine identifies red flags and offers suggestions for contract language that protects the rights of your patrons from contract preemption.

• Does your contract override fair use and thus inhibit free speech? Make sure you have a Fair Use Savings Clause!
• Does your contract restrict equal access by prohibiting forms of digital lending? The Americans with Disabilities Act may have your back!
• And hey, is your library an “arm of the state” under the 11th Amendment? That might give you rights, too!

While the zine’s authors note some strategies are untested and do not constitute legal advice, they do offer libraries a way to think about digital lending, library rights, and the civil rights of library patrons in an expansive manner. Rather than thinking only about the things libraries can’t do under the iron grip of contract law, they focus on all the things libraries are meant to do–and how the law can help.

Know Your Rights is part of the work of the Library Futures Research Network and was made possible by a generous grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.