Medical Library Association | Public Policy : Digital Rights Issues

Advocacy & Policy

Digital Rights Issues

Joint Library Letter to Senator Brownbeck

September 24, 2003

Senator Sam Brownback
U.S. Senate
303 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-0001

Dear Senator Brownback:

The Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association are pleased to endorse the "Consumers, Schools and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act of 2003," S. 1621. The bill seeks to address the growing confusion and inconvenience for many sectors of the American public as access and redistribution control technologies are introduced in the marketplace.

The library community strongly supports your efforts to encourage private industry to voluntarily undertake steps to protect the legal, reasonable, and customary practices of end-users, including libraries and educational institutions, with regard to the digital media products that they lawfully acquire. Similarly, our institutions, and the American public, would benefit greatly from your proposed prohibition on access control technology or redistribution control technology in digital media products that would prevent consumers from donating digital media products they own to educational institutions and libraries.

In addition, we are pleased that your bill would promote consumer welfare, privacy, and safety by ensuring that the manufacturers of digital media products cannot require Internet access service providers, which are merely providing subscribers with transport for electronic communications, to disclose a subscriber's personal information, without due process and judicial scrutiny.

We look forward to the opportunity to work with you for passage of the "Consumers, Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act of 2003," which promotes access to information in the digital age.

Sincerely,

Susan Fox

Executive Director
American Association of Law Libraries

Keith Fiels

Executive Director
American Library Association

Duane E. Webster

Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries

Carla J. Funk

Executive Director
Medical Library Association

Janice R. Lachance

Executive Director
Special Libraries Association

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in North America. ARL programs and services promote equitable access to and effective use of recorded knowledge in support of teaching, research, scholarship, and community service. Contact: Prue Adler (202-296-2296)

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is a nonprofit educational organization with 5,000 members dedicated to providing leadership and advocacy in the field of legal information and information policy. Contact: Mary Alice Baish (202-662-9200)

The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit educational organization of over 64,000 librarians, library trustees, and other friends of libraries dedicated to improving library services and promoting the public interest in a free and open information society.
Contact: Miriam Nisbet (202-628-8410)

The Medical Library Association (MLA) is a nonprofit, educational organization of more than 1,100 institutions and 3,600 individual members in the health sciences information field, committed to educating health information professionals, supporting health information research, promoting access to the world's health information, and working to ensure that the best health information is available to all. Contact: Mary Langman (312-419-9095 x.27)

The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is an international professional association serving more than 14,000 members of the information profession, including special librarians, information managers, brokers, and consultants.
Contact: Doug Newcomb (202-939-3676)