“In the struggle to define new working relationships between publishers and libraries, there’s no lack of openness to new options. Just a few days ago, Jeff Goldenson of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab in the Harvard Law School proposed Library License as a way for publishers to grant non-commercial lending rights to libraries through a licensing framework.
“Explicitly modeled on Creative Commons licenses with a similar eye towards simplicity and granularity, Library Licenses could be constructed in several different ways. The most simple example is a straightforward grant, where libraries could acquire and then lend ebooks after they had been on the market for a period of time ranging from instantaneous to some number of years. A somewhat more refined version would grant “performance” licenses, where grants to libraries were triggered once sales fell below a specified threshold.
“A slightly different variation would be a license that was provided to a specific institution, for example, the Digital Public Library of America. This kind of institutional license could be combined with a time-based or performance-based license, so that titles could be granted to the DPLA after five years (for example). Any number of permutations are possible. One attractive aspect of the Library License approach is in the acknowledgment that library uses are unique in the book market, and currently we have inadequate means of carving out an exception for them from the commercial fray.”
From Peter Brantley’s post on PWxyz, Library License: A suggested framework