Not exact matches
Besides, what's legal or not is going to depend on the
country or
countries considered and your questions touches upon several distinct
issues (
copyright, public funding...).
Is it a
country specific
copyright issue?
Works
issued later in the 20th century might still be under
copyright in certain
countries.
One way this
issue is managed is by partnering with an e-book distributor such as OverDrive, which manages an array of digital content for 18,000 libraries and schools in 21
countries, including 15,000 in the United States.47 OverDrive generally charges public libraries a set fee for use of their checkout system, as well as a fee per title for patrons to borrow.48 The OverDrive catalog for libraries now includes 700,000
copyrighted e-book, audiobook, music, and video titles in 52 languages.
The study discusses
issues from the foundation of library exceptions to their prevalence, scope and structure, and the nature of the various exceptions in the
copyright legislations of all WIPO member
countries.
Basically, you have to comply with everbody's
copyright law, when you operate a web page, unless there's an
issue with a strange law in a
country that has no legal reach into the UK (no treaty governing enforcement of foreign judgments).
The legality of file sharing has been hotly debated in this
country for many years, and the
issue boiled over again recently with the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) trading pot shots in the press with
copyright luminaries like Michael Geist and Howard Knopf over both the legality of the practice and its effect on the recording industry.