E-books and a principle of technological neutrality

Public Lending Right (PLR) and Educational Lending Right (ELR) schemes are remunerating Australian authors and publishers for making available their books in Australian libraries. However, e-books are currently not included under these schemes. With the expansion of the e-book market and e-lending services within Australian libraries, it has been suggested that the schemes should be technologically neutral and extend to include e-books. After an extensive analysis of the technological neutrality principle, this article concludes this principle does not impose a legal obligation to extend PLR and ELR to e-books since traditional lending and e-lending are not functionally and economically equivalent services. Nevertheless, such an extension could be favourable when taking into account other economic, cultural and political circumstances.