http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.

David

They’re not usually bothered about grainy, blurry photos from camera phones that end up on Facebook pages (or they accept there’s nothing they can do to stop them). They are bothered about commercial-quality reproductions that they don’t control, so sometimes they say you’re allowed to use a camera, but you mustn’t use flash and/or a tripod. That usually limits the quality of photos to below what most people will pay for.

My feeling is any right of action would rest in contact law. Basically, the institution has the right not to lend a book that it owns, and is offering a particular eBook to individuals only under the terms of a contact.

On the face of it, such an agreement would be enforceable.

These terms restrict the use of the material loaned by the library. But these restrictions only extend to material loaned by the library: it can not extend to the same material if obtained from a separate source.

There is also the “database right”, which resembles a “sweat of the brow” provision. It lasts 15 years after the database was first made public, and exists “if a substantial amount of work was required by the maker of the database to obtain the data in the database, to verify the data, or to present the database’s contents.” It “is infringed if most or all of a database is extracted and reused without the consent of the owner, or if small portions of a database are repeatedly extracted and reused without the consent of the owner.”

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_the_United_Kingdom )

At least some of the early lending libraries charged a fee for borrowing books. They’re free nowadays, of course, but most of the ones I’ve visited charge for borrowing other items, such as CDs and DVDs.