[HN Gopher] My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the I...
___________________________________________________________________
My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive
Author : edward
Score : 174 points
Date : 2020-07-23 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.archive.org)
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| It has been stated many times that if today's copyright laws had
| been in effect 200 years ago, US libraries would never have been
| allowed to exist. This situation looks to me like a fresh attempt
| by the beneficiaries of copyright law to destroy libraries in
| general; not just the IA.
|
| Between this fiasco and paywalls around scientific literature,
| it's becoming impossible for me to see publishers as anything
| other than cat-stroking Bond villains.
| murphy1312 wrote:
| And thats why i like libgen..
|
| havnt paid for a book in some time, cause most/all ebooks are
| overpriced af imo.
|
| And also how can i resell my ebooks? why would i pay the same
| price as a physical copy then..
| [deleted]
| Borlands wrote:
| IA is one of the most valuable resources on the web, and has been
| for quite a while. Hope they come out of this in a good way.
| jjcon wrote:
| Archive is clearly getting awfully nervous about the current
| lawsuits against them - I'm not sure this is going to do them any
| good though.
| kiba wrote:
| Whataboutism what?
|
| As far as I am concerned, we should be preserving knowledge and
| making it accessible to the public, not locking up knowledge
| forever.
| luckylion wrote:
| Should anyone get compensated for creating the knowledge? If
| you "lend out" unlimited copies for a single copy you own,
| that compensation gets pretty much limited to a single copy
| and thew few copies that friends, family and fans buy,
| doesn't it?
| kiba wrote:
| _Should anyone get compensated for creating the knowledge?_
|
| Look, do you want books to sit around uselessly not being
| read because everybody have to decide if they want to learn
| based on textbooks costing hundred of dollars?
|
| If you believe people should be compensated for creating
| knowledge, then buy a copy. I certainly do.
| abbub wrote:
| Within reason, sure? The idea that that compensation should
| exist in perpetuity is nonsense, particularly when the
| people who most often are the ones getting compensated
| aren't actually the one's responsible for the 'creation' in
| the first place. But let's be clear, people very seldom
| 'create' knowledge, they extend existing knowledge. That's
| one of the main reasons why the human race has gotten as
| far as we have. It's something Newton understood very well,
| and but modern hubris seems to disregard.
| luckylion wrote:
| > But let's be clear, people very seldom 'create'
| knowledge, they extend existing knowledge.
|
| That's semantics, you can just as easily frame that as
| "creating knowledge that will be added to the wealth of
| human knowledge".
|
| The point is that IA's idea about unlimited parallel
| lending (that is, essentially, a free download portal) is
| a problem unless there's a different way to compensate
| the authors & publishers. I don't think they suggested a
| different way and are trying to make it about "knowledge
| itself", and not their unilateral abandonment of laws &
| contracts.
| jjcon wrote:
| Despite the circlejerk, copyright helps push innovation and
| human knowledge by allowing IP to be profitable for those
| that spent time and resources creating.
|
| In a post-scarcity world though I would agree. Were not there
| yet though.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| Nothing makes me more angry than publishers who act like this. I
| regularly deal with the academic publishing industry and feel the
| pain of professors and students alike.
|
| The usual suspects are involved here -
|
| >I call on the executives at Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and
| Penguin Random House to come together with us to help solve the
| pressing challenges to access to knowledge during this pandemic.
|
| The publishing industry should take a cue from the gaming
| industry. Offer games at a reasonable price, make delivery easy
| and you only stand to profit. Services like Steam, GOG, Epic et
| al have massively reduced game piracy. If books were being sold
| for a couple of dollars each online, we would not need lawsuits
| like this.
| Qahlel wrote:
| Each industry always tries to hold on to max profits first.
| They don't have long term vision. They only have yearly balance
| sheets to care about.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Yearly? Pretty sure it's quarterly executive bonuses driving
| "The Market."
| wnevets wrote:
| > Services like Steam, GOG, Epic et al have massively reduced
| game piracy.
|
| This has absolutely been the case for me. I went from pirating
| everything to having so many games that I've paid for but
| haven't played yet. I'm sure part of it is being older with
| more disposable income and less free time but its just so much
| easier to buy the game on steam.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| You'd never know the difference between reducing game piracy
| and making games that cannot be pirated.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I don't know about others, but I almost exclusively play
| single-player local-only games these days. I don't have
| time for multiplayer games.
| bmarquez wrote:
| I'm confused by this article. As I remember Archive.org created a
| "National Emergency Library" basically breaking the 1:1 ratio of
| physical to digital books in Controlled Digital Lending, and
| allowing unrestricted use.
|
| The lawsuits were brought on June 1st, while the NEL was active.
| Are these lawsuits based on the CDL (which I personally support)
| or based on the NEL (which could be considered piracy)?
| pwinnski wrote:
| According to this post, they did not break the 1:1 ratio of
| physical to digital books, but expanded the pool of physical
| books to include those unlent at libraries across the country.
| That is certainly a debatable point, though.
|
| More to the point, the lawsuits are in effect and moving
| forward now, long after the NEL has ceased operations. They are
| directed at the CDL now.
| neltnerb wrote:
| It's less debatable if the libraries they partner with have
| records showing that said books were on the stacks behind
| locked doors and that they used these records to change the
| number of each title that can be loaned out.
|
| But it is still a pretty big shift in "how to count" that
| maybe would have gone over better if discussed first. But
| let's be realistic, the publishers would have done the same
| thing. They do it over and over again. A lawsuit seems like
| an unfortunate but probably only sane way to determine if
| this new counting method is legal enough to pass muster.
|
| I think counting books in libraries you have formally
| partnered with that are literally locked behind closed doors
| is extremely reasonable, but I also think copyrights should
| last like 20-30 years tops so I doubt that I'm in the
| mainstream.
| MayeulC wrote:
| > I also think copyrights should last like 20-30 years tops
|
| Seriously, I can't fathom why anyone would say that
| copyright should last longer than _patents_
| snapetom wrote:
| "We lent books that we own--at the Internet Archive and also
| the other endorsing libraries. These books were purchased and
| we knew they were not circulating physically."
|
| I read this as not increasing the book pool, but saying, "We
| own Book A. Our endorsing libraries have a total of 9 copies
| of Book A." However, instead of now offering 10 copies of
| Book A (which would have adhered to 1:1), they offered
| _unlimited_ loans, which certainly breaks 1:1.
| healsdata wrote:
| > According to this post, they did not break the 1:1 ratio of
| physical to digital book...
|
| I think the article _implies_ that without explicitly saying
| it. Their own announcements and FAQs about the NEL certainly
| didn 't say that. Is this controlled
| digital lending? No. It is close to
| controlled digital lending but is significantly different
| while waitlists are suspended. This library is being
| mobilized in response to a global pandemic and US national
| emergency. It shares aspects of controlled digital lending by
| controlling the physical book that was scanned and the
| redistribution of files through digital rights management
| software, but differs by having no waitlists for users
| borrowing books. Once the US national emergency is over and
| waitlists are back to their normal capacity, the service will
| return to full controlled digital lending.
|
| https://help.archive.org/hc/en-
| us/articles/360042654251-Nati...
| duxup wrote:
| It seems strange to loan a digital copy of ... someone else's
| book.
|
| As for the lawsuit going on after they stopped lending, well
| yeah the legal matter wasn't settled, so it can go on.
| jVinc wrote:
| Why should it seem strange? If you own stock I can lend it
| and sell it outright, and as long as I buy it back and
| provide it to you at the exit of the deal everything fine.
|
| If you own a book and I buy it but under a deal that
| defines you should keep it locked up in a safe. I still own
| it and have the right to lend it out digitally under CDL,
| yet it's physically with you. Why is it strange to forgo
| that madness and just let me provide digital lending
| services on your behalf? I mean just because it's my
| lending system doesn't mean I should need to own everything
| that's being lend out. Amazon doesn't have to own
| everything they sell.
| duxup wrote:
| Did they actually make that deal about not lending out
| other people's books?
|
| The article seems somewhat fuzzy on that...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ironically, the same thing happens with banks under a
| fractional reserve system. If the bank has $1000 in gold,
| they can lend out a virtual $9000 of that gold.
| quercusgrisea wrote:
| Why? A library lending someone a book belonging to a
| partner library because that library is not easily
| accessible to the lendee is common practice.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But usually a van physically transports the book to the
| lendee...
|
| I think the debate will be if making a digital copy and
| locking the original book in a safe is equivalent, and if
| I were a judge, I would say "no", because to say
| otherwise significantly weakens copyright in so many
| other ways.
| esrauch wrote:
| It seems like "faster vans" and "more effective nagging
| people to immediately return books they have already
| finished" would also weaken copyright under that line of
| argument; both allow you to loan the same copy to more
| people in sequence.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think they're going to win this one, either.
|
| Their best bet is probably to shame the publishers into
| dropping the suit, since they won't actually win if it
| comes down to it.
|
| I assume that's what this is meant to do: shame the
| publishers.
| duxup wrote:
| Hopefully they can just settle it in a way that IA goes
| on, but maybe with some better guidance at the top of IA.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If I were them, I would be signing perpetual data-sharing
| agreements with other sister companies and archives, and
| prepare to protect as much of the archive as possible in
| bankruptcy...
| thatcat wrote:
| Not really. As long as they are documented to be not in
| use, then the first party can lend them to whoever, and
| they can lend to whoever.. and so on as long as the chain
| links back to a real book paid for then it makes perfect
| technical sense.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > More to the point, the lawsuits are in effect and moving
| forward now, long after the NEL has ceased operations. They
| are directed at the CDL now.
|
| They are directed at the CDL as a target of opportunity.
| Their raison d'etre is for damages from the NEL period.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > According to this post, they did not break the 1:1 ratio of
| physical to digital books, but expanded the pool of physical
| books to include those unlent at libraries across the
| country.
|
| AIUI in all previous communications about the NEL, they
| _claimed_ they were doing the _former_ , i.e. "effectively"
| removing all limits to legitimate lending, regardless of the
| previous 1:1 ratio. But there was plenty of speculation that
| the real mechanism behind the NEL was the latter, i.e.
| partnering with outside libraries to _expand_ the physical
| holdings they could lend out via CDL.
| avemilia wrote:
| > Controlled Digital Lending is a respectful and balanced way to
| bring our print collections to digital learners. A physical book,
| once digital, is available to only one reader at a time.
|
| I never understood this "lending" practice. Can somebody explain?
| Sounds like obscurantism to me. So, if there is only one
| digitally scanned copy of an old book, only one person on planet
| Earth can borrow it? Because I remember a few times when I
| clicked on some document in IA and it said I couldn't read it
| "because it was borrowed".
| aw1621107 wrote:
| My impression was that "lending" digital copies this way is
| less likely to upset publishers, since it's more or less
| analogous to the already-acceptable practice of checking out
| physical books from a library.
|
| Allowing an arbitrary number of simultaneous readers would take
| better advantage of the digital format, but is much more likely
| to attract a lawsuit.
| rocqua wrote:
| It is using the existing carve out for library book lending in
| the physical world, and applying it to the digital world.
|
| So if the book is old enough to not be covered by copyright,
| they can distribute as many copies as the want. Otherwise, in
| order to use the library carve-out, they need to limit it to
| the number of physical copies taken out of circulation in
| actual libraries.
| dmurray wrote:
| > With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital
| world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on
| their terms; we can only preserve in ways for which they have
| granted explicit permission, and for only as long as they grant
| permission; and we cannot lend what we have paid for because we
| do not own it. This is not a rule of law, this is the rule by
| license. This does not make sense.
|
| If that's the main argument of IA, they'll have a tough time in
| court. It's reasonably well established that when it comes to
| intellectual property, you _can_ refuse to sell it, and only
| grant a limited license. With some small carve outs like the
| First Sale doctrine.
|
| They'll need a judge who is willing to legislate from the bench.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| It's in their best interest to settle in a capitulating way
| that will hurt them but not kill them. This might have to
| include a public apology that admits they're in the wrong
| because publishers can be petty about this type of thing.
|
| It doesn't seem like they're willing to do that, and while I
| agree with their viewpoint and the troubling future with
| licensing... it may be the hill they die on and I'm not sure
| it's worth the trade off in this specific case. IMO the
| Internet Archive is incredibly valuable to humanity.
|
| I admire them for taking the stance, but worry about their
| future. Hopefully they're playing tough publicly and aren't as
| willing to die by the sword in private.
| pyk wrote:
| Any way to refocus on the bully publishers? Boycott these
| folks (Hachette, Harpercollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random
| House) so they respect the public service IA is giving to
| millions of people - beyond just the content in question.
| Actions can speak wonders.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| I think it's hard because the bullying has been done and
| the law is already in their favor. This isn't a grey area
| case of "is it legal or not" it's a case where the IA broke
| the already established rules. They're fighting upstream.
|
| Despite its importance I don't think the Internet Archive
| is a common household name on the level of Wikipedia and I
| don't think any sort of boycott would have the legs (I
| would love to be wrong about this).
| nitrogen wrote:
| I'm astonished and dismayed by all the comments calling for
| capitulation. It's very clear that the publishers in this
| case are bullies, plain and simple. You don't kneel to
| bullies if you want them to stop, you fight back. Not to do
| so leads to tyranny and feudalism, where the whims of the
| large become the law.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| Right but we're operating in the reality of the American
| court system. Idealistically I agree with you, but it's not
| pragmatic -- the law is _very_ obviously in the publisher
| 's favor (they whimmed it to their side years ago).
|
| At the end of the day I think this will be a battle over
| whether or not the Internet Archive can continue to
| exist... and it's incredibly important for them to live to
| fight another day.
| nine_k wrote:
| I think this does not mesh well with their mission.
|
| They are the _Internet Archive_ , the archive of freely (in
| the past) available stuff that can't be found anywhere
| else, in most cases. This is much more _fragile_ than old
| books which likely exists in thousands of copies anyway.
|
| I do _not_ admire their stance, and am unhappy that they
| are recklessly jeopardizing their unique thing to make a
| case where they have a very big chance to lose, without any
| circumstances forcing them to do so.
|
| This is not how you serve as a warden of a valuable
| archive. (I know, I know, it's their right and their
| choice.)
| quazar wrote:
| > The Internet Archive is an American digital library
| with the stated mission of "universal access to all
| knowledge."
|
| First sentence of the Wikipedia article.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I understand you, and vehemently disagree.
|
| There is a real and serious risk of having ALL published
| material eventually fall under "licensed use" instead of
| ownership.
|
| We're rapidly tipping towards a society where you pay
| rent to license everything, and own nothing.
|
| In the short term, I find this model abusive. In the long
| I think it guarantees we will have a competitive
| disadvantage against countries that don't enforce this
| style of licensing.
| mrpopo wrote:
| In the long term if they accept all kinds of trade offs I am
| afraid that they will become less and less relevant, and
| that's why they are taking a stance here.
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| Yeah like any legal battle it's a lot of posturing and
| back-and-fourth. It's just anxiety producing to not see
| what their survival plan is (and of course it wouldn't
| really benefit them to share that publicly!).
| devwastaken wrote:
| IA will lose because the precedent set by winning would mean
| that all online digital sales can just be distributed. Itd
| evaporate a trillion dollar market overnight.
|
| I disagree with book publishers and general copyright law, but
| judges can understand the difference between physical books and
| digital ones. Physical books cannot be outright copied atom for
| atom in 5 milliseconds and distributed to millions in hours.
| The difficulty of any sort of copying makes it significantly
| economical to just buy a new one, or have one lended that had
| to be bought.
|
| I'm afraid IA is going to be demolished because of their move
| here. They shouldn't have done it under the banner of IA. If at
| all they should have done it under a rogue name and service
| over TOR.
| mjevans wrote:
| The First Sale doctrine SHOULD apply, As someone else replied
| in a sibling comment. A digital sale should be just that, a
| perpetual license that can be transferred, inherited, etc.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > A digital sale should be just that, a perpetual license
| that can be transferred, inherited, etc.
|
| Even if that was the case (which it isn't) then the IA
| would still lose this case.
| wittyreference wrote:
| First Sale doctrine evenly applied to digital books would
| allow you to freely resell the ebook you purchased. It
| probably wouldn't mean allowing you to make infinite copies
| and distribute them freely, abolishing the market for the
| actual book.
|
| Yes, that's not the technical definition of FS doctrine,
| but that doctrine was written _before this technological
| context existed_.
| rocqua wrote:
| Thing is, the IA did not make infinite copies and
| distribute them freely. They specifically made limited
| copies and for every copy the lent out, they took a
| physical copy out of circulation.
| wittyreference wrote:
| I don't see anything in IA's FAQ or elsewhere that they
| limited digital lending to physical copies. I read that
| they only lent ebooks they had physical possession /of/,
| but that there was no limit to how many such copies they
| lent out (i.e., they had one physical copy of Mark Twain,
| allowed an unlimited number of people to digitally borrow
| Mark Twain for up to two weeks).
|
| If I'm mistaken, I'd appreciate a link that explains
| their approach.
| supermatt wrote:
| They say in the article that they used controlled digital
| lending, where they only circulate the EXACT number of
| copies they (and partner libraries) physically own and
| are currently not lent.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Then they did the emergency Covid library, where they
| just gave copies of everything away.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It's reasonably well established that when it comes to
| intellectual property, you can refuse to sell it, and only
| grant a limited license. With some small carve outs like the
| First Sale doctrine.
|
| Maybe pedantic but there is no "intellectual property" law in
| play here. Just plain old copyright law, under which they do
| fully own the books - as opposed to licensing them. What
| copyright law allows is everything that libraries do.
|
| My opinion - One should be able to use a webcam to share a book
| with someone. That's not far from what IA is doing though it's
| also technically quite different.
|
| On another note, I'm not a fan of using the pandemic to
| highlight IAs value even though I appreciate their efforts.
| gowld wrote:
| Copyright law _is_ intellectual property law. It 's the only
| kind explicitly mentioned in the US Constitution.
|
| Regular copyright law says that if you _buy_ a book, digital
| or not, you can resell it. If you license a book, _digital or
| not_ , you can't except as specified in the license.
|
| IA's point is that digital books (which are many or most
| books nowadats) aren't sold; instead, they are licensed.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-
| manual...
|
| > Further, the privileges created by the first sale principle
| do not "extend to any person who has acquired possession of
| the copy or phonorecord from the copyright owner, by rental,
| lease, loan, or otherwise, without acquiring ownership of
| it." See 17 U.S.C. SS 109(d).
| kd5bjo wrote:
| > It's the only kind explicitly mentioned in the
| Constitution.
|
| Patents are explicitly covered there, too; from Art 1, SS8:
|
| "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote
| the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
| limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
| to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
|
| (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause )
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| "Intellectual property law" encompass copyright, trademark,
| and patent law.
| thatcat wrote:
| The First Sale doctrine can be applied to the digital domain.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean you could try but you still wouldn't be allowed to
| duplicate the work. So you would only be allowed to sell your
| purchased version if you deleted any copy you had.
| supermatt wrote:
| That's what DRM is supposedly for...
| phkahler wrote:
| Is there precedent for that? DVDs sure - see Netflix. But
| that's still physical goods.
| gowld wrote:
| Precedent? It's the law.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-
| manual...
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| The author is obviously not paraphrasing the arguments IA's
| lawyers will make. See links below for what IA will argue.
|
| https://controlleddigitallending.org/
|
| https://controlleddigitallending.org/statement
|
| https://controlleddigitallending.org/signatories
|
| https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I would agree. No lawyer at all, just my 2c:
|
| When I buy a book, I buy the physical item but I only buy a
| license for its content. I own the book but I do not own the
| content. That also makes it difficult to make copies.
|
| In the digital world world there are not longer physical
| artifacts, only content and making copies is trivial. In fact,
| 'buying' digital content involves making a digital copy, not
| transferring ownership of a single physical item.
|
| My understanding is that these differences result in different
| areas of copyright law being exercised and that the First Sale
| Doctrine applies to physical items (and it requires ownership
| of the copy).
| vuln wrote:
| I have a monthly reoccurring donation in the amount of $10.
|
| If you haven't donated please do.
|
| https://archive.org/donate/
| remram wrote:
| I had a recurring donation _until_ they decided to take a step
| that was obviously going to get them sued. I support IA 's
| mission and products, but won't throw money in legal
| proceedings they set themselves to lose; I feel like this is
| better spent on EFF etc who are serious about it.
|
| I object to modern intellectual property and publishing
| practices as much as anyone, but what did they expect would
| happen when they dropped their entire legal justification?
| kbenson wrote:
| > but what did they expect would happen when they dropped
| their entire legal justification?
|
| Specifically what legal justification to you think they
| dropped that they followed previously?
| dfabulich wrote:
| They were doing controlled digital lending (CDL) with a
| strict owned-to-loaned ratio.
|
| Then, during the emergency, they waived all waitlists and
| limits, allowing an unlimited number of loans for a single
| owned copy. They no longer could claim that they were still
| engaged in CDL, so there was no legal justification to make
| all of those copies.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I wonder if perhaps they are sitting on data showing that
| no individual page of any book was ever being viewed by
| more than one person at a time, and therefore they were
| still effectively just redistributing the physical book
| pages they already owned.
|
| If so, their legal basis looks much much stronger.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The EFF is taking up the legal defense in this suit, so your
| donation would be ending up at the same place anyway.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Some tech companies match employee donations to it as well.
| garmaine wrote:
| Why? I stoped my donations when this started, because I could
| see the writing on the wall. I have better uses for my
| charitable dollars than paying legal fees and judgement for a
| lawsuit they are clearly going to lose.
| karlp wrote:
| Considering they were only lending to one person at a time, it
| does seem like the lawsuit is uncalled for.
| martin__ wrote:
| Last I heard from this story, the lawsuit was because of
| unlimited lending:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391662
| mcguire wrote:
| If so, then the lawsuit would likely be dismissed for lack of
| standing.
|
| (Yes, yes, they may have loaned more copies of a particular
| work than they had, but those loans have expired now.)
| criddell wrote:
| I wonder what the truth is. In this article Kahle makes it
| sound like they are lending one digital copy for every
| physical copy that is locked up in a library somewhere and
| not circulating.
| jandrese wrote:
| From what I understand that was the original policy but
| when COVID hit they announced that they were removing those
| restrictions. Commenters went "you're gonna get sued" and
| then archive.org was all surprised Pikachu face when their
| mailbox filled up with lawsuits.
| duxup wrote:
| They say that now, but man I only remember them announcing
| that the limits were off whole hog.
|
| Not sure what the legal standing is loaning ebooks based on
| "well someone else isn't using their book".
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I certainly appreciate what they did and I donate to the
| Internet Archive but what does lending to one person at a time
| mean here? It's on the internet, anyone could lend, as far as I
| know.
|
| If 1000 users come on a shopping portal and buy things they are
| all buying one at a time, but 1000 transactions are still done.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Not the person to whom you're replying, but I believe they
| meant that Archive.org only loans out as many copies of a
| book as they have access to physically.
|
| Mr. Kahle is now claiming that they kept that up during the
| emergency period, but expanding the pool of physical books to
| include those being held my libraries around the country.
| That doesn't seem to quite line up with what I remember,
| which was the term "unlimited," but we'll see how that shakes
| out in court.
| duxup wrote:
| I thought Internet Archive started loaning books ebooks beyond
| their usual 1 ebook to 1 digital copy system?
|
| The paragraph that addresses this isn't clear to me as it seems
| to indicate it was 1:1 (although at the time everyone seemed to
| think it wasn't) and then that paragraph seems to note all the
| books stuck in other libraries... did they feel they were loaning
| out ebooks associated with all the libraries that were closed
| too? Was there some sort of legal arrangement there?
|
| This letter seems very non specific on a critical points....
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| I love the IA. But it is so clear the argument made is written by
| a lawyer after the fact. Reading between the lines of the lawyer
| speak:
|
| 1. The books were not locked up and out of the reach of students.
| Students were able to take their books home. Yes class was over
| Zoom. Teaching from the same books previously used in the
| physical classroom. College classes have done this for decades
| using physical books for online courses.
|
| 2. Public libraries throughout the country ramped up digital
| online access at the start of COVID-19. Students were able to get
| online library access. It's possible that some obscure books were
| non-digital (650 million books seems like a stretch). But,
| obscure books are mostly unused in the classroom. Schools usually
| assign students classics like "The Giver" which are digitized.
|
| 3. The argument is made that IA has a right to lend the books
| digitally, because it owns a copy of the books. Because any
| rational person can understand the quantity of books IA digitized
| casts doubt on if they own a copy. The argument shifts quickly to
| saying it had a right to digitize because of its 130 "endorsing"
| libraries.
|
| 4. Some of these 130 libraries did not "endorse" IA until after
| the lawsuit was filed. By the point of the lawsuit the service
| had been active for some time. Meaning the copyright infringement
| had already occurred.
|
| 5. IA has lawyers on payroll to advise IA on their main product.
| Which is archiving of copyrighted web content. Meaning that a
| lawyer likely advised IA before the service started that a
| library "endorsing" support for a cause !== to a licensing
| agreement allowing the endorsed cause to use the endorsing
| libraries' licensed content.
|
| It should be noted that libraries pay for books. Libraries are a
| public good and funded by methods such as government funding and
| donations. Yet they have real expenses.
|
| Imagine a city library. Library cards are limited to city
| residents. For example, think of a city with 1M residents. That
| puts a cap on the license costs they will pay for content.
| Imagine IA serving the world 7B or even just the US 365M. Whoever
| sells content to the library that is co-sharing content with IA
| would be charged such exorbitant prices either:
|
| 1) the library is unable to license content 2) the library shuts
| down. 3) the library stops working with IA
|
| IA can be a library. But they have to act like one. Pay for your
| content like public libraries do.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Teaching from the same books previously used in the physical
| classroom.
|
| Yeah, the "but think of the children" card played around this
| seems mostly disingenuous. They already had their textbooks
| which they took home. Anything in the public domain is on
| Gutenberg and elsewhere. And I'm even willing to bet that
| anything more recent that's likely being taught in school can
| be fairly trivially found online (or will be simply shared in
| some form) or, worst case, for the cost of media mail on
| Amazon.
|
| And, if you actually need to do research in a library, it's not
| clear to me how much this helps.
| thatcat wrote:
| >Library cards are limited to city residents. For example,
| think of a city with 1M residents. That puts a cap on the
| license cost.
|
| So you're saying that the amount libraries pay for a book is
| proportional to the number of residents in that city?
| ghaff wrote:
| He said "license cost." And, yes, I'm pretty sure how much
| libraries pay for digital licenses is at least partly based
| on the size of the population that they're serving. I doubt
| my small town library pays the same for licenses as the
| Boston Public Library does.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| > In total, 650 million books were locked up just in public
| libraries alone. Because of that, we felt we could, and should,
| and needed to make the digitized versions of those books
| available to students
|
| Libraries also have movies and music... should they have put
| those out for free too? I love wayback machine but I'm not sure I
| follow the logic on this one. I'm no legal expert but that seems
| like pretty iffy reasoning.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| Using controlled digital lending, yes. Why not? The libraries
| hold licenses to lend this media in physical format but were
| temporarily shifting to lending using controlled digital
| lending.
|
| They didn't just give away unencrypted copies to be pirated.
| They did what libraries do, lend media.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| They lent unlimited copies. The limit is very very key to
| being covered under CDL.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| Have you ever borrowed a digital book? It's for a limited
| period of time usually a couple weeks, in an app of some
| sort. That's what they did, that's CDL.
|
| They temporarily removed waitlists which did allow more
| people to borrow a title than they had licenses, as
| physical libraries closed and as schools tried to get
| online. It was an unprecedented time. They had the support
| of major libraries. They stopped early when they got sued.
|
| The lawsuit should be dropped.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| So it's just to create artificial scarcity, this brings
| back the problem of piracy, what's the difference between
| lending 100 copies vs 1M? Or why they charge more to "buy"
| a digital copy of a movie vs "renting" it? The key problem
| here is that we're trying to adapt old models to a totally
| different medium like trying to attach the horses to a car.
| saagarjha wrote:
| And the problem was that by rushing into that without
| thinking we might end up much worse for wear after a
| judge thinks that digital sharing in general is totally
| bogus. You can't just try doing something to see if it
| works and then magically assume that people with
| entrenched interests won't come after you.
| [deleted]
| bscphil wrote:
| The article itself appears to be claiming this is not true:
| every book they lent was endorsed by a backing library,
| such that the physical book was guaranteed to be sitting in
| the stacks, not lent to anyone, whenever the digital copy
| of the book was in circulation.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I hate the concept of intellectual property as much as anyone
| but this was obviously illegal from the get-go. They lent out
| copies of books they didn't possess. Now they've put the
| entire legally-grey concept of copying physical books for
| digital lending in the judicial cross-hairs.
| loeg wrote:
| I think the idea is: the library has 5 physical copies. IA
| loans 5 digital copies while the physical ones are locked up.
|
| The number of library copies of the work in circulation is net
| zero.
| garmaine wrote:
| Except they didn't limit it to 5 (in your example).
| jjcon wrote:
| HN: Pirating a movie isn't the same as stealing it
|
| HN now: Digital lending should be treated the same as
| physical lending
| adventured wrote:
| HN: privacy is absolutely critical
|
| Also HN: overwhelming support for one of the world's
| largest privacy violators, the Internet Archive, which can
| never comply with GDPR or any other stringent privacy laws
| under any circumstances because they have no idea what's in
| their archive and they intentionally make it difficult to
| remove privacy violating content from it (which they
| hoovered up without permission and now you can't even stop
| them from doing it because they ignore robots.txt)
|
| Yay for massive, epic scale privacy violations and being an
| abusive parasite that intentionally doesn't follow proper
| site directives!
|
| Even if IA survives this debacle, they're going to get
| wiped out by privacy violation lawsuits in the coming
| decade. Their entire archive will have to be dumped, or
| combed line by line for privacy violating content (at
| extraordinary cost).
| roblabla wrote:
| Both can be correct at the same time. Pirating a movie is
| copyright infringement, not stealing. Digital lending is
| currently legally gray-zone, but the pragmatic end-game for
| lenders is to make it so a physical book can be digitally
| lent so long as the physical book is unused during the
| lending period. This is because it can easily be shown that
| the publisher doesn't incur damages, since the same amount
| of books are on the market at any given time.
| basch wrote:
| Now I'm waiting for a Netflix of lending, where I declare
| what movies I physically own, and can lend them out for
| credits to watch other movies. The middle man distributes
| a digital copy. You agree to legal responsible for any
| movies they distribute, that you claimed you physically
| owned but don't.
| rocqua wrote:
| I believe that old movie-rental-stores needed more of a
| license than just owning the movies in order to rent them
| out for money.
| loeg wrote:
| Digital lending is widely established and supported by
| publishers generally. It's not especially new at this
| time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverDrive,_Inc.#Libra
| ries_and_...
| loeg wrote:
| Libraries lend movies, too. I'm not sure where that fits
| into your metaphor.
| jjcon wrote:
| Libraries lend physical copies of movies just like they
| lend physical copies of books
| aSplash0fDerp wrote:
| Foundations matter, so legally this is a raw emotion debate and
| only changes the course of the IA (pivot while the
| forgiveness/permission quote still applies).
|
| Maybe proposing an annual charity drive for "published" material
| to fill these new "shared resource" vacuums that you`ve uncovered
| will satisfy the hybrid-capitalism model that you desire.
|
| Making teaching resources HC compatible (with permission windows
| or indefinitely) may make compromise-it-forward a movement that
| is uniquely yours.
|
| Even though Nielsen and the music charts have not figured out how
| to accurately count digital figures, the tax deduction angle
| looks promising as part of a formal model.
| blumomo wrote:
| Internet Archive stores the history of the internet. There's
| someone who's afraid of it, there's someone who wants to erase
| history and write a new one.
| throwaway-92831 wrote:
| If you want something removed from the Archive, now is the time
| to make your request.
|
| Who knows what hands the data will end up in after they're gone.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| I'm glad to see the names of the publishers involved in the
| lawsuit - "Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random
| House" - out on the open. I will gladly avoid purchasing books by
| the companies that are threatening this remarkable digital
| institution in a time when hundreds of physical libraries are
| closed.
| nashashmi wrote:
| This article is very well written and very helpful. It presents
| the case for digital lending quite well.
|
| But in the last 20 years, pirates have abused digital copies of
| data and given digital copies a bad name.
|
| Today the publishers are sore from that experience. And they
| fight like they always did before.
|
| But they will use court cases against pirates to justify suit
| against IA. And that sucks.
|
| Judges worldwide have sided with opposing sides on the issue. No
| consistency has been reached. It is clear that courts cannot
| interpret these issues with consistency.
|
| So legislatives must CREATE rules for digital content and
| digitized content. And they are not the same. The latter is
| conversion of data into a less than digital format and this takes
| effort, the kind of effort like buying tires, creating molds for
| them, and distributing tires made from those molds.
|
| Current copyright laws do not distinguish between digital and
| paper products. Paper products before year 2000 should be
| digitizable. After should need to be paid a fee. And lending
| should be clarified.
| threepio wrote:
| I love Brewster Kahle.
|
| He doesn't get nearly enough credit for being one of the VERY few
| tech zillionaires who has dedicated his subsequent time and money
| to creating an enduring and necessary public-spirited resource.
|
| (And that part of his career all happened __after __he & Hillis
| created the Connection Machine.)
|
| He epitomizes the intellect and curiosity and good ethics that I
| associate with old-school hackerdom.
|
| I don't know if he can win this dispute. I hope so.
| nabakin wrote:
| Does the lawsuit not include all the copyrighted books put up for
| free, unlimited downloads? For example [1].
|
| [1]: https://archive.org/details/01TheLightningThief
| gorbachev wrote:
| "With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital
| world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on
| their terms;"
|
| And this is why I still prefer physical media. I own it and I can
| do whatever the hell I please with it. Not so with almost every
| digital media platform I've seen.
|
| Well, other than platforms built on piracy.
| twox2 wrote:
| >I own it and I can do whatever the hell I please with it.
|
| Not really... IP law still applies. You can't photocopy the
| book and sell it or give it out without consequence.
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