I'm surprised and disappointed that the IA ever thought this would go over well, though I do respect the reasons for which they took these actions.
Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages.
You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this.
On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong.
Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation.
I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.
My thoughts exactly, thanks for summing up so nicely. (upvoted)
IA's decision was apparently done with good intentions and under extraordinary circumstances. The "open sharing" was not meant to be permanent, and anyway has been discontinued. IA never sold the content for profit so any "harm" should be similarly limited.
Publishers would generate nothing but good karma by dropping their lawsuit. As an author it is more valuable to me to know my words and ideas are being preserved so they can be read and absorbed by future generations. Trying to extract every last dollar from such works undermines the pursuit of knowledge and human potential.
I think there's another dimension to this though, which is that IA carries an enormous responsibility that is totally unrelated to this area of their operations but is now put into jeopardy because of it. That's the real moral issue here. They sacrificed bigger-picture priorities that will impact lots of people for years and years to come, for a short-term stunt that affected people for a couple months.
There are plenty of public domain and Creative Commons books that could have sufficed for folks looking to read and learn. Someone wanting to read "The Trials of Apollo" instead of "Robinson Crusoe" does not equal an emergency.
I have three favorite properties on the web: Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and the Internet Archive.
Whoever thought this was a good idea should own up to it and step down, this was a dumb move if there ever was one and risking one of the prime - and very fragile - properties on the web like this was highly irresponsible. Keep in mind that IA already has plenty of enemies who are continuously monitoring it and hoping to find a way to shut them down, then hand them this sort of thing on a golden platter. Beyond stupid, really.
It's heartbreaking that they're going to self-destruct over _this_. The Internet Archive holds invaluable collections of digital content for which there is no replacement, and they decided to put all of that work in mortal danger just to replicate the services that thousands of libraries already provide? For a few months?
The only guess I can make is that there are people with power at the IA that fail to appreciate the value of the unique services the organization provides, and would rather be running a traditional library instead. Once the dust has settled, I would be interested in reading an account of how this happened.
I'm not the person you responded to, but that comment was just reacting considering how jacquesms comment ended.
He (jacquesm) is always judgemental to a silly degree, despite not actually knowing even close to enough to form a useful opinion. That does get tiresome considering how often he comments and can end in snippish comments like the one before.
Scanning and providing access to digital copies of books was the dumb move---without that, they would not have attracted the enmity of publishers. The fastest and most successful way to avoid the destruction of an organization is always to concede to the wishes of its enemies. Preemptively, if possible.
They’re a DRM encumbered pile of JPEGs. The ebooks available at a local library via OverDrive are Kindle ebooks with all the searching and bookmarking enabled.
The ones I've seen could be downloaded as ordinary .PDFs if you select that option in the menu.
I've contributed heavily to IA in the past and would never stick up for traditional publishing in a fight like this one. But turning themselves into a modern-day Pirate Bay was a suicidal tactic on their part. I can only hope they're playing some kind of long game that outsiders can't yet appreciate.
The more interesting thing here is the "controlled digital lending" test case that will almost certainly come of all of this.
If they somehow prevail on that aspect and set a legal precedent there, that would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of companies.
For example, Netflix could stream every movie ever, as long as they bought enough DVDs for peak demand. Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream the signal.
I just hope the IA doesn't get CDL shot down because of this and ruin it for everyone.
They didn't fail, they were sued out of business. They had a good, innovative product that people wanted, and they got killed by a lawsuit. This is the tradeoff we're making when we grant more exclusive privileges over works: we kill innovations like these, and we get...probably not any more creative works than we would have gotten otherwise.
They had a product that involved giving away other people's stuff. Yes, copyright terms are too long. But I'm pretty sure that a vanishingly small amount of that stuff they were giving away would be out of copyright even with a copyright term of 20 years.
Aereo's business model was almost exactly identical to how the cable industry started - capture an over-the-air signal and deliver it to customers over a landline channel.
If Aereo was in the wrong than the cable industry probably should never have existed.
Yes, in 1976 Congress passed new legislation that forced them to pay up. By that time the cable industry was well-established and could afford it (and they had enough of an audience that the broadcasters had a strong incentive to make rights deals). If the same rules had been in place and enforced in the 50s and 60s, I doubt there ever would have been a cable industry.
The important thing to note is that the cable companies won the lawsuits (with the arguments that are currently being made here, the courts agree with you!) which spurred Congress to amend the Copyright Act so that transmission was a copyright violation and cable companies needed to license.
Well I really take issue with the idea that IP is "other people's stuff". I might say they were giving away copies of data that the government had granted others a monopoly on. I am being intentionally pedantic because copyright is much more harmful than people give it credit for. The internet archive is desperately trying to give people free books and others are trying to stop them.
Nothing is stopping the IA from buying books and giving them to people, or paying authors to write books and then giving them to people. What they are suing is to prevent IA from scanning books and giving those copies to an unlimited number of people, which is, no matter what your moral feelings about the matter, quite different!
Yes. All of the writing on my website is CC0 licensed (public domain). The robot I have been designing for the last 2.5 years is CC0 licensed. I design PCBs for fun and license them CC0. I have been licensing my youtube videos as CC0, and I just started a new youtube channel for my own CC0 licensed 4k videos of nature. Most of the content on my github is already licensed with some kind of permissive open license either CC0 or MIT/BSD licensed, though some of my older work is licensed GPL.
Intellectual property restrictions raise costs and keep people poor. 3D printers were $50,000+ until the patents expired, and now you can get a decent printer for $300. And books of course could be distributed for free. Every person on earth could be born in to great wealth if we simply allowed it.
Of course I do not advocate that we take income from hard working artists. Instead I advocate for a world where we make living so cheap that artists need little in the way of income for survival. Reducing intellectual property restrictions is one important factor in lowering the cost of living for all, and would make it easier for billions to benefit from the technologies people like me in the USA enjoy.
Supporting copyright means supporting the idea that we do not build a comprehensive library of all books accessible to all people. In contrast to the idea that every child born on earth should have access to a complete library of the written word, intellectual property advocates push for the impoverishment of the billions on earth who cannot pay tithing to book publishers and movie studios. It's quite the bold position to take.
I can’t see this working on a large scale. With no IP rights then how can I protect my work? We could outlaw all businesses so nobody can take my work and turn a profit from it but then where’s the incentive to solve complex problems? If I have to give away my solution then there’s really no reason for me to try unless I’m being forced in some way. Why would a dr want to work on a solution for cancer instead of just treating people if the value gain is the same?
Prusa 3D printers are open source. Their main product over the last several years has been the MK2 and MK3 line of printers. Millions of clones have been sold by well-equipped Chinese companies. The clones sell for 1/3 the price, but make some cost cutting measures to achieve low cost. The result is that there is plenty of room in the market for the first party company and the clones.
Your suggestion that we outlaw business is clearly meant to be inflammatory, but it's unnecessary. Businesses like Prusa seem to be just fine without using IP restrictions.
> Why would a dr want to work on a solution for cancer instead of just treating people if the value gain is the same?
I would put it to you that you've misunderstood why people do things that they do. I am making a 3D printable off road robot and associated computer vision stack completely open source because I want to. It feels good to make something I think others will benefit from. I am able to cover my material needs with part time work, and I put a huge amount of effort in to my computer vision research so I can help contribute to solving tough robotics problems. The endeavor has cost me thousands of dollars in supplies and truly hundreds of hours of my own time. But it's worth doing.
You mentioned a desire to "protect your work". Well your work is not under attack when someone observes what you've done and reproduces it. Your work is still there, it's fine. But to advocate for IP restrictions is to say that you think I should collaborate with you to stop anyone else from copying your work. And I think that's a bad idea. Closed source technology is a big unchanging black box that stops up the works. We can make the cost of living dramatically cheaper for all people on Earth, but not with thousands of little black boxes everywhere. Imagine a huge open source software project that relies on a bunch of closed source modules. Developing improvements would be a pain. Why should we tolerate the same for the very means of reproduction of our society?
I actually didn’t mean the outlaw business thing as inflammatory. I challenge you to find a way to make this work when some can still make profit.
I’m aware what you do on your Github, I looked it up. Interestingly I have many more public/oss repos than you.
You have failed to address the point and gave one example of a company based around 3d printers. I challenge you to think about this across all industries and how a company making something of great value can protect this thing so another company cannot just take it and get all the research for free.
Further I put it to you that YOU don’t understand why people do what they do. Most of us enjoy an intelectual challenge but that is not all we enjoy.
Also regarding open source repos: as a robotics engineer not all of my work is software. A major contribution I have made are the complete mechanical designs (including dual stage planetary gearboxes) for my off road rover robot:
https://reboot.love/t/rover-and-skittles-cad-design-files-he...
My actual software contributions are smaller, though I did design an arduino compatible frequency hopping wireless networking library and associated open licensed hardware designs, some of which is under my failed company's github account.
My computer vision stack is under development and I don't have much on github at the moment. But the point was not that I am so great for making a bunch of open source contributions. The question (which someone else asked) was whether I would open source my own code. The answer is yes.
I am also the lead engineer on a farming robot, which has lots of software I wrote myself. I am pushing hard for us to become a non profit and release all of our IP with an unrestricted license. So yes to the other commenter's question, I am very willing to follow my words with actions.
You’ve misunderstood my point. Companies in my opinion should not stop others from reproducing their work. This should not be something people can do any more than you can stop your neighbor from leaving their house.
I gave you a perfectly fine example of a company that works even in the current climate without needing such restrictions on competition. I believe it would work the same with washing machines and automobiles and farming equipment. Can you tell me why it would work for 3D printers and not washing machines?
Of course huge adjustments would need to be made. But we would find a balance.
You mentioned curing cancer. Why did the inventor of human made insulin sell the rights for $1? Because he wanted all to have access. It is only intellectual property that has made the price so high many are dying in America because of it. Is that the world you would prefer?
Insulin is also a natural chemical made by our bodies. The cure for cancer is not. How much people power has gone into looking for its cure? How is this funded? Either by taxes or revenue. If you decrease that then clearly you cannot perform the research. And the reason why all these companies are chasing that cure is the massive payout at the end.
I have published a small book which I licensed CC0 and put a free copy online. I have also been designing a robot for the last two and a half years and I have licensed the entire thing as CC0 so anyone can benefit from it. I also regularly publish youtube videos which I license CC0, and in fact all of the writing on my personal website is also licensed CC0. Even at my workplace I am leading the push to become a non-profit so we can raise money via donations and make our product open source (with a CC0 license).
So no, I would not be annoyed. Intellectual property restrictions increase the cost of everything and stand in the way of providing a better world for all.
They were renting out equipment, and the equipment captured free OTA signals for the renter to view later. If they were offering a datacenter where people put their own DVR boxes, it would be unquestionably legal and ethical. It's stupid that there is a distinction.
IANAL, but I have trouble believing that the number of antennas matters. (And I assume Aereo tried every workaround they could think of. Although I believe there's another case at the moment with another organization trying a non-profit loophole.)
But, yes, at the moment it seems as if the IA has let the genie out of the bottle and may well force a ruling on something that the publishers were willing to let slide given the limited impact.
Aereo lost their case because they received a signal, decoded it, saved the video to a hard drive, and then streamed the video from the hard drive to the customer. Their business model clearly depended on them offering DVR capabilities to customers, deduping videos, etc. - why else save the videos to disk and then stream from disk?
If they simply streamed the undecoded TV signals to their customers, they would have been fine. The Supreme Court decision constantly compared the Aereo service to previously litigated cases involving "antenna on top of hill really far from house as a service" (deemed to be legal).
> If they simply streamed the undecoded TV signals to their customers, they would have been fine. The Supreme Court decision constantly compared the Aereo service to previously litigated cases involving "antenna on top of hill really far from house as a service" (deemed to be legal).
Those cases were Fortnightly and Teleprompter and were overturned by Congress in 1976. If those cases were litigated again today the the CATV providers would have been shut down.
> Aereo lost their case because they received a signal, decoded it, saved the video to a hard drive, and then streamed the video from the hard drive to the customer.
No they didn't! In fact the opinion specifically calls out that the technical details of how Aereo transmitted the work didn't matter one way or another.
> If they simply streamed the undecoded TV signals to their customers, they would have been fine.
It would not have. After the cable companies won their case about the antenna on a hill Congress amended the Copyright Act to make it illegal.
I think I read the judgement at the time. I should re-read.
Though CDL would seem (IANAL) to be more analogous to the DVR in that it's transforming the original product in some manner rather than just boosting a signal.
ADDED: Would it actually be fine to stream an OTA channel? I don't actually know. I'm not sure it would be a business model for anyone but would that be considered a public performance?
> Would it actually be fine to stream an OTA channel? I don't actually know. I'm not sure it would be a business model for anyone but would that be considered a public performance?
The answer is no, and that's why Aereo lost their case.
It is important to note that Aereo lost their case under a specific carve-out for broadcast transmission. Back in the 70s there were a few cases around CATV operators doing the exact same thing Aereo did. The end result was a series of regulations that made rebroadcasting in the fashion you describe an act that required licensing from the original broadcaster.
This is also why the Slingbox back in the day survived legal challenges (if there even were any.) The Customer had to have their own physical hardware at the location receiving the signals.
> This is also why the Slingbox back in the day survived legal challenges (if there even were any.) The Customer had to have their own physical hardware at the location receiving the signals.
So could areo sell the physical hardware to the customer and then buy it back at the end of the billing cycle?
> IANAL, but I have trouble believing that the number of antennas matters. (And I assume Aereo tried every workaround they could think of. Although I believe there's another case at the moment with another organization trying a non-profit loophole.)
The main reason for the original cable companies to pay is a loophole about 'distribution' because they're taking one antenna and boosting+splitting the result. Having separate antennas is a way to remove a loophole, IMO.
First, I want to make something clear. The courts 100% agree with you. In fact you don't even need to bother with a bunch of antennas under the older version of the Copyright Act. But in response to cable companies winning their case Congress amended the Copyright Act to undo the decision and make rebroadcasting in (pretty much) any way a copyright violation.
Nothing about splitting or saving to disk or private copies or dedicated lines -- nothing about how the work is reproduced and transmitted mattered at all. You can't technical jiu-jitsu around a very human court.
There are several presidents in the older direction. Legally, if the copy is not stored in a location you own it counts as a public performance and needs specific licensing.
An interesting work around might be leasing physical shelf space, playback hardware, and then having someone physically move the disks. But I seriously doubt that would work.
I stand behind Internet Archive on this. It was the right opportunity to try and push our freedoms forward. Internet Archive is political by design, it's very existence is merely tolerated by the Intellectual Property Feudalists. It was the good fight to fight.
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely not true. You don't do IA or the discussion any favors by being inaccurate.
I live in San Francisco, whose library participates in a digital ebook lending program through Libby. They have a certain number of copies of each ebook available, and allow each copy to be checked out by one person at a time. As a consequence, i've had to wait 7 or 8 weeks for popular books to become available, something which works the same way as physical books at the library. The library buys or is given a copy of a book (whether physical or digital) and then can loan out that copy of the book.
Notably, this is how IA's lending program worked BEFORE the pandemic. They just decided unilaterally to change it to loan out unlimited copies of books. It is this change that the lawsuit is about.
No, it really isn't. Library contracts for digital lending vary based on publisher and service provider, but aside from some very small publishers (if that), there is no publisher that allows for unlimited unmetered lending of e-books and certainly not for the price of a print book. Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends.
It's an observation that points out that physical books are not being lent out hundred or thousands of times so the physical book argument (or the digitized physical book argument) don't hold water.
Sorry, lots of commentary. The IA lending is premised on the idea that a physical book can be lent an unlimited number of times. Public library lending of e-books is premised on limited number of lends with most lends (Libby/Media on Demand being the most common of these, but there are other programs as well that work the same such as 3M's digital library offering). With Hoopla, there's a per-lend charge that takes place.
I had not realized that the Internet Archive had 'expanded' into archiving & re-publishing books
While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability.
Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.
They already had 20,000,000 books (yes that's a real number) available. The ones with Controlled Digital Lending allowed a single DRM-encrusted copy to be loaned out for each physical copy that they owned. This isn't explicitly allowed by any law but publishers hadn't challenged its claim of fair use and a lot of libraries use this technique. What was new with the NEL was just removing the one-copy-at-a-time limit. But the lawsuit is challenging the whole concept, including what other libraries are doing.
This was my first thought when this whole thing erupted ... why wasn't this a separate not-for-profit corporation. The publishers may still try to pierce the corporate veil but that's a whole 'nother matter.
> The Internet Archive removed waitlists for books in its "National Emergency Library" so that multiple readers could simultaneously download the same digital copy.
>Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit.
>The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.
It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society.
The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.
This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet archive? They struggle enough as it is to make money without a global financial crisis, and without large organisations taking it upon themselves to give their content away. What’s the “reward ratio” for all the book retails going out of business at the moment, and all the staff they’re laying off? Even if you hate publishers, and for some reason think they’re not entitled to property rights, what’s the “reward ratio” for their employees, or the people who’s retirements are invested in their publicly traded companies?
It’s easy to sympathise with the motivation behind the decision, but really their decision was to summarily strip people of their rights, and the payoff for their hard work. It wasn’t a noble decision, because they didn’t own what they were giving away, and an attempt to rationalize the deprivation it contributed to is really just sad. It was truly a monumentally stupid decision on their part, and they’ve jeopardized their entire mission because of it.
Views like the ones you've expressed here, which frame this as a property issue, will lead more and more to begin to think that intellectual property isn't "property" at all.
As I stated in a different response, I don’t think there would be anything immoral about abolishing copyright in general (for newly created work at least). But if you did that then you would most certainly see much less people investing their time and money into creating it, I also imagine it would create a resurgence in draconian practices such as chained libraries. How does cinema-only releases sound to you? For both TV and movies, of course.
However, whatever you think of such an idea, the people who created the content in question did so under conditions where the state had offered them copyright protection. To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.
> To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.
No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything. If they created something today and the law changed tomorrow thereby destroying the economic value of their investment, too bad. That's life.
Copyright and its practically infinite duration defrauds the public out of works that by any reasonable estimate should already be in the public domain. Did Disney worry about that before spending its intellectual property profits on lobbyists in order to get the government to extend the duration of copyright? No. These creators and companies have already made an obscene amount of money, many times over their initial investment. Are we supposed to feel guilty about "defrauding" this industry by changing the laws that enable it?
Also, the objection downthread about you posting repetitively is not without a point. Please don't do that; it's bad for curious conversation, and it lowers the signal/noise ratio of the thread.
Since this is the second time you’ve posted basically the same same comment in response to one of mine, I’ll just copy paste what I said last time. Perhaps you’ll respond to it this time?
> Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
> No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything.
Technically this is correct. The state is generally able to set whatever laws it likes. It was be a bit difficult in the USA as copyright is enshrined in the constitution. But there are examples in history of governments stripping all sorts of property rights from their citizens. It tends to go quite poorly though, for many reasons, but at least in part because people in that situation tend to view the government as stealing from them.
If the government sets the law in such a way that people who do X will be entitled to Y, then people who did X would be rightly upset if the government summarily decided they were no longer entitled to Y. The only thing that would seperate such a scenario from legally actionable fraud is sovereign immunity.
Most of the anti-copyright comments I’ve seen in this tread seem to really just be thinly veiled anti-private-property comments. So why not just come out and state your case if that’s what you’re getting at?
> It was be a bit difficult in the USA as copyright is enshrined in the constitution.
No, it's not. Like letters of marque and reprisal, copyright is something Congress is authorized to grant in the Constitution, but, also like letters of marque and reprisal, it's not something the Constitution gives anyone a right to expect Congress will grant them.
Copyright isn't guaranteed by the constitution. The ability for Congress to create copyright is guaranteed by the constitution. It would be perfectly fine, constitutionally for Congress to degree "there is no copyright".
People being upset isn't a reason to remove a rule.
> There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things.
Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous.
There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.
Copyright has the force of law internationally. Which means that courts, police, and armies back it up.
I would agree that copyright has many problems. But "rule of law" also matters.
Perhaps more importantly, the Internet Archive has chosen to take actions that are likely illegal, and do that in ways that threaten its very existence. Any court in the world might rule against the IA with a financial punishment that would permanently shut it down AND hand all its resources to its enemies. And those rules will be enforced by trained policemen with guns, tear gas, and bulletproof vests.
The IA is very important, and in general I really like the IA. The Wayback machine is a critical resource today. The IA's decision to risk the existence of itself and all its archives, by taking this step, was extremely unwise. I'm disappointed in the IA, I expected smarter decisions.
I hope they get some excellent lawyers that might salvage them so they can at least exist in some form. Right now, the IA and all it archived is at risk of being destroyed, with nothing good to come from it. If they stay in existence, I hope that they get some good lawyers to keep them away from such horrendously bad legal decisions in the future.
Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching.
Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
You're clueless, it is directly relevant, you said "copyright laws are neither moral or immorral" which is a bs statement because every rule (which it is) has political consequences, you need a giant state to declare "some ideas are not sharable". AKA copyright is a cultural construct that evolved in one particular society at a particular point in history, not a natural law.
So no, you don't get the idea of owning ideas is directly itself an attack on freedom itself, aka if you can claim you own ideas you can use violence against others because you believe in that idea. The problem you're not seeing is that it's impossible to enforce property rights for ideas while not infringing on basic human freedoms. Copyright is backdoor to get rid of property rights for the public by associating it with software/technology.
The idea that we just need "good regulation" to stop the abuses, is bs, since the last 200 years of copyright has always seen its power and abuse expanded and not reduced.
So you're the one making disingenuous arguments. Since our culture is literally being irrevocably destroyed and there's no way much culture during this period will be saved because of the lawlessness of the USA and general idiocy of its citizenry.
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> You're clueless, it is directly relevant, you said "copyright laws are neither moral or immorral"
I actually said that copyright itself is neither moral nor immoral, which is a completely different statement.
Any particularly copyright law can be as immoral as you want it to be, but the idea that somebody can retain rights over content they create is not immoral. You could easily create a society that didn’t have such rights, but the outcome would certainly be much less content, and much more restrictions put on it. You complain about copyright destroying video games history, but copyright is the only reason that history exists to begin with.
Your examples harmful copyright abuse are irrelevant first of all because they are not copyright able. The alphabet can not be copyrighted, and neither can an idea (that would be a patent, which is again a completely different thing).
They are made even more irrelevant by the fact that such “harmful” applications of copyright are not relevant to this situation. The copyright in question is not of a word, or the alphabet, or an idea, or the work of some long dead author. The copyright in question here is entire recently released books.
The idea that somebody who writes a book, or creates a movie, or a video game, can retain exclusive rights over its distribution for a certain period of time is not generally classified as copyright abuse. To characterize it that way is a very extreme, niche position.
> In doing so, it essentially allowed for a single copy of a book to be downloaded an infinite number of times.
The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
I used to work for Spotify, and pretty much everything we did with music, lyrics, or album art had to go through legal, and projects often had to get label approval. This is just how you do things when you're working with IP.
It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
> The complaint had alleged that “Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” it said.
Note that I'm not saying Spotify did anything wrong in this case, but it does show two things.
1. Big companies can manipulate the system better than nonprofits or individuals.
2. Publishers sue to exploit the unreasonable monopoly the law gives them.
IIRC, the problem was that Spotify didn't know who to pay because there isn't a list of song to song writer, unlike song to label. Apple Music had the same problem.
I've got a synology NAS with at least 10TB spare capacity I could donate... If only there were a way to use it, and thousands more, to back up important projects like this in a decentralized way.
IPFS seems perfect for the purpose. Files are content-addressed and a request for a part of a file can resolve to any accessible peer that has it. A peer has it if they have pinned it or if they have accessed it themselves recently so that it is cached on their node. This way, users share the load for popular files, donating both bandwidth and storage.
Torrents also seem like a perfect way to donate bandwidth and storage, and the IA already uses those.
The only problem with these approaches or generally any distributed file store is that someone will have to share a copy, so you'll mostly be donating bandwidth by storing a redundant copy of data that they likely have to store themselves as well to guarantee accessibility.
I keep thinking that the Bittorrent protocol would be an ideal fit for this; specifically, it would need a way to have all peers agree on what chunks of a file they themselves host and share to ensure the most complete copies available. And it would need a system for keeping it updated.
I wouldn't mind hosting a NAS in my closet and some bandwidth + storage to donate to the IA.
I also think cloud providers - all of them - have the capacity to host backups of the IA; I'd prefer if companies like Amazon, Google would donate their storage and bandwidth capacity to the IA instead of just money.
Bittorrent would require the totality of the archive to be preserved in multiple copies. I can't have a copy of that ledger here at home. We'd need a distributed highly redundant filesystem for that.
44 million items in the Internet Archive are available as torrents. It's pretty straightforward to enumerate them, download them, and serve them up in a swarm.
> Controlled digital lending is a legal framework, developed by copyright experts, where one reader at a time can read a digitized copy of a legally owned library book.
And digital downloading is a communication framework, developed by technology experts, where an unlimited number of readers can read the same digital library book at the same time.
One of the benefits of the press was decreased price of a copy and increased availability of printed material. Look where it got us. Digital medium is no different from the press, but of course, papyrus industry is going to fight it, because profits are more important, always.
As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs.
Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.
If I did the math right, it actually only costs about 72k per year to archive 6PB on Google cloud. Thats well within the range of one Googler's annual discretionary income.
I'm not sure that's right. It's 60PB [1], not 6PB. According to https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing Google's cheapest (?) non-redundant archive storage seems to be USD $0.0012/GB/month. 60 PB = 60e6 GB, so 1 year would cost 1260e6.0012 = 864e3 = USD $864 thousand. That's not counting the cost of getting the data in or getting any of it out to use.
> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license.
Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?
The problem is libraries got into the game of paying for first run titles. They started measuring themselves on checkouts and not what they provide for the community. Is the library really helping the community by overpaying for 50 Shades of Gray the week it comes out so all the soccer moms can read it for 'free'?
I'm not saying libraries shouldn't provide access to all types of books, but they could cut their costs considerably by waiting 6-12 months to stock the hot new book. Then they can use that money to provide other community services.
The problem is that without the political support of soccer moms, the libraries are not used by the majority of the population and they wither and die.
Because an eBook is not at all like a physical book. It's more like a service that interacts with DRM to provide an illusion of physicality. Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.
> Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.
Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
This comes down to the distinction between labor-value and use-value, and how they relate to exchange-value. The marginal labor-value of information is zero, therefore the exchange-value should also approach zero. However, if there is an artificial constraint on supply, the exchange-value can be driven up until it approaches the use-value. So naturally shortsighted publishers have every incentive to come up with increasingly hair-brained schemes to artificially constrain supply.
Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value.
Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
> People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability to control copying in the Internet age is a simple fact. Gravity makes flying airplanes hard, too. Deal with it.
That's an interesting perspective. What system would you propose to allow people to be "paid to do" this sort of creative work in a fair manner? Particularly since it's not always clear what the value of that work is until you see the finished product. (E.g. It's possible for two movies with identical multi-million dollar budgets to be produced, and one to turn out to be unwatchable garbage and the other a masterpiece that everyone loves.)
It's a good question, and I don't know. Perhaps some model like Patreon; perhaps just having voluntary payments (actually not dissimilar to what we have now, which seems to be working reasonably well); perhaps sponsored by wealthy individuals or corporations; perhaps something I haven't thought of. People would figure it out, and we could finally stop trying to pretend that you can prevent computers from copying bits.
I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".
All the stupid crap we've been dealing with for the past 20 years. Stupid DRM; HDCP compatibility issues; YouTube copyright strikes; this lawsuit which threatens to kill a valuable resource; $222,000 penalties against an individual for pirating 24 songs; large companies locking our shared culture away for centuries. It's trivial to think of more examples of the harmful effects of copyright. It's all caused by an old business model that depends on scarcity trying to force an artificial scarcity into a domain where scarcity doesn't exist.
How is this any different than the protections for other products that you have to buy? The whole point is you need to pay for it, and the producer needs to ensure you actually did so. I understand the technical issues with DRM which can have a poor UX sometimes, but for the most part it's only a problem if you didn't actually pay for the content. The rise of Netflix and streaming services show that it's working fine for millions.
Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free. That's the fundamental issue, and I don't agree. I doubt many creators and producers would either, not without some alternative answer to monetization. Do you have a solution for that?
> I understand the technical issues with DRM which can have a poor UX sometimes, but for the most part it's only a problem if you didn't actually pay for the content.
Actually, most of the UX problems only show up if you did pay. The people who download the content for free get the better product: an unrestricted file that they can use pretty much anywhere. Subscribers taking the legal route are stuck dealing with a bunch of different services, each with its own special blend of UX issues on top of the poor UX from the fragmentation itself.
> Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free.
Not content should be free per se but rather content should be freely redistributed. Many people producing new content will still want to be paid for their work, and that's fine. They just need to ensure that they get paid before the content is out in public where anyone can copy it, since they will no longer have a legal monopoly on distribution after that point.
Patreon, Kickstarter, and others offer one model for funding the production of creative works for public distribution. Others would include sponsorship and donations. Open source development is another option which can be applied to more than just software—just look at the various Blender open movie projects[1], all of which are distributed to the public for free and were funded with a combination of donations, sponsorship, and volunteer contributions.
> it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value
It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for.
> I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it
I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately.
> People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it.
"Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people.
The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.
> Creation must act like an investment, not a product.
This is exactly how it works today, and then the investors (people who either gave money or time) hope to get their investment back plus some profit through distribution.
The law is how control is enforced. The same way we handle other unwanted or criminal actions.
Just because you can do something does not give you the right or permission to do so. You can drive all over the road, or ride the train without a ticket, or walk out of the store without paying. But you wouldn't because it's against the law.
As far as crowdfunding, some projects have already taken that route but the results have shown that it doesn't really support the AAA content that consumers demand. If you think you can convince millions of people to pay upfront for content, and enough to outweigh all the free consumers, then I'm sure the industry would be very happy to hear from you.
Why would someone pay in advance for something that they will get for free at the same time as everything else? Fundamental limitation of capitalism is that one of its goals is to acquire the maximum amount of value for yourself, while losing the minimum amount. Even the most successful Patreon users rely on "Patreon exclusive content" for their supporters to be able to make some kind of livable money.
> Why would someone pay in advance for something that they will get for free at the same time as everything else?
Because the content wouldn't get created unless they do pay. That's why worthwhile Kickstarter projects tend to reach their funding threshold, even when they're to be released for no added cost.
That's not a goal of capitalism. It has no goals. All it means is that you, the individual, own the means to production. And you own the resulting profits or losses, regardless of how much value you create or how efficient you are in the process.
Interestingly a lot of films (like Transformers and Fast and Furious franchises) cost a lot, yet are incredibly boring. Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner had much smaller budget. And Youtube rocks on modest earnings.
It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are).
I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.
That's an entirely different issue. There are still good movies being made but the high budget blockbusters have to appeal to an ever broader audience, often with international releases, so the story is usually just mediocre enough to pass.
Yes, sorry if that was not clear, there are good movies.
I mean can it be that current system is not fair to the customer? We compare ownership with physical object. What if movie is not good? Can I get a refund? File is in perfect condition. Companies spent a lot on advertisement, some products I would consider fraud. Trailers usually the only good parts of the movie. Yet it is aired from every corner.
Part of book store experience is reading. I have a lot of child books, I like them all, we read again and again. When kid grown up he can present them, donate or sell.
In my mind Internet Archive made mistake. Not better than cracking Windows or jailbraking iPhone. These should become niche products, no need to advertise them, better help other communities.
Publishers should not both get copyright AND the ability to DRM the books while removing all the other properties of that physicality.
Books should be in a digital format that has at least all of the the properties of a physical good. I agree that if one has a physical (or digital copy) of a work, that there is no-issue renting or temporarily transferring it for as many ownership tokens as you possess.
If the publishers want copy right protection from the government, they must use open formats, unencrypted, non-executable, bits I can copy/sell/rent/etc. If they want to use DRM, they get no copy right protection.
> Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses
I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.)
Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.
If you donate a print book to the library, it will almost always be handed off to the Friends of the Library (or similar organization) for their book sale to raise money. If there's something special about the book, it might be added to special collections (e.g., if you're an important public figure or you've donated a research collection on a special topic). Almost never will the book be added to the lending collection.
eBooks and paper books share very little in common legally. e-ownership is generally a best efforts service to which you have a license.
In some jurisdictions they are even taxed differently. Just to highlight to morose creeping evil that is VAT. Paper book is a necessity. eBook is a luxury. Apparently
This wasn't the smartest move on behalf of the Internet Archive. One could argue they were pushing boundaries to get courts to rule in their favor but in the process they are putting the whole project in jeopardy. Taking current copyrighted works and just giving them away en-mass is obviously not going to be seen favorably by many.
Good. the internet archive does important work, and i'd hate to see a stupid idea like this put their larger mission at risk. i'm not sure how they ever thought they could get away with giving away other people's property, just because pandemic.
I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide?
> I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide?
That's a tricky precedent to set though, isn't it? If you do sufficiently good work elsewhere in your organization, you can break the law without penalty? That's like McDonalds claiming that they should be allowed to mistreat their workers because they also run a children's charity.
Doing a right thing doesn't grant you immunity when you do a wrong thing. And there was no question that what they did was illegal. Many thousands of people told them that the moment they announced they were planning to do it, they didn't even need legal counsel to point that out. They did it anyway.
Rather, if you do sufficiently good work in the process of breaking the law (as the IA has done here), you should be able to break that law without penalty.
If your doing so somehow has no adverse effect on the shop, sure! That's why copyright infringement is laudable, and stealing is wrong: the latter means the person stolen from no longer has any of the shoes.
Well it's the only place of its kind, it's more like it's too important to allow to be destroyed. Because you know that these copyright holder do not actually care about history or culture. Look what happened to what.cd, they will burn down everything to protect their profits
Why would there be another lawsuit?
Book publishers dont care about archived websites.
They care about IAs side activity of digitizing books and ignoring copyright.
I can see them bankrupting the IA to stop their copyright infringement, but I don't think they have an interest is stopping the sale of the archive. They may not even have a legal ability to stop a sale during bankruptcy.
I wish that the Internet Archive had tried to work around this by reaching out to public libraries, and having those public libraries agree to "loan" their still-on-the-shelf books to the Internet Archive. That might not cover all the copies that were simultaneously checked out by people (I don't know the numbers involved), but it would have helped.
Remember (the few that are over ~~600 years old might??:) )
Gutenberg invented movable type and a publication explosion followed. Heretofore books were hand copied, with errors etc. A medieval ~Xerox room was full of scribes - hard at work. A Xerox salesman who promised to double the speed of your copying - he walked in a hulking slave with a whip - all the monks visibly and hurriedly sped up.
Back to Gutenberg, https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.htm... the Authors fought printing presses, they fought even lending libraries. Books were often chained to the shelves to limit access as well as theft.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-cha...
So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up.
MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!
"Many open-Internet activists have been discussing how to back up the archive and make it more resilient for years. The temptation would be to employ a distributed system, such as a blockchain, that would be censorship-resistant and couldn’t be legally shut down."
Very interesting discussion here. Apparently can get 16TB drives at $100 each on enterprise bulk pricing. An entire backup would be 3,125 drives for $312,500.
But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.
Disclaimer: I run the infrastructure/ops team at the Internet Archive.
Unfortunately none of those numbers are really even close to correct (the discussion is always fun, but the folks in r/datahoarder are often not correctly informed. textfiles has more patience for it than I do). It would probably cost around 1.5M in drives, even at reasonable current enterprise volume pricing, to back up the 60+ PB of unique data in the Internet Archive (plus, as someone does note in that thread, the cost of running them -- even if it were a static backup to cold disks, you still need chassis to run them in for the backup process, space and infra for them, electricity, people, &c). I don't know offhand how much space the contents of the Wayback currently take up, but it's definitely an order of magnitude more than that number as well.
I'd love to know what the internal atmosphere was like when the IA did this. Who should I hold a grudge against for pulling possibly the stupidest move in the history of digital intellectual property?
This is the kind of radical demonstration I expect out of some fly-by-night startup, not a twenty-four year old nonprofit with less annual revenue than the lawyers who're suing them.
Does that 1.5m figure include redundancy (e.g. RAID)? What about if the data is compressed (either trivial gzipping each "file" the archive has, or using a compression window that spans multiple files)? I imagine the HTML/plaintext content of the Internet Archive would compress very well.
No, that's for a single raw copy (it could go lower based on implementation -- the sweet spot on $/bit pricing is around 8TB/disk right now, but that would actually be more expensive for us in total cost because of the increased infra/space/power necessary to run them). We could probably get a relatively trivial 20-30% savings on space for Wayback contents via compression, maybe more with work (various projects are underway to do this), but much of the rest of the contents are difficult to compress, or already compressed (music, imagery for books, video, software archives, etc). We have also historically been very reluctant to deduplicate heavily, though we are experimenting with it for certain types of content -- one principle of operation is that as an archive of last resort, we're unable to have a true deaccession plan as some other archives have. A compromise we make is that our hard drives are "landfill-ready" -- that is, the contents of a drive (assuming you can read the filesystem) are inherently meaningful, content is housed with its metadata, and so forth. This produces some unusual restrictions on how far we can take compression and certain types of bitwise redundancy.
It may be your target, but I would not be so dismissive of the other data in the Archive. The Software Library, the tens of millions of scanned books, the music, etc etc. On top of that, the raw scrape data driving the Wayback Machine is not currently made available to download from the archive. It's stored in WARC files, which would include both the images and text of all scrapes and would not be trivial to disentangle.
I'm not dismissing any other section of the archive. The the wayback machine has the big red target on it. It's a snapshot of recent history, I have lost track of how many times I have needed it for things that would otherwise be memoryholed.
Please, consider making a subscription service for the warc files, let us pay to get access to a query interface. archive.org could raise significant defense funds.
On the scale of what a bored multi-billionaire tech philanthropist could choose to fund on a whim, 50PB of storage is a tiny amount. People spend far more than that on their second yacht.
As an extremely rough calculation, I've seen figures that it would be about 1.2 million dollars of hard drives. Built into 4U size, 36-drive servers with RAIDZ2 arrays, it could be $8 to $10 million of hardware. And then you need a place to put it and keep it powered up and running, let's say that's a million dollars a year for datacenter space.
That's a tiny amount of money compared to some of the other nonprofit initiatives various billionaires have funded.
The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not put it at risk of destruction.
>Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, //
That's not at all self-evident, indeed quite likely false.
We had a similar discussion here a few times and content/program creators have said they made more money when their product was also available free - people tried it and bought it.
That probably only works for content creators who's stuff is good - publishers still want to sell stuff that's not good but just is packaged as if it were.
People who want free literature will find it, regardless of whether publishers consent.
As a sidenote, game publishers appear to be using a model of giving away an older game when a sequel is due out - it a similar game from the same company. Naturally one might think that this would eat in to potential profits, but I'm assuming they get more users for the new game, or at least profit more overall this way.
With video games there's also dlc to take into account. I bought total war Warhammer in a humble bundle sale for 12$, and enjoyed it so much I bought all the dlc for another 60
> We had a similar discussion here a few times and content/program creators have said they made more money when their product was also available free - people tried it and bought it.
There's a difference between making your work free when most work is non-free and making most work free. When things are generally pay-walled, free content can get extra attention at the expense of paid content. When the expectation is that things are free, well, there isn't any more total attention to go around, so all that changes is that content creators stop being able to charge for their work.
More generally, positional goods exist, so you cannot reliably extrapolate from individual interest to group policy goals. When people want a bigger boat than their neighbors, you cannot subsidize boat-buying until everyone has the best boat on the block.
I commented elsewhere but I find this a terrific example of a bold prospective move in this space. They took a risk for which the patron reward ratio was potentially huge. Also, publishers should have anticipated this sort of thing and prepared bridges so they didn't have to go on the attack and waste 10 different types of capital. That they are shutting down a public benefit with relevant impact (IA release gives an example) during a pandemic is a dick move in more than one way. This part among others will come back to bite them.
IA didn't release copyrighted books for free; at the very least this depends on your definition of "release" and personally after checking out a book I find that I no longer have access after ~2 weeks. This kind of timeline is much more like a library than a bookstore.
I think any smart author who cares about their craft, and knowledge in general, would much rather their publishing representative find a way to moderate and proactively track this new approach than turn the whole thing into a war, making a library--of all things--into the enemy.
> Also, publishers should have anticipated this sort of thing and prepared bridges so they didn't have to go on the attack and waste 10 different types of capital.
Publishers repeatedly asked the IA to stop obviously breaking the law before filing the lawsuit, and were ignored.
If that's all they did, it makes one wonder if the publishing corporate leadership teams understand how laws are made, or rewritten? They completely missed their interface with IA.
IA now has a lot of social leverage thanks to these publishers being about as creative and flexible as a concrete patio.
>In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists
Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
>Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement
And they did it in the most blatantly illegal way possible, with a press release that removed any doubt as to whether the infringement was willful. Brilliant!
IA could have, for instance, reached out to local libraries to see if IA could "use" their physical copies for proxies of the digital ones IA was loaning. This would likely have been illegal, but far more palatable, justifiable, and importantly not willful infringement.
Not a IP lawyer here, but I speculate that when and if this lawsuit goes to higher courts, the fact that IA was acting in favour of the public in a national emergency would be in their favor.
I can imagine the answer to all those questions from IA wouldn't be "because we are a law unto ourselves" as you suggested, but it would be along the lines that following bureaucratic channels during a national emergency to be able to help the public with availability of books, would have been slow and hence counterproductive.
In this country, laws have a interesting way to bend during national crises. I'll keep my fingers cross for that in this case.
>following bureaucratic channels ...would have been slow and hence counterproductive.
The courts will understand this to effectively be "we are a law unto ourselves". Those determinations are properly made by the mayor, governor, president, or legislative body-- not some random .org.
You made your point very clear. Regretfully, I can not agree with your fervent enthusiasm for the law of the land in this case that this is an obvious and open-and-shut case of illegal conduct that one might very much want it to appear. This is based on the assessments of experts such as the Copyright Office on the case and the nuances reflected in it.
As I said, we'll have to wait and see. I do look forward to it. In the mean time these are the tiny actions I'll be taking in support of IA (1) I double my donations to the IA and match donations of any friends and acquaintances, (2) the four conglomerate publishers are boycotted until further notice.
And remember, the Internet always finds a way, if its short history has taught us anything.
That won't fly because it is just as easy to lay claim that ignoring copyright is against the public because it devalues private property rights of which the creator did not assign to the IA.
Copyright Office mostly agrees with you in their response to an inquiry about IA National Emergency Library by a senator[1].
But there are things in that response to distinguish IA actions and motives from other bête noires of Copyright law (The Pirate Bay, etc.) That would give IA and their supporters something to work with; intents, outcomes, and the limited nature of IA NEL would (hopefully) harness publishers opportunism in the view of the law.
The argument being put forward here is as if IA just broken into peoples houses and redistributed 3m masks, and tried to justify it because they're doing good.
Fine, but the good has been exaggerated too. Some people who heard about this were able to read a book or two for free during a time when everyone was stuck in their house. That's a good gesture that I'm sure was appreciated, but they didn't change anyone's life here.
And it was a gesture that was not theirs to make. Did they ever consider just asking the publishers for permission? They might actually have gotten it. Companies were quite eager to do things to show they were trying to help back in March and April. But I've looked and found nothing saying they asked, so I'm guessing they didn't. Probably because they thought asking would look bad if they were told "no" and did it anyway.
I know only a comparatively small number of people who own library cards. You cannot check out an ebook from the library without a library card. You cannot get a lovely card without physically entering the library. If you did not have a library card when the library closed, or you left it unused until it expired, then you cannot check out ebooks from the public library.
Last I checked, there was, I think, 3 public libraries in California that allowed you to get a library card without being present. One of them required verification in some other method (fax? I can't remember), the other two had a second level card that didn't give access to ebooks or other library resources.
In Ohio, many (maybe all?) libraries allow you to apply online for a virtual library card that can be used to check out ebooks/audiobooks/etc. A librarian reviews the application and approves or denies it within a day or so, and you get an email either way. No need to ever visit a library in person.
I'm not 100% sure that this was in place before COVID-19, but I think it was.
To check out physical books, you have to visit a library in person and upgrade the virtual library card to a physical library card.
Yea, I forgot to mention it, but it's the same way for all of the major library systems in Ohio as well. My local library is connected to Dayton's system, but I also have virtual cards for Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. It makes finding audio books much easier.
There are a lot of people who use libraries without a card. Admittedly, many of them only use the computers, but in most locales anyone can wander in and read as much as they want.
A tangent, but I'm really glad California allows any state resident to use any public library in the state. In the state where I grew up, I was fortunate to live in a town with excellent library resources, but it was not something everyone in the state could enjoy even if they were willing to travel to another town. There's still a very noticeable difference between the library systems in different towns in CA, but at least one can still register and utilize online resources (assuming they visit in-person once if that's needed to register).
I don't know when you last checked, but Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, and Sonoma counties all let you get a "virtual" card to check out ebooks and you can do it online. (I'm not 100% sure about Napa's ebook status, though; I have a Santa Clara county virtual card but am just checking the web sites for other counties!) San Mateo County will mail you a library card. San Francisco County is the only one in the Bay Area that seems to require in-person visits, although they've waived that through July. Sonoma County also seems to coordinate with Mendocino and Lake counties on their online card systems. I won't check the rest of California, but it seems like it's definitely more than three libraries now. :)
Only speaking for Toronto here, but the Toronto Public Library very quickly amended their application process to allow you to get a card/membership online. (For any faults in this city, the TPL is amazing)
That's why they wanted to do it. It doesn't explain why they actually did it.
There's a long list of national and even worldwide problems I could solve, if only I was allowed to use other people's resources without their permission and was not required to compensate them in any way for that use.
I want to tackle all of those, but they would not get past the "ask a lawyer how much legal trouble it would be" stage, and so I do not actually do them.
If they had increased their lending by a finite amount, matching the number of copies in closed libraries they'd been in touch with, then I could sort of understand an increase in keen lending over their normal levels, as it would not be putting the publishers in a worse overall position. However, as it stands the unlimited lending seems naïve and ill thought through.
The grandparent isn't questioning the motivation for breaking the law, they are asking why the organization would possibly think it's a good idea given the likely consequences.
Q: "Why do you rob banks?"
A: "Because that's where the money is."
I actually think that even that analogy favors the restraint argued by the original comment. The civil rights movement was highly strategic in their choice of when and where to violate the law. The most successful leaders of those organizations would never have gambled the existence of the orgs on a purposeful violation of a law merely because it was unjust.
But really that's besides the point. If someone wants to argue the IA should gamble the entire organization on this issue, they should explain why rather than pretending its obvious and "right there in the article".
It probably did, but note that the scope was limited: Books released too recently were excluded (if I remember correctly, the cut-off was 5 years?), and they are still DRM protected and have to be returned at the end of the 3 month period, when the waitlist will kick in again.
Also note that the publishers' problem is not just the 3 months of waitlist suspension (supposed to offset the closure of physical libraries during the pandemic), but the practice of controlled digital lending of books scanned from physical copies (ie handing out a digital copy for each physical copy you've got sitting on your shelf) without additional royalty payments.
Publishers will also be able to trivially show that the Piracy subreddit found the DRM and geofiltering to be below industry standard and how there were literally thousands of posts there about people downloading books for permanent retention because they could.
If you've been warned that what you're doing is enabling others to violate copyright and continue to do so, then in a lot of jurisdictions yes. Same reason torrent trackers keep getting closed down.
By exactly this same line of reasoning, don't libraries present a loss of revenue for publishers because people can borrow a book that they otherwise would have to pay for and purchase? One book may be borrowed hundreds, if not thousands of times.
> One book may be borrowed hundreds, if not thousands of times.
Except requiring the physical book (or single book digital equivalent) controls the pace. If a standard checkout is 2 weeks, and if the book is always checked out, it will still take 4 years to hit 100 lends. And a thousand lends? Close to 40 years.
That's a difference in scale, but it doesn't make libraries right at the spot they sit. Do libraries pay 100x price for their books?
Be careful to avoid reasoning from an axiom that the way things worked when you grew up was the correct way. It's a pernicious psychological bias we all suffer from.
Hence the existence of Public Lending Right programs[1] in some countries. In Germany for example, libaries do need to pay a fee per loan (3-4 cent according to Wikipedia).
In the US, library ebooks have a lot of restrictions like the digital ebooks cost more for the library than physical copies and expire after a certain number of downloads.
>One book may be borrowed hundreds, if not thousands of times.
You over-estimate the lifespan of physical books and the physical stress of lending. 25–40 times is a more likely lifespan for a physical book. With digital lending, there are actually specific contractual limits on the number of lends and the cost per lend which vary based on the publisher. And the average number of lends per library book is probably close to 1.
Libraries still buy their books. And the fact that there are limited, physical copies means that access to the book is still controlled in a way that free online copies are not. There is no permanent ownership. A single person can use each copy at a time. That's a vastly different circumstance than the book simply being freely available to everyone everywhere, permanently.
This doesn't follow, because you need to also assume there are no people who downloaded for free and then went out and bought the book or convinced others to buy the book. Neil Gaiman has pointed out this happening with the Sandman series.
I think that this reasoning is quite naive. The most basic counterexample I can give is a person who downloaded the content, but wasn't able to afford it. If that content was not accessible on IA, that person wouldn't be able to access is. The publisher would still not earn anything.
I think it is your reasoning that is naive. Of course there are people using IA to access a book that, were it not free, would not buy the book. These people are neither plus nor minus in terms of revenue. But for your point to hold, everyone who downloaded the content would have to fall into this category. Almost certainly a large number of users would be those who might potentially buy the book but will simply download it if its free. These people would be lost revenue.
You can argue about the size of this group, but the counter argument would be that there is a valid fear that if it is normalized and allowed to continue, this group will grow larger and larger over time. You can argue by trying to compare this to libraries, but libraries still buy their copies of the book, and checking a book out from a library comes with restrictions that don't exist here. There really isn't a way to spin this where it doesn't result in some amount of lost royalties for the author.
We can go back and forth with thinking each others' reasoning is naive, but reasoning isn't how we discover the truth. Frankly, to both sides of this argument, real-world evidence or GTFO.
There's plenty of totally reasonable hypotheses for why giving away content can be profitable OR unprofitable, and plenty of real-life examples of both as well. The fact is, with regards to this situation, we don't know, and this conversation shouldn't center around a problem that some people have only hypothesized exists.
There's a whole list of assumptions you are making though that likely don't apply.
1. There actually is other material available from the author to buy. If there isn't, it's simply a loss.
2. If there is other material by the author, you have to assume the reader was not going to read any of the author's material without having access to the free book first.
2. If additional material exists, and the person would have never engaged with the authors work without a free "trial" of their work, less than 100% of people who access the free material will go on to buy additional material. Some because they are uninterested, some because they don't want to or can't purchase it for the same reason they couldn't purchase the original. In the former case, thats a net loss. In the latter, its a wash.
3. Even if there is additional material to buy, and even if the reader only becomes interested in the author's work through the free book, and even if the reader is inspired to go out and buy it after reading it, it only offsets the original lost revenue of the first, free book (assuming they are priced similarly). So its only if a reader is inspired to go out and buy at least 2 more works by the author that they would actually become a net positive for the publisher/author.
Clearly the number of people accessing the free material who would actually be a net positive for the author/publisher is quite small, and the free book in general would almost certainly be a net negative. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want, but at the end of the day, its still theft. People will argue that publishers are all rich and so we shouldn't care, but thats a different argument, and doesn't apply to the majority of authors who don't actually make that much money.
With modern technology they can. Isn't it better to enhance this new technology rather than pretend we are stuck back in the middle ages ?
We finally have the technology to protect knowledge and culture forever and instead we are trying to invent ways to artificially limit this that could result in important literary works being lost not not mention misused for censorship and suppressing of "unwanted" information.
In the UK/Ireland, "the author received about 10 cents (U.S.) per use, with a max of $8,500 (U.S.) per year" but "the copyright holder must be a citizen of that country to participate".
I’m a big supporter of IA, but they really goofed on this one. I donated after this incident but mostly because I don’t want this lawsuit to shut them down.
There is probably not enough people on IPFS to store all of it in a safe way that makes it always aviable. I think all the items on the page already have torrents so it would likely be better to share them around.
I really don't know much about the intersection of IP and legal entities, but in the worst case scenario would IA be able to move its web captured assets to a separate company instead of tanking the whole thing? In other words, just leave the "library" division to tank and take the heat while everything else remains safe elsewhere?
The Internet Archive should do the lawful thing and remove all the content that the publishers want removed, to prevent the collateral damage to the important resource for those who just want to see old versions of pages that have changed or disappeared.
Leave the books and whatever to pirate torrent sites and just do the Wayback Machine thing.
I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence.
I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass.
If you want to establish a legal precedent, you can't just go to a court and ask them to. Courts only hear "cases and controversies" -- to establish what the law is, you have to get somebody to sue you.
The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating.
But it's also because the plaintiffs are vindictive. They know this is about setting a precedent. They don't like the precedent, so they're out for blood. They could have been civilized and only asked for an injunction.
That’s not a very believable scenario. First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening? Second, that’s not how precedent is established: typically a single case is hand-picked to serve as the exception to the rule taking great care to make it as palatable, appealing, and free of recriminations as possible and you take that to the courts. You don’t make available millions of books to billions of people, you make available a book or a hundred books or whatever number that it takes to prove your point without making matters worse for you and opening you up to such a massive liability. Third, you are making my point for me: again, some other website or organization should gamble their entire existence that isn’t worth as much as the Archive to get this precedent: whatever the reason, it’s a massive and hugely irresponsible gamble.
It’s not like the Archive doesn’t know what kind of people they are dealing with. They know publishers are out to stop second hand sales, ebook lending, right of resellers to set prices, and a million other things. It’s like expecting the RIAA or the MPAA to settle for an injunction when they have the chance to kill Napster/TPB/IsoTorrent/whatever. If it’s really in order to set a precedent then that’s damn short-sighted.
> First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening?
You're assuming the country being closed is especially relevant. The point is rather that they had physical books and weren't physically lending them out, in which case they should be able to digitally lend them out. If you're not lending more copies than you have, how is that not a reasonable argument?
> typically a single case is hand-picked to serve as the exception to the rule taking great care to make it as palatable, appealing, and free of recriminations as possible and you take that to the courts.
It's a well-loved actual library that only wants to lend out its books, what more do you want?
And if they'd only lent out a single book, would that have gotten them into court? It had to be enough for the plaintiffs to care.
> some other website or organization should gamble their entire existence that isn’t worth as much as the Archive to get this precedent
Why? It has to be a real library. You would rather some other library take the risk, or that nobody ever do it?
> It’s not like the Archive doesn’t know what kind of people they are dealing with.
And that's the point. The people they're dealing with are the bullies and the Archive is supposed to back down? Somebody has to fight the fight.
> If you're not lending more copies than you have, how is that not a reasonable argument?
That's the crux of the problem, though. The Internet Archive originally followed that model making that very argument; that argument hasn't actually been tested in court and the legality of it isn't settled, but publishers were generally looking the other way. But in March, the IA lifted the limit, allowing an unlimited number of people to read the same book on the grounds that closing physical libraries created a national emergency.
I somehow doubt that they actually lent books to an unlimited number of people, since an unlimited number of people don't exist. So then you get into questions like, did they actually lend out more copies than exist in all the libraries that are physically closed? Probably not, right? Probably not even close to that. So that's an interesting question on something like digital inter-library loans.
And we still haven't heard their response, only what the plaintiffs are claiming.
> If you want to establish a legal precedent, you can't just go to a court and ask them to. Courts only hear "cases and controversies" -- to establish what the law is, you have to get somebody to sue you.
> The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating.
Are you trying to claim that Internet Archive purposely tried to set a precedent, knowing they don't have enough money to actually do it? That sounds like a pretty damning accusation of gross incompetence.
I can, do, and will. There has to be room in the charity ecosystem for organizations that take risks.
It remains to be seen whether this blunder will actually destroy the Internet Archive.
In general, I think the idea that good things have to last forever is overrated. Organizations willing to compromise their values eventually drift away from those values completely, which is worse than simply ceasing to exist--such organizations can linger on and do more harm than good.
> They can count on support from many. Maybe they have a plan.
I've looked at the complaint, and I've lived through the Napster trial. It would be one thing if they had a good case and just needed funds to make it through the trial. That's not what's going on here.
When you mix statutory copyright violation with digital technology, you get infinite fines. Any money you donate is going to the book publishers at the end of the day.
Small point: you don’t technically have to wait until someone sues you. It is possible to seek a declaratory judgment (where a court issues a legal finding) without waiting to be sued. You do have to show that there is an actual controversy before a court will hear you, as you note.
There's no controversy here though. What IA did was plainly on the "not legal" side of the line. (I mean, there are surely some people who believe otherwise, but you can find someone who believes almost anything.)
You may feel that the dismantling of copyright is an issue on par with civil rights. However, that sentiment is rare, and isn't supported by any plain reading of the constitution, unlike racial equality. IA's not going to be setting any precedents in the defense of the lawsuit. They are going to be handed a swift, expensive, and one-sided defeat.
The sentiment that blacks are equal was rare once too.
I find your understanding of this rather contrived given that your constitution has nothing to do with me.
Your ip laws on the other hand, well, they stretch far and wide around countries that would rather have nothing to do with you.
I would prefer, if youre going to refute my claims, you at least acknowledge them.
Like, the fact ip law had a net benefit to society when they were conceived. But have since been twisted and applied dishonestly.
Can anyone tell me what the real damage would be if we limited copyright terms to one year? And what would be the real benefit to society at large to freely access information?
What you're talking about isn't the same as what I'm talking about. I'm dealing with the idea that there's a precedent setting end to IA's decision. There isn't. They don't have a snowball's chance in a supernova of winning this case. It's was just dumb.
Your concerns about the effect of America's IP laws is a totally different issue. Your government presumably either believes that IP law is a net benefit today, or else wants something else that america had enough to hold their nose and make a deal. There are some political steps you can take to try to reverse that scenario but I'm afraid IA's actions here have no bearing on that. They can't possibly help you at all.
As to the rest of what you said, does it have merit? I don't know. What I do know is that IA will be worse off after this lawsuit is done.
Rosa Parks launched a boycott to protest a bus system that was so racist that even the horrific Jim Crow laws weren't enough for bus drivers who kicked off black people (and police officers who arrested them) who had a legal right to their seats.
Actual Libraries buy materials and loan them. I don't think that is what archive.org was doing. I don't think the content owners are being bad guys here.
I found this initiative really irritating, as there are almost certainly better ways to accomplish the objective legally.
Could you site your source for "their net assets are only a couple million dollars"? Knowing the scope of the organization, that number would surprise me.
Yes, I think that perspective is actually more relevant, even if the IA might have made a mistake.
But I see only victims in this conflict. Most authors today don't really eat with golden spoons and to have an organisation that helps them get their fair share of the work they put into the books is certainly necessary in the internet age.
On the other hand the internet archive is an extremely valuable service. I hope some form of agreement can be reached that doesn't end in even more dysfunctional laws or judgments around copyright or the end of business for any participant.
Personally, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the publishers and authors when they are so over-the-top. Painting the Internet Archive as "vile" and claiming they don't provide any valuable service strikes me as so far from the truth as to be insulting. It feels like they are targeting people who don't really know much about what IA is or what they do... That makes me wonder if it's really about more than IA and their emergency lending program, but now I'm probably starting to sound paranoid.
I'm sure that some authors lost some dollars to this program, but is it really all that much? The coverage on the lawsuit doesn't mention how much injury the publishers (and, to a much lesser degree, their authors) have suffered.
I’m writing a novel. I’ve been at it since 2016, partly because project planning is just as hard outside of software and partly because I have a full-time job too. Based on what people like Charlie Stross blog about, and based on the few sales estimates I can find, even if I reach the heady highs of ranking 214th biggest SciFi writer by sales, I will make less than $40k in lifetime sales for four year’s work.
This has little or nothing to do with any supposed reduction in book sales the Internet Archive or any other library, dead-tree or bittorrent, has caused, and quite a lot to do with publishers screwing authors out of royalties for books they do sell. I have no sympathy any author too stupid to realize that publishers are to blame for their still needing a day job after (for example of Myke Cole) twelve books, two TV shows, and a comic series.
I'm not familiar with Myke Cole or his books. I'm sure they are quite good. I think that quality is more important then quantity though.
Some people on here seem to make one app and kick back for years on the earnings while others churn out one after the other unprofitable software tool.
I myself have written 3 novella, 1 book of short stories, 1 movie, 2 native apps, and 4 web apps. I can't live on the royalties from any of them but I know there are people who do less and get more.
I haven't seen any evidence that the shrinking earnings of authors are related to piracy. From what I've read, publishers are simply retaining more of the profits for themselves and, often, theorizing that piracy is somehow raising their costs yet providing little by way of documentation.
That's what sukilot said: it is a fallacy to assume that people would pay for content that they can't pirate. In actuality, it's the other way around: people pirate content that they can't pay for (either because they have no money (at all or in a currency that the publisher accepts), or because the publish refuses to deliver the content (either at all or in a format they can actully use, ie not DRM-encumbered or otherwise defective)).
That would be great if I’ve misunderstood and the Internet Archive is really only lending our books that aren’t for sale. (And, as is probably universal on this site, I think DRM in books is both bad and dumb: bad for accessibility, dumb because of how easy it is to OCR text).
Likewise, unless I misunderstood, they already had a legit lending library system set up, but they broke the rules and made it infinite free copies for everyone.
I hope there is a happy ending to this story, because I like the internet archive, but at the moment it looks like they got their legal advice from the same minds who came up with Freeman Of The Land.
> That would be great if I've misunderstood and the Internet Archive is really only lending our books that aren't for sale.
I'm not sure if they are only lending books that aren't for sale, but my understanding is that the overwhelming majority of the books involved are in fact not available for purchase. A book that is only available in DRM-encumbered form is not available at all.
It seems unlikely to me that piracy is a major factor, as headline-grabbing as it often tends to be. It's hard for me to even hazard a guess how the IA's "emergency library" would really affect things; it's not piracy in any conventional understanding of the term, but maybe that makes it more likely to cost authors potential sales, because it's so easy to read the book for free. But I want to triple underline that maybe and surround it with question marks.
There is no fallacy in my statement, it's an anecdote supplied to show some fairly popular, published authors are not making enough money to quit their day job. For those authors, losing income would be painful. It's an example that proves the comment I'm replying to isn't correct.
That’s a reply to an argument for abolishing BitTorrent, and not on-topic. What the Archive did is obviate the need to even pirate: everyone could get content “for free” from a legal entity operating under US laws and subsuming all liabilities.
Suddenly you can get your book for free without even the legal or ethical hazards.
The authors aren't involved in this, unfortunately.
The plaintiffs here are publishers—you know, the ones who take the vast majority of all profit from all book sales, despite massive increases in scalability over the past century.
If the plaintiffs win this, authors won't see a cent.
IA has ruffled a lot of feathers over the years with their copying of copyrighted content, putting all the eggs in a single basket was understandable given the resource constraints they are operating under, starting a war using that basket as a shield was not the best move they could have made, especially knowing who the opposition is.
The publishers have been out for their blood for a long time, this is essentially handing them a very easy victory. They'll be very lucky if they survive - and so will we.
Assuming it is possible to copy the data I would support an effort to make an off-line backup on the off chance that they get shut down completely and lose access to their assets.
The plaintiffs are arguing that IA broke the law and that they as plaintiffs had their rights violated.
If IA shuts down it will technically be the courts fining them, but I have trouble pinning blame on the court or the injured party asking for relief. Nor can IA claim ignorance here.
"Without any license or any payment to authors or publishers, [Internet Archive] scans print books"
That's a lie, unless they are alleging that those print books were stolen, they were bought and paid for. That is how print books work, for the most part?
That is not how digital lending libraries work. You must only lend out the number of copies you own. Similarly, you can’t buy a movie and set up a free streaming site. IA has no legal leg to stand on
Isn't it better to have people learn from their mistakes (if this is a mistake) - at least, perhaps, learn to be more circumspect - rather than just getting rid of people who have experience of making mistakes?
I hate that whole thing about requiring people to resign because they made a mistake (if it's genuine); obviously a pattern of mistakes is different. An obvious blunder would also be different, where it was self-evidently wrong and lacked mitigation.
No. A board that collectively shirks its responsibilities to the stakeholders needs to be replaced. It’s not like no one could have predicted this was a possibility- and even their board did too, but they gambled that it was worth it.
What that tells you is that their board does not place the sustainability and long-term availability of the archive over all other metrics and I think that’s a fundamental issue that can’t be corrected. If growth, popularity, increasing in scope, etc are more important to the archive’s board than the guaranteed existence of the content they’ve curated ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now then they are not worthy protectors of it. The archive’s worth isn’t the data they have today, it’s the fact that they promised to safekeep it for the years to come. If they can’t be trusted to do that and place that over everything else, then they are failing what the whole world has been sharing data and making donations in the name of.
That doesn't seem like an honest mistake, everyone knew this was very risky move. In such a case, someone has to be accountable. There can't be only upsides and no downsides for taking risks.
The board are in that role because they’ve made the mistakes and are now experts who can avoid them and are truested to. If its an obvious mistake they shouldnt be board members.
Agreed. Or at least every board member that supported the action should be expected to step down.
I really want the service provided by IA to continue. Even though I have never used it, I recognize how valuable it is to humanity as a whole. But if the people running organization providing that service are going to jeopardize it like that, then they must take responsibility.
"I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities."
Most non-profits, like almost all organizations, have the primary goal of continuing to exist as an organization, not do whatever charitable ideals they purport to support.
archive.org is a primary target for the book burners. As with any big thorn; they dont need coordination to attack it; it's practically a law of nature.
Archive team: is there a 101 on getting pages? I struggle to archive the things I want because of the JS interface and the generated data. I just want the links to the original GET
's and source files.
Torrents for the lowest level data per domain would be excellent. I would donate (again) to get priority for the ones I am interested in.
"I struggle to archive the things I want because of the JS interface and the generated data. "
Similar experience here, the interface and, worse, the lack of built-in p2p redundancy, even on the gross level, is quite staggering considering that the Archive org has modelled itself around the protection and archival of brittle information.
Really hope the lawsuit swings in their favour but damn there's work to do for them. When they last held a fundraiser because their traffic overwhelmed their servers I had a look at their basic search front page - it came in at a staggering 7-8mb per pageload as compared to under 100kb for most regular search engines?! This frankly makes me unlikely to donate since it seems so mismanaged that one -cannot- throw enough money at that for it to work at scale.
Is there a different way than downloading the displayed page from the wayback machine again? It seems to support raw html download but I haven't found a way to get the accompanying JS/CSS easily.
I saw some API to manage ones' own collections but that seems to be only for owners...
>Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence.
Putting aside the obvious “not if there is a clear and agreed upon plan for naming their replacements,” there is actually a very different last resort for organizations (typically non-profits) that are deemed to be in service of the community (even if just as a place of employment but especially when they are furthering a mission) where the courts are granted custody of the non-profit and appoint a respected member of the community to maintain core operations as they oversee the process of creating a new board of directors, possibly by setting up elections, creating a committee to establish new governing bylaws, etc so that the good a non-profit has been doing isn’t wholly undone by the dissolution of its governing body.
Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?
The data stored on the disk drives is what the world values, but it actually has very little economic value. Internet Archive should start selling off the storage/server setup to a different nonprofit at fair market value ("Internet Cloud"), and renting continued access. If some eventual creditor wants to claim that the specific data collection on the disks had a value that was improperly sheltered from bankruptcy, they would be free to make a copy.
The plaintiff would have seven years in which to have the court claw back the transferred assets and, as there's no way that it would come close to looking like an ordinary course-of-business transfer, it would not only make them more likely to lose the suit (by making them look even more like law-flouting criminals), but it would likely add a criminal charge to the mix (bankruptcy fraud).
Yeah, its only 10 PB, why don't we p2p a copy? 1000 people with 10 TB to spare wouldn't work but 50 000 storing 100-400 GB each would be managable. 50 k pp is ofc nothing and probably not even enough to get it done before everyone gets bored. (you know who you are) Tubing it into the boxes would be the hard part. Most wouldn't need to do much more than contribute bandwidth and temp storage.
> There are 237,000 members of this subreddit.
> If each of us on average contributed 1TB (I know many people, myself included, would give a more than that for IA), we'd have 237PB, which feels like it's the right ballpark of raw storage to host 30PB in a reasonable, redundant, "not ideal but at least functional" manner.
I'm small-potatoes for a datahoarder, but I could chip in a couple tens of TB to a project like this. If only I knew what button to push to make it do the thing.
Sorry for my ignorance on this matter, but why do safe harbor provisions not apply to the Internet Archive? Shouldn't they have been served a DMCA takedown request bu the publishers, and then been in violation of those rules and paid the applicable penalties had they not complied and removed the offending content?
Safe harbor applies when other people upload books on your service and you are taking it down as you go. It does not apply when you publish books on your service.
It should be noted that the cumulative annual revenue of these four conglomerate were north of $4B in 2017.
Unfortunately, they own so many smaller publishers, that it's very hard to boycott all of their subsidiaries effectively and without harming the small fish.
But I do share your sentiment; I haven't loaned even one single book from IA emergency library and I still stand with them in support against opportunistic greed of these publishers in this case.
For what is worth, I didn't download anything by those publishers from the IA during the pandemic, but have for sure some physical books from Penguin and Wiley in my library. I took notes anyway to never buy anything again from those publishers, not even as a gift.
I guess it's an ad hominem, except the original comment made no argument, just implied they were boycotting those publishers going forward. I made no argument, just implied their boycott would probably be infective because they probably weren't buying books anyway.
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy where the debaters character is attacked rather than their point addressed. There is no argument being made here on either side.
I beg to differ. I see at least two main arguments here:
Argument 1: Since these publishers are suing IA (premise), I find it justified for myself to boycott them (conclusion)
Argument 2: Well, you were not spending money there anyway (conclusion) if you were downloading your books from IA (premise).
Why did I feel that Argument 2 was unsubstantiated and ad hominem? I asked myself,
how did the person making Argument 2 know that the OP...
(a) ...has used IA National Emergency Library at all? may be they are just unhappy with these publishers bullying an NGO?
(b) ...has used IA NEM to download books from these particular publishers? may be they are buying everything Penguin publishes, but enjoyed using NEM for reading other books from other publishers?
Assuming things about the characters and actions of the person you are discussing with and making your argument about those rather than the topic of discussion, is a sign of a logical fallacy to me.
Losing the Wayback Machine alone as a free resource would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It must be saved!
Its not an argument on the scale of the operation but rather if alternatives exist. I am merely stating that burning down a library is not less of a loss if an alternative exists, especially seeing that you'd need to find the new archive and get awareness out about its new location.
... 'size' is really not that important. What matters is the content, it's uniqueness and relative importance.
Libraries, even books (let alone literacy) during antiquity were rare and generally unique, remember, this is before the printed press.
The Library at Alexandria was a 'first-order' source of knowledge and wisdom, a place where 'intellectual luminaries' (i.e. big rabbis of the day) would have studied. Possibly every single book represented a unique bit of knowledge, and each one a historical artifact.
Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like losing 15% of all Universities, professors, all of their papers, textbooks, 15% of authors, playwrights, all of their works, 15% of all written history - basically most or all copies of their works, vanished into thin air, for all of time.
If the Library continued to exist in its fullest form, we may very well have much more of our history pieced together.
The Internet Archive is not even a 'second-order' resource. It's nice to have, and useful particularly for some historical reasons, but if it were to evaporate tomorrow, civilization wouldn't skip a beat.
There is no specialized, arcane knowledge there. Parts of the IA are of course really nice to have, particularly the news which forms a kind of historical record. But old copies of 'HomeDepot.com' and 'McDonalds.com' are just not that important.
We don't use the IA as a source of science, physics, fiction, students don't go to the IA to access authors' works or textbooks on orbital physics.
If the contents of IA were seriously valuable, then quite a number of parties would be interested in maintaining it, first of all, the parties being documented (if HomeDepot.com doesn't care about their 2006 web-site, then maybe it's not so important).
I support the IA and I would hope that it was even a kind of government-sponsored agency, but it's not an 'intellectual foundation'.
(Edit: changed from 25% to 15%, it's just a number obviously, but my point being 'it's some material share of the compendium of knowledge')
They don't necessarily fit the definition of "arcane", but there's certainly specialized knowledge that at this point exists primarily on the Internet Archive.
At this point in time, there have been lots of niche websites and forums and many have shut down. In some cases, those websites housed actual practical knowledge. Example: I drive a Mazdaspeed3. There was a forum dedicated (partly) to that car, and it went down. Now that it's gone, a lot of information on how to work on it is also gone or much more difficult to come by.
The internet archive is a universal archive of the internet rather than just what is exposed trough their wayback machine. You are comparing a quantifiable well indexed archive of any online with one which is not quantifiable due to being lost to history. There are similarities between the efforts of the Library at Alexandria and the internet archive which make them comparable, so lets.
>'size' is really not that important. [...] each one a historical artifact.
The uniqueness of content in the internet archive is significantly greater by virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point. Knowledge which would be lost (often intentionally) if not for efforts such as the internet archive, or that of the Library at Alexandria.
The library made copies of the knowledge for the original owners rather than having the only copy. making every copy most likely non-unique. The value in its indexing is immense especially when you realize that useful information is only useful within a context where it can be applied and cannot be valued outside of it.
>Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ...
This did not happen.
>If the Library continued to exist in its fullest form, we may very well have much more of our history [...] orbital physics.
Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive. The archive and efforts like it are used as a first source of knowledge by wikipedia, students, developers, researchers, anyone needing to verify a business existing prior to the investor call. If there was not an archive of the Feynman lectures I would know nothing about orbital physics now, if the current hosts are lost I am very very glad that the internet archive has a copy.
>If the contents of IA [...] important).
Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind). Things which would be lost if not for the specific functionality you are mentioning. Also there are many many other efforts, unlike you seem to state (e.g. archive.is, ipfs, the-eye.eu).
1) "virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point."
>>>>>>> the IA is not 'knowledge' it's 'information' and most of it is irrelevant to anything - more importantly: All of the important information in the IA is well documented elsewhere. We don't need the IA for much at all.
2) Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ... This did not happen.
>>>>>>> Of course it did! Lucio Russo / "Forgotten revolution" argues that a large part of the scientific knowledge of the Hellenistic era was lost.
3) "Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind)."
>>>>>>> If that's a good example use case - then you've proven my point because there are exactly 0 people in this world using IA to see if 'some business existed 10 years ago in order that they might do business with them due to concerns of honey potting'.
4) "Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive."
>>>>>> Some contents IA might be a little bit useful to a few historians, but beyond that, it will have no meaning.
The IA could be cut down to 1/1000000 it's size, and still, maintain it's historical relevance.
If the IA were vaporized today, it wouldn't really matter that much, there's nothing in there we need, and the important content is saved elsewhere. The NYT has a great archive.
The internet is mostly noise and babble, most of it is not important at all. Some of it is.
We can’t judge what is important and what is not. This is a job for the future historians in a millenium.
What historians really need is accounts of how regular people went about their business, without a filter applied by the one recording that account. The internet archive is an excellent resource for this, but only if it is preserved.
Previous ages failed to record what was needed to properly understand that age, not because they lacked the capacity to do so, but because they didn’t consider mundane things worth recording.
Seriously. It runs contrary to people's intuition, but things we think of as boring now are what historians will care about more than famous, well-preserved, and widely-replicated materials.
The Stoics were always going to survive into the 21st century, but the graffiti on walls would tell you a lot more about the politics and culture of the time than one well-off scholar's view. All those long-gone personal sites are the graffiti on the wall, and we have a copy of a lot of it.
I learn a lot about things I was only vaguely aware of in the '90s from random magazine clippings/media people like Jason Scott and Anatoly Shashkin share.
So much of this is in the Internet Archive. Think of what it means to someone 100 years from now trying to piece together an understanding of this era. How much could you find from just 5-10 years ago without it? Most of those websites are offline, the magazines long gone, the companies absorbed into another with no interest in history.
1. All of the important information at Library at Alexandria is documented elsewhere by definition.
2. Sure, 15% of all academics going poof is the exact same thing as the Library at Alexandria burning down.
3. Those are two separate examples
4. You are replying in a thread about how the internet archive making copies of books and allow people access to those is getting them shut down, would you then argue that the Library at Alexandria is also largely meaningless?
At least the internet archive usually follows the law. When IA is gone everyone will just go to libgen which actively opposes copyright. Not only that but a bunch of history will be lost and source links on Wikipedia will break.
IMO: most publishers are worthless anyway. I feel bad for authors but it’s hard to sympathize with publishers.
To appease publishers? How about so they can do right by the many authors out there who are still able to sell books through Powell's, Amazon or other local book sellers?
How many books written today would not be written at all if copyright lasted, say, 20 years? 10? "life of the author" is far too long; all culture is built atop other culture.
Copyright is a limited exclusive grant in exchange for the expectation of having more works written/created/painted/drawn/designed. We should not just ratchet up the duration or scope of that exclusive grant without the expectation that we'll get more value out of it (more works) in the trade.
Life of the author seems potentially too short. What if an author is struck down early? Shouldn't their family left behind be able to enjoy some of the profits for a period of time?
Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted to incentivize the creation of new works, for the benefit of the public.
As you suggest, a time-based copyright term (such as the original Copyright Act term of 14 years with a single renewal) would preserve this incentive even for authors who expect they might die before the end of the term.
Why treat authors differently than any other laborer? Does the ownership value in a house disappear when the carpenter dies? What about in car?
Art takes work. It makes sense to give the artist something concrete that can be sold so the artist has a chance of earning a living. If that right is passed down to the kids, at least the artist has something to pass along, just like other laborers.
No. The first copy of a book is VERY, VERY scarce. It can take years for an author to churn it out.
Here's a deal: go write a book. If you are overjoyed to see people pirate it, I'll personally buy a copy. But I guarantee that you'll be heartbroken to see people steal.
Have some respect for people who work long and hard.
Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages.
You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this.
On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong.
Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation.
I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.