I was utterly flabbergasted by this move. If some unrelated entity had done some bold move in the digital lending space, that would be one thing, but IA is a single point of failure for large amounts of internet history. Frankly, it was completely idiotic to risk all that on an untested lending experiment.
If I’m being honest, none of you would have made the archive happen. Presumably, you would have been troubled by the copyright implications. The kind of person who does that would probably also do this. There is no perfect stopping point. Everyone fantasizes that they would have sold GME at the top, run a business to the point it was at its best and no farther, and pushed a law to bend only as far as it can.
The evidence is in the action. The archives are available yet none of you even host a mirror of this supposed treasure. Of course you are flabbergasted: you would have been flabbergasted anyway. What use is the surprise of the peanut gallery?
I agree. I don't understand why the IA seem to be continuously poking the limits of what's acceptable or not, when their core mission is already complicated enough copyright-law-wise.
They are one big lawsuit away from being possibly forced to shut the _entire_ archiving operation down, and yet they continuously prod all the entities that are likely to serve them such a lawsuit. I cannot but have this picture of a small dog barking at a pack of huge dogs. And then they'll cry and make a fuss and claim they are the victims when they are inevitably sued.
Personally I find it more naive to think that tiptoeing around book publishers in fear hoping that they can slowly make small progress is the smarter move. They're not going to make serious progress in the fight against unfair online lending terms by appeasing publishers.
Not only do they still have an appeal, but the problem goes beyond the Internet Archive itself. Lobbying politicians, coordinating with other libraries, inspiring more civil disobedience, all of which can more productively happen now that we've seen what publisher's limits are as well as how we've seen that publisher profits _grew_ over the period that the National Emergency Library was available.
The appeal would be for the implementation of the restriction both parties have already agreed to. It’s a clear regression from pre Covid. They’ve lost either way.
Agree, but the real naivety is that they did it (afaict) under the same corporate entity as the critical online Internet Archive. This means a loss on this lending issue may jeopardize the entire IA, which would be a much greater loss.
They should absolutely be pushing the edges, but cleave it off so as not to put the whole enterprise at risk.
If they spun it off separately they'd be handing a pretty big target for publishers to lean on during trial: "They *knew* what they were doing was wrong, they even tried to separate it from their non-profit to protect themselves from the consequences!"
Probably it's more that we just disagree on the relative importance of digital lending; I think that digital lending is one core part of the overall ability to access archived works, and thus is core to the Internet Archive's mission and function rather than a simple extension of it. That makes it worthy of putting their full weight behind it.
>> they'd be handing a pretty big target for publishers to lean on during trial: "They knew what they were doing was wrong, they even tried to separate it from their non-profit to protect themselves from the consequences!"
Maybe, if they did it foolishly and obviously. But it could easily be done so as to undermine the same argument, and even if not, the counter-argument is that "we did it that way because "we knew we would be swimming with a bunch of excessively litigious asshat corporations." Not hard to convince a jury of that.
Moreover, as important as digital lending is, losing BOTH digital lending AND The Internet Archive will be a serious disaster with very long-lasting consequences. This latest decision just made ti more likely, and the current SCOTUS, which may well be where this ends up, is likely to produce that result.
We need an archive copy of The Internet Archive (both the data set and the organization).
>initial ruling cited emergency lending to justify banning all digital lending and the case was only brought up due to it as well.
The ruling's only mention of the emergency lending was that it was illegal as CDL was illegal.
There's also a fair amount of reason to suspect the publishers were preparing for the lawsuit far before the emergency lending. They were publishing stories about it and forming a petition against it in 2019, following years of criticizing it.
Worst case is they’re ordered to shut the entire archive down. It will be like the burning of the Library of Alexandria only the arsonists are the IP lobby and the reason it happened is ego.
A good example of letting ideology walk you past the cliff. Even if they’re successful against the injunction the damage has been done.
Given how tenuous online lending is already, it was naive to push the boundary further.
I feel a similar ideological gap is slowly growing in the treatment of data surrounding generative AI.