>I expect it won't be long before you can't get old magazines or other nostalgic and niche material.
I will point out that the Internet Archive is among the foremost source of warez[1] today.
Being brutally honest, what Internet Archive is doing these days isn't archiving or academic fair use anymore. They are flagrantly violating copyright, or enabling violations of copyright, and that is straight up not okay.
As an aside, do not be fooled into thinking all those ISOs[1] were provided by the rightsholders. They were not, even if they seem so at first glance. I would say the way they present the information is disingenuous at best, deliberate obfuscation at worst.
Yeah, and if you read the ruling in the controlled digital lending case, it was a mess. IA wasn't making sure the print copy came off the shelf, and they were linking to their own site (BWB) to sell copies of the book. Not a well built case to take to court.
Isn't linking to a place to buy a licensed copy an argument in favor? It implies that they sincerely believe that the "free download" doesn't hurt the market for the book, given that they expect people to still be willing to pay for it.
And not making sure the book is removed from the self seems kind of irrelevant when the book is on a shelf in a closed library where nobody can borrow it anyway. Are we really supposed to believe that the number of copies they lent out during COVID exceeded the number of copies locked up in libraries everywhere?
If I put up a copyrighted work and link from that work to my own company to buy a copy, that is not going to look very good in court. It also undermines my claimed altruistic reasons. Linking to the publisher site or even Amazon to purchase would have been better to show increasing marketshare.
Ignore the covid emergency library. The entire CDL was never setup to do what was claimed. Libraries uploaded their holdings list, the books were made available digitally, and nothing was done to verify the books came off the shelf when a digital copy was checked out. The emergency library simply pushed publishers to stop looking the other way.
What IA did here actually hurt possibility of CDL or an interesting court case challenging various pieces of copyright.
> If I put up a copyrighted work and link from that work to my own company to buy a copy, that is not going to look very good in court. It also undermines my claimed altruistic reasons.
How is a free copy less altruistic when you also provide one for sale? Does the free copy make it more likely to buy the paid one? What would it imply about the alleged damages to the copyright holder if that were true?
> Libraries uploaded their holdings list, the books were made available digitally, and nothing was done to verify the books came off the shelf when a digital copy was checked out.
Wasn't this the difference between CDL and the emergency library?
And the argument for the latter is presumably something like this: They could go contact every closed library and inventory their books, but the emergency is happening right now and in many cases contacting them has high latency or isn't possible because they're closed, so they're going to temporarily guestimate that there are more books in libraries everywhere than they're lending out. Which isn't a bad guess, and if they went over by a slim margin in some specific case, it's a trivial amount of harm that only occurs during a temporary emergency, i.e. the effect of that on the market for the book is negligible.
The first is I'm now trying to profit from someone else's copyrighted work. That's always going to be an issue.
For the later, read the judges ruling. The EL was not the issue, but what came out is that the CDL was never what they claimed. By being so cavalier they ruined what could have been a great test case.
> The first is I'm now trying to profit from someone else's copyrighted work. That's always going to be an issue.
It's an authorized copy. Is Amazon in trouble because they sell used books, i.e. are trying to profit from someone else's copyrighted work?
Doesn't the copyright holder also profit from selling the used books, by taking them off the market so the next customer has to buy a new one?
> The EL was not the issue, but what came out is that the CDL was never what they claimed. By being so cavalier they ruined what could have been a great test case.
It seems clear that the judge in that case was intent on finding against the Internet Archive, and explicitly stated that they wouldn't have been allowed to win regardless:
> Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA’s reproduction of the Works in Suit.
See also concluding that the use wasn't non-commercial despite being a non-profit who didn't charge for it, because members of the public might have liked that they did this and made a donation. Which likewise moots the implications of them selling used books (as they're indisputably allowed to do), because the next excuse was already lined up.
One wonders how a use could ever be non-commercial under this line of reasoning.
I will point out that the Internet Archive is among the foremost source of warez[1] today.
Being brutally honest, what Internet Archive is doing these days isn't archiving or academic fair use anymore. They are flagrantly violating copyright, or enabling violations of copyright, and that is straight up not okay.
As an aside, do not be fooled into thinking all those ISOs[1] were provided by the rightsholders. They were not, even if they seem so at first glance. I would say the way they present the information is disingenuous at best, deliberate obfuscation at worst.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/cdromimages?tab=collection