>Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2].
This isn't a "disagreement" with the GP. Piracy is a legal concept, and they were speaking in legal terms. Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US.
Except the IA did not establish the NEL as an act of civil disobedience or call for changes to the unjust existing copyright laws when they did it. They instead told themselves and their patrons that there was a "national emergency" exception to copyright law, when no such exception existed. Should one have existed? Of course. But it did not at the time. The IA continued to assert that the NEL was legal within existing copyright law, not that it was a principled act of civil disobedience against an unjust law. They were trying to Jedi mind trick a "national emergency" exception to existing copyright law into existence.
If you want to challenge an unjust law in a democracy, you can work within the system to change it, or you can engage in civil disobedience, publicly accept the consequences, and put your freedom on the line as a way to bring popular attention to the unjust law. That is the mechanism of civil disobedience against unjust laws. The whole point is that you must risk something in order to go around the system and challenge an unjust law. Everyone in America has at least one law they consider to be unjust, including some laws that I'm sure you believe are very just and would be very upset if others started to violate them in the name of justice.
Birmingham banned Martin Luther King, Jr. from participating in public protests and a Circuit court judge signed off on it. When MLK said he would protest anyway, the whole point of the civil disobedience was that MLK would be arrested for it. He was right that the public was outraged at the enforcement of this unjust legal order and called for change. What the IA did was like if MLK put on a mask to go protest, and when the police tried to arrest him, he said that he wasn't MLK.
A global pandemic is a national emergency (I'm unsure how this cannot be argued considering the efforts both the US government and the Federal Reserve engaged in). The Internet Archive is at risk because of their actions, which can be argued to be in good faith during extraordinary times based on the events that occurred at that time [1]. You may not agree with regards to intent and the definition of good faith, but that is for the judicial process to resolve. If the Internet Archive legal entity is forced to dissolve, are legal participants on the other side of the civil suit prepared for the fallout from such an outcome (the "public outrage" you mention)?
I would argue the NEL is an example of fair use when the entire world is locked down [2] [3] [4], but I'm not the one who is defending the case. You're upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process. That isn't a Jedi mind trick, and to call it as such is silly ("The fair use right is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works. In the U.S., fair use right/exception is based on a flexible proportionality test that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work.").
Power concedes nothing without a demand. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
> You're upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process.
I am not upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process. I am upset that they literally bet the entire organization on a questionable and novel legal theory, without acknowledging that they were putting the rest of their mission at such risk. You quoted some Wikipedia to me, but fair use is notoriously a minefield. You, me, the IA, and whoever edited that Wikipedia article all probably agree on how we think copyright law and fair use ought to be interpreted. But it seems like I am the only one of us who accepts that Big IP has a lot of influence over copyright law and that most judges don't think like us.
It would be one thing if the IA said, "We know we will be sued for this, and while we believe we will win this case and that the law is on our side, there is a very real possibility that we will not. If we lose, this may bankrupt our organization. However, we have a strong moral imperative to serve the people....." Or if they wanted to do a legal challenge to settle the law, they make one book from the most litigious publisher available for two people, record the entire thing, and send it to the publisher's lawyers. It goes to court
But they didn't. They responded to any criticism that this is risky in our current judicial system by saying that you can only believe it is risky because you don't share our views on what copyright ought to be.
> Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
That is maybe decent advice for dealing with parents or a boss, but not with the legal system. There is no forgiveness in copyright law. You don't escape liability just because you thought you were acting in good faith.
> If the Internet Archive legal entity is forced to dissolve, are legal participants on the other side of the civil suit prepared for the fallout from such an outcome (the "public outrage" you mention)?
As much as I love the core of the IA's mission, there will be no public fallout from this if the IA has to dissolve to pay its debts. I wish there would be, but I seriously doubt this would break through in our current political climate. This is one of the reasons I was so upset, because the IA does not have the political capital to pull off a civil disobedience project. And they didn't even try! Where is Brewster calling on Congress or the President to get a digital library exception added to any one of those bills or executive orders that were being passed around the national emergency?
> When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged.
Sure, but do they? They're a nonprofit, and as such depend on donations. Their donors might or might not be aligned on these two relatively orthogonal issues.
I'm even sympathetic of their desire to challenge the quite absurd status quo of controlled digital lending, with bizarre skeuomorphisms such as simulating "books wearing out" after a couple of lending cycles, while at the same time being more restricted than physical books (even though I don't necessarily agree with their means of challenging it).
But even for me, I think the risk is too big, and I'd feel much more comfortable with a different (maybe related/affiliated, but ultimately separated as legal entities) non-profit organization for each concern.
To say nothing of the fully legal digital services (and physical checkouts with inter-library loans) that many public libraries in the US and I assume elsewhere offer.
That may be but it exists today for the most part. And librarians at research libraries were grumbling at licensing costs for digital a couple decades ago. Not they were happy with physical subscriptions either.
>Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2].
This isn't a "disagreement" with the GP. Piracy is a legal concept, and they were speaking in legal terms. Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US.
>LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away.
Then why should internet archive, which fills a number of niches that aren't just book or document piracy, be killed off?