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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

They are not. They are violating copyright law, and stealing from writers and publishers. Twitter is full of complaints by writers who discovered their illegally scanned books here, pointing out that this will make it harder for them to eat and pay rent during the isolation period.

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In my whole life, I've never heard of a significant author who complained about one of their books being in a library, or about library patrons as 'thieves'.

IA has deals with countless libraries, and since the libraries are closed, and the online schools are open, I very much doubt that IA will keep up with the temporary loss of the libraries or the needs of schools.

"Public support for this emergency measure has come from over 100 individuals, libraries and universities across the world"

This is not a complaint about libraries or library patrons. I love and use libraries. Authors love to see their books in libraries, including their ebooks. The details matter. Scanning a book and putting it on the internet without the right to do so is not what a library does.

I think there might be some misunderstanding. There was a good comment on Reddit [1] about how all this was legal. From what I gathered, libraries scanned books that didn't have digital copies already made, and offered them to patrons to "check out". They used software to make sure that they only checked out a total combined digital/print number equal to the number of print copies they had bought, with software to make sure they couldn't be copied. That seems fair, to me (and is, apparently, legal). The National Emergency Library basically opens that up to anyone now, however, with no limits on how many times a book can be checked out at once.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/fpsqm0/the_internet_...

I don't think there is a misunderstanding. In fact, your informative comment explains the crucial difference between what a legitimate, copyright-respecting library does and what the "Emergency Library" is doing. This is, in fact, why authors, who never complained about real libraries, are complaining about this.

Didn't Google do that too a few years ago, and get away with it?

No, they didn't get away with it, which is why they only display short excerpts from books in search results.

The distinction is that each library needs to buy a copy - if not several copies - of the book. Patrons of libraries cause money to end up in the pockets of authors/publishers. If a library wants to make a book available to multiple patrons, it needs to buy multiple copies.

IA is suspending the check-out logic they'd previously been using on these scans, which breaks that connection. Now a thousand people stuck at home can read the same scans free online.

(My opinion here, without thinking very hard, is that what IA is doing is reasonable for out-of-print books or books not available in ebook form, especially textbooks and such, but probably less reasonable for recent books easy available as ebooks. It may still be fair use in both cases, though.)

> I've never heard of a significant author who complained about one of their books being in a library, or about library patrons as 'thieves'.

Libraries have had their day: Horrible Histories author: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/13/libraries-horr...

Horrible Histories is a significant set of books, now also tv programmes, in the UK.

> pointing out that this will make it harder for them to eat and pay rent during the isolation period.

Which makes very little sense. Royalties on books already pay out very little, and at very inconvenient timespans. It is probably not going to make any impact for most authors.

Thanks for deciding for authors whether they have a right to be paid for their labor.

Might want to tone down the snark just a tad. I am an authour, with around about twenty books on the market at the moment.

However, a legal process that barely touches on the edges of (the relatively thin) margins is in fact unlikely to have a direct and immediate impact on anyone. That has no emotion attached to the statement.

I'll try a less snarky rebuttal because I think there is a point here.

Why does IA get to make that decision? I get why this has populist support, but that's not an excuse to commit piracy. I get that IA is popular, but I'd also be annoyed if a less popular company did this.

If this was a government level decision to nationalize bookstores, to waive library checkout limits, then I'd understand a little more. But some random company taking copyrighted material they don't own and distributing it without the consent or payment is something very different.

I'd further point out that publishers, copyright holders, etc also need money to operate. I get that they can be less of a sympathetic group than author, but they have rights and they have bills to pay.

Theres lots of public domain books, books from libraries, free online content, etc. Theres no reason we need this sort of piracy to get through the pandemic.

This, is not piracy.

I do understand that it may be instinctual to leap to that position, but it isn't.

Usually, the books that appear on IA appear under the doctrine of "fair use".

However, that doctrine is adaptable to circumstances (which is actually written into the US law that governs fair use). All IA has done here, really, is suspend their waitlists, to make it more fair to the public to be able to read further, for education to continue, within a crisis.

They've also made it very clear that this is temporary. If it wasn't, you might have a case that it isn't fair use.

Part of why this falls under fair use is that their focus is on books that do not have a digital copy, apart from IA's scan, available online. This is specifically something that libraries are granted the ability to do. To scan and upload books that are not yet available.

The books that appear in this collection have been donated. However, if an authour wishes to remove their book, then there is a very simple and effective way available to them. (Linked to from the article) [0]

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QjErbouWG7pUlzcxPcRk4YEt...

> actually written into the US law

Reference?

There are four considerations for fair use, the 1st, and 4th, both rely on the current context, and allow for different interpretations based on the current climate.

> 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

The purpose, in this case, is nonprofit educational purposes during a crisis. Such a purpose is generally looked upon more favourably, as it is presented as a humanitarian gesture in a time of crisis.

> 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

During a crisis, a temporary, and very clearly temporary and short-term, effort is unlikely to have an effect on the potential value of a copyrighted work.

As IA have aimed this collection at education it's probably also worth including:

> such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means ... teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

[0] All quotes come from Section 107, of the US Copyright Code.

Imagine getting mad at archive for nearly doing the exact same thing that Google books does more or less. It's Google library but more liberal in it's approach, which was initially what Google wanted it's ebook part to be, an accessible elibrary, until authors who did not pay attention to the evolution of music distribution successfully pulled a partial injunction against them. Laughing in hexadecimal, until neural nets become the new authors in 25 years.

How will someone who always works remotely be financially impacted by isolation orders?

If you steal my book from the "Emergency Library" instead of buying an electronic copy, I get financially impacted.

> pointing out that this will make it harder for them to eat and pay rent during the isolation period.

This implies that "during the isolation period" modifies "harder to eat and pay rent" in a meaningful fashion. Restaurant workers are having a harder time paying rent.

Authors save for a privileged minority have traditionally struggled to pay rent as well but presumably no more than normally.

Now I understand your point, which is a reasonable one. The situation is that the economy in general is tanking, people are not going to bookstores, etc., so authors, who, as you point out, are not wealthy, have even less income now. In other words, it's a particularly cruel time for the "Emergency Library" to be taking money out of their pockets.

So if most authors don't make a whole lot anyway if copyright went away or was drastically limited but you received basic income and medical would you be better off or worse?

You assume that everyone reading a copy of the book, would also be willing (or able) to purchase it. That’s not the case.

That’s too absolute: nobody is arguing that there’d be a 100% purchase rate but it seems highly unlikely that there will be no sales impact from having free copies available from a reputable source with very high search-engine ranking.

Such is the risk of absolutes...

>> "nobody is arguing that there’d be a 100% purchase rate"

The typical case against things like this does multiply downloads by sale price under the assumption each one is a lost sale. I've seen authors (obscure and prominent) scream about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they're missing out on because they found their book on some torrent site.

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