Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
publishers.org
publishers.org
Like many people on HN, I regularly use the wayback machine or other parts of the Internet Archive to track the history of websites or read out-of-copyright and public domain works. Sharing this information is important and should be continued.
I also believe in the concept of "Fair Use" for sharing and discussing excerpts of more current works.
But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized. The Internet Archive decided that its mission trumped these rights and the laws of the United States. Even when it was asked to repeatedly stop, it continued. So here we are today.
Someone earlier asked the question, "Why can't the publishing industry just hurry up and die?"
I'd like to put the question to those HN members who work in tech: How would you feel if someone took your output without permission, whether it's designs or code or something else unique and hard to make? How would you feel if people cheered this on, or called for your demise, suggesting that the world would be a better place without your work?
The traditional publishing industry has been in economic decline for 20 years, with the number of regular readers declining and most retailers on the ropes. Few publishers or authors make much money, yet the output of authors and publishers grows every year thanks to self-publishing and other trends.
And some of the work published every year is fantastic. I sometimes serve as a judge for indie publishing competitions, and it's amazing some of the work that authors and their publishers are putting out, even though very few titles will turn a profit.
Even if you haven't read a book in the past year or two, it's safe to say at some time you did, or your loved ones did, and it informed or delighted you.
Finally, even if you don't personally care for the book industry, try to show some respect for what we're doing, and the legal and business frameworks we need to do what we do.
As someone with a humanities education (literature specifically) I feel like I've studied more than the average reader here about the particulars of famous printed works from the past. And that background says "bullshit" in response to your questions. Throughout history publishers have exploited authors mercilessly in an effort to keep ALL of the profit from their writing.
In short, the answer to your hypothetical question is quite simple. All of these people you're addressing have code, and have original ideas. You on the other hand are just a publisher, you don't have any original work at all. You're nothing but a middle man.
There are no more middle managers at toaster and television distributors in the developed world, sitting at desks filling out reports by hand and ordering fresh stocks of paperclips and staples. We got rid of those people when we modernized supply chains and in the process cut the prices of microwaves and televisions so that they're not luxury items anymore.
Similarly, there's not going to be any room for publishing middle men for very long either. If I were you I'd find a new line of work.
I made five figures by selling my book via a small publisher.
I know authors who sold their books via big publishers and they made magnitudes less money than me while selling magnitudes more copies than me.
To me this sounds like a broken system.
If the occasional developer working for free finds a profitable idea, the Google or Microsoft would pay them well under what that person requires to survive for one year, plus a small (less than 10%) residual royalty only after the developer has "paid back" the less-than-one-year amount which the Google or Microsoft called an advance rather than payment for the original work.
The only way the working-for-free developer could survive would be to teach other developers who also aspire to work for free, and in so doing suppress their urge to tell those students to go do quite literally anything else more productive, because succumbing to that moral urge would result in less students, which is the only way the developer can pay for rent and groceries.
This is a joke right?
There is absolutely a place for publishers, which is why they still exist fifteen years after anti-copyright campaigners said they'd be done in five.
If authors decide not to go to publishers and publish directly you'll have a point. Broadly, they don't.
How would you feel if some aging industry held back the creation of the society of the future simply because they don't belong in it?
The entire publishing industry has been rendered obsolete by modern technology. They exist to make and distribute copies of books. We have far better ways to do that now. The only reason they still exist is the fact they own the intellectual property. The government has granted them a monopoly that will last over a hundred years. That is literally the only reason why they're able to compete with vastly superior technology.
The truth is copyright makes no sense in the 21st century. When copyright was created, people had to be major industry players in order to make copies at scale. People needed industrial hardware like printing presses. This is no longer the case: everyone has at least one computer, making copies now costs $0 and is as easy as copy paste. Once the data is known it's trivial to make copies and distribute them. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it.
Only the first copy must be paid for. Authors must find a way to get paid before they write their books. Crowdfunding and patronage might be the answer. Creation must be like an investment rather than a product to be sold. Insisting on maintaning the archaic copyright industry means ignoring reality.
Get paid before making something. Using crowd funding one might not even be obligated to deliver. A serious attempt to make something can be good enough.
There are monthly donations for those who continue to demonstrate relevant qualities. It's a bit like a job contract with a hundred or a thousand employers.
I think we will eventually figure out a system where we can collectively order a work and pay for it after delivery. Perhaps with a series of deadlines.
Strange thoughts: Books still have their value over digital media in that they are a robust storage medium and you can re-sell the copy. It should at least in theory be possible to reduce the number of copies printed to a point where value is preserved. If a book in a good state is new or not shouldn't matter to the customer.
When will the publishing industry finally accept that it exists in a world where counting copies made doesn't work as a business model anymore?
Technology isn't going away. The business models will have to change. Some businesses will fail. Some creators will have tragic outcomes. Some works will never be created. Entire classes of works might never be created again.
re: "...took my output without permission..." - I choose not to deal in "intellectual property". I've arguably left money on the table by not. I've chosen not to pursue projects that involved selling licenses for "intellectual property"-- projects that had a decent shot of profitability.
Under the current terms of US copyright I consider it a tainted and morally questionable business. It's not one I want to participate in.
I also have deep moral concerns with the idea that a creator should somehow be entitled to be paid again and again for work done once.
You would do away with the ability of developers to license their software?
While I'm somewhat ambiguous about this IA matter, the example you bring up is rather unconvincing on HN.
I, just like many other fellow users here, publish our code (both end product and tools) to public, and to organizational, Git repositories.
We have structured our work and our contracts with customers to get paid for the services rendered[1], not the number of zeroes & ones (nor files nor LoC nor other incidental artifacts). It's not only doable, it's also the arrangement closest to fair & morally right we have found so far.
--
[1] yes, including some upfront payments where circumstances warrant it
Sure, but that code is generally tied to a license. Very rarely are people releasing things into the public domain. All that code people are releasing are being released with the support of copyright. In fact, people here on HN and other communities very much oppose people taking things without permission. I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise with your own repositories.
That's a whataboutist tangent, but let's entertain it for a while.
The copyright law is usually restrictive, in the form of "everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden", and some of the openings - like Fair Use - are somewhat contentious. Thus a specially crafted free license is used to make the work legally accessible & reusable in an unambiguous way in such legal environment.
A free license for software is generally used to unambiguously establish the legal status - that simplifies dealing, especially for organizations and professionals. It effectively increases ability to access and re-use the software [1].
A license & copyright information is used to convey authorship and guarantee certain author's rights, like the right to attribution. Some licenses (eg. copyleft) are also used to prevent certain misuses (eg. tivoization), again with aim of increasing availability of the software for access and re-use.
Conversely, releasing into public domain (which is a limited legal concept, not available in certain countries) runs with the risk of somebody else slapping a restrictive license on the code and making it unavailable via legal mechanisms.
Free licensing is not only about improving availability and protecting the author and the reuser, it's also about preventing subsequent yanking of the code via machinations by a 3rd party.
While those concerns are valid and need taking care of, pretty sure they aren't at the stake in the IA vs book authors discussion. They aren't mentioned in the OP either.
>In fact, people here on HN and other communities very much oppose people taking things without permission. I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise with your own repositories.
Ah yes, a challenge to prove a negative. I'll rise to it right after solving the halting problem :^)
> That's a whataboutist tangent
Yeah, you brought it up. Not me. You can't talk about something and ignore the part of that element that is integral to the conversation. Putting code up on GitHub does not make it freely reusable without restrictions.
Regardless, nothing you said disputes what I said. The public domain issue can easily be overcome by assigning a license with no restrictions for those places that don't abide by public domain, and while companies can put that code behind a non-free license, it doesn't make the original code anything less than public domain.
> Thus a specially crafted free license is used to make the work legally accessible & reusable in an unambiguous way in such legal environment.
Most all still impose restrictions and requirements that when violated, people last out against. You can argue whatever you want. Reality wins.
And, the best part is this:
> ...it's also about preventing subsequent yanking of the code via machinations by a 3rd party... They aren't mentioned in the OP either.
> How would you feel if someone took your output without permission, whether it's designs or code or something else unique and hard to make?
I mean, you haven't even addressed this concern. You just flat out ignore it. None of the shared code you have allows for someone taking your output and doing what hey will with it without your permission. And pretty much no one here on HN allows for that with their code.
> Ah yes, a challenge to prove a negative.
Or, you could simply release all your code into the public domain and a license that doesn't impose any restrictions or requirements. Not at all proving a negative. Back up what you are saying. That's all it would take to do what I asked.
> I'll rise to it right after solving the halting problem :^)
Would be more productive than your comment.
That's only to work around the fact that relevant governments are incompetent to send corporations and executives to prison for source code fraud. (That is, providing software exclusively in a form - such as a service like Office 365, physical device like a shitphone, or build artifact like a .exe file - that is not fit for use due to the practical inability to perform maintainance and further software development on it.)
I have a problem with copyright being transferable. The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creators. If you transfer a copyright or license it out, its term should get shortened dramatically. "Congratulations--you got a payout. Now make something new."
I have a problem with copyright outliving the author by very much. There will be no further output to incentivize, so why does the copyright persist?
I have a problem with multi-decade copyrights overall. I have a lot less problem with people asking for strong copyright enforcement if it only lasts 20 years.
I also have a problem with multi-decade copyright because it allows corporations to simply sit on works rather than licensing them because everybody is afraid that it might become popular and then they'll get fired--we've irretrievably lost movies and music because nobody would license them and then the vault they were sitting in burned.
I would be far more sympathetic to the "publishing industry" if they were an active opponent to the abusiveness of copyright law. Instead they are merely rent-seekers abusing the system.
That would devalue the copyright and creators would get compensated less. This also applies to a lesser extent to your other problems. Copyright outliving the author increases the value of the copyright even when the author still lives.
I also have many problems with copyright law as it stands now, but the problems are in the details, not in the principle of copyright being transferable, or of copyrights outliving the creators per se.
I believe that being able to profit strictly from control of intellectual property is on the decline and will ultimately disappear. "Payment for access" to IP will be outcompeted by easy and ubiquitous technology for IP distribution (and thus infringement). I believe we'll move back to a world of primarily "payment for genesis".
You want to make money as an author? Then find a way to say "hey world, I'll write a great book about XYZ if I get PQR money." In the same way software developers say "hey, you want this piece of software? I'll write XYZ software if I'm paid PQR money."
It's a brutally huge change to the historical way publishing's done and the way artists earn a living. But it's already happening and I believe it'll only accelerate.
The future is "payment for genesis" not "payment for control".
There is no incentive to invest substantial resources in development if there is no ability to profit.
Is there something morally objectionable you find going on here, or are you just bringing up 'rights' and 'laws of the United States' because these fairly arbitrary laws happen to benefit you?
> How would you feel if someone took your output without permission, whether it's designs or code or something else unique and hard to make?
Let's be clear - we are not talking about taking something away from someone. We are talking about copying something. And I would be fine with that.
> How would you feel if people cheered this on, or called for your demise, suggesting that the world would be a better place without your work?
How is copying something a suggestion that the world would be a better place without that thing? That's completely backwards.
> Finally, even if you don't personally care for the book industry, try to show some respect for what we're doing, and the legal and business frameworks we need to do what we do.
What? Why should I show respect for something I'm against and don't like? 'Even if you don't like the cigarette business, please show some respect for what they're doing.' How about no?
1. Did they legally acquire the books they scanned?
2. Are they only allowing one subscriber at a time to check out/read the book?
If so, then they are doing exactly what libraries do. To argue that there's some fundamental difference between a physical book and an electronic book is exactly why people hate the music industry, and if the publishing industry tries to go in the same direction, they'll get the same results.
That would have been fine if the power balance wasn't severely tilted in favour of the publishers.
Most of them are greedy rent-seeker middle-men that do much more harm to the interests of the creators compared to if they tried to self-publish.
I am not doubting you in particular. An indie publisher is likely more ethical than most mainstream publishers. But you have to recognise that you have a vested financial interest and that this might make you skip the bigger picture, which is...
...that a lot of programmers are creators. We also have "publishers" (middle-men) in terms of bad employers or hiring mediators, so you maybe should make an analogy targetting them.
Copyright is clearly not working for humanity because a lot of people constantly try and break it. Maybe somebody should open their eyes for that fact and think of another paradigm. We can dream.
I can't wait until your market deflates enough that even the big guns don't have the money to push for this bullshit.
And I totally understand his frustration. It's one thing to have pirating websites that have always distributed copyrighted material illegally. But for IA to decide that they only play by the rules when they want to is different imo. Not only is it bait and switch but it's also just weird to pretend to follow the law when you don't.
Imagine your boss deciding that you just won't get compensated for a few months because they decided to give away for free the software you worked on. If IA wanted to give away other people's work , it's still up to them to foot the bill.
It's not even that I'm totally against piracy, it's just that when I pirate I realize I'm not compensating the author and that if I like the stuff I'll try to do that later. Even the cracking scene tries to put notices on the torrents that if you like what you downloaded, consider supporting the creators.
With how IA presents it's whole program, there's no way to explicitly know that the authors have had no say in the emergency library beforehand and that they don't get compensated . IA looks benevolent but the authors don't.
Currently, it takes greater than 2 average lifetimes for a work to transfer into the public domain and copyrights have been extended something like 12 times due to Disney's lobbying; there is a strong argument that that current copyright law is forever.
What interest does the public have in copyright that transfers nothing into the public domain? The "mainstream media" is in fact a publishing oligopoly of 4 companies (Ref: Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian). Furthermore, a 20TB HDD can store enough movies you can watch 3 a night for 2 decades; in 20 years time it'll be possible to store every newspaper clipping, TV Broadcast, movie and song on a desktop computer and in 40 on a thumb drive.
Congress and Businesses have neglected the publics interest, and due to that the public is using technology to wipe their arse with the law and rightfully so. The "Legal and Business frameworks" are outdated, orwellian cultural astroturfing exercises supported that are counterproductive to the operation of a disciplined, free society. Go read Vietnam and Korean era Psychological warfare manuals and tell me they are not blueprints for how a modern news org works.
When Mickey Mouse is free, I'll respect what you are doing. Until then, don't come sobbing to me. Nobody cares.
The output of my work is finally money and more than half is taken away from me; most people agree with this and quite a lot think I should be left with even less. It is called taxes and please don't tell me it's not the same because it is the output of my work and it is taken away without permission, so it is the same word for word.
I want authors I connect with to be paid, but the best way of doing this is paying for their living expenses independent of their publishing schedule. All the while voluntarily promoting their public persona to my peers.
Direct "sales" of information only deserves to have a future insofar as the buyer of the information gets important social signaling value from it, per GitHub sponsorships.
It isn't limited to GitHub sponsorships, either. Use your imagination. Use your grasp of modern technology.
In the publishing model of the future, authorship is financially compensated based on how much social signaling value their readers derive from monetary patronage.
Rather than paywalling my work, or hyping it up using immoral sales psychology techniques which are extractive not contributory, I would much prefer rewarding individual patrons, who opt to voluntarily pay for any of my work, with social credibility. I think that's healthier for everyone, and I fully trust online communities dedicated to information consumption will be better than I am at packaging my information for further public consumption and distributing it far more widely than I could ever achieve as a lone individual.
that has happened to me all the damn time and quite frankly I've stopped caring so boo effin hoo.
we live in a postindustrial society.
People have value extracted from them without due compensation every single day.
Just be glad you're getting your slice of the pie as it is
They never even looked at First Sale Doctrine which is a possible defense in this type of dispute.
If you translate this too books then the book itself is the tangible medium. Scans are infringing copies and only valid for personal use.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi...
However, I think this may be different. Defendant is a non-profit and isn't reselling anything.
That particular loophole probably doesn't apply there, but similar ones might.
Also at EFF: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-joins-locast-defense-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi...
Looks like palming a card, to me.
Who gets to define an entity as a "library" and is IA defined as such, legally speaking?
They intentionally make it very difficult to remove content from their archive, even if it contains content that violates your privacy. IA is one of the greatest privacy violators in the tech space. You won't see that discussed very often, the fans of IA go out of their way to dodge that conversation.
A lot of people seem to think IA has some special exemption to do so because they're a library (by some definitions) and are, in general, a valuable resource. But really they do it by being a non-profit, voluntarily respecting robots.txt (even retroactively), and generally taking stuff down when asked.
I don't know what they were thinking. I'd love to hear how they arrived at the decision to just brazenly flout copyright law like this. I fear that they have put a lot of their other efforts in danger.
I hope that my "archive and access" efforts will not be effected.
In a previous HN discussion [0], @Apocryphon linked to [1] speculation on a possible explanation: that the IA leadership is perhaps hoping for a landmark court ruling [2] that challenges the first-sale doctrine as it applies to ebooks.
Physical books can be lent out freely by libraries but digital goods like ebooks cannot because they are exempted from the first sale doctrine [3]. This forces libraries to enter into separate licensing agreements with rights holders, which is why the IA is purportedly trying to challenge the rent extraction from libraries, albeit in a less than ideal way.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734145
[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1244257620548038656.html?...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine#Applicatio...
I know, fuck them, right? /s
You mean a stupid one that endangers everything else you do, yes?
Robbing a bank and giving away the money is a decision not based on money or liability, but you shouldn't be very surprised you still get put in prison for it.
You've picked the one circumstance-- an unprecedented worldwide pandemic that is wreaking economic mayhem-- that could possibly weaken one of the indefatigable "pre-digital analogies for understanding digital ethics."
I would not be surprised if the police were unable to locate a culprit who had been handing out monthly $1200 cash bundles from bank robberies. (Especially if they delivered the bundles on a dependeable schedule.) :)
Edit: clarification
No, not really. The police would very much track down such a culprit and they would go to prison.
It's not like there is some critical shortage of things to read online in the absence of the IA.
Quoting the other comment here to make my point.
AFAIK IA they did not give away the books, the books still were shared the same way as before, with DRM and expiration dates. They just temporaly removed the limitations of amount of books you can loan and increased the loan period with an initial max end date of June 30.
So, yeah, what IA did is pretty different from robbing anything, in unprecedented times of a global pandemic they provided access to a digital library the same way a public library which holds those books would in normal times.
It's honestly what sucks most about this country: if someone is making money on it, everyone else who comes near it is powerless against it.
Yes, they are breaking copyright law. Who gives a flying fuck about copyright law when there are 100,000 dead people and riots in the streets?
I recently bought out another company that was doing the same thing and ran out of money. I'm still trying to get everything up and running before I start charging people, but my burn rate and cost structure should be manageable.
> Click on the book you would like to borrow. You will be taken to the item page and will be given the option to Borrow This book. Click on Borrow this Book. (If the book is on loan, you will be given an option to Join Waitlist)
So, at least before "quarantime", they only propogated one copy at a time of any title.
[1] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016554912-Borr...
But this is new: unlimited borrowing. That's the opening for this lawsuit.
One of my books was published in 2014 and is on the list.
> There's an opt-out.
Because authors can opt out of having their books pirated, that makes it OK? How are authors notified about the existence of the opt-out? Oh, they're not? Hmm.
I'm all for copyright reform, but that's a preposterously short period. One hundred years ago, copyright lasted for 28 years, with the potential to renew for another 28 years.
Even if you went back to that copyright term WITHOUT the renewal, five years is still less than 20 percent of that.
Was that legal? Possibly not, so authors and rights holders do have a grievance. But personally, I'm going to judge anyone who's going to the courts instead of merely opting out.
I am completely willing to believe that some people did, but the overwhelming majority I saw were getting downvoted for (whether deliberately or carelessly) confusing "copyright infringement is not legal" (which is true, but common knowledge) with "copyright infringement is not a active moral good" (which is false, at least of the type of copyright infringement archive.org is doing), and concluding that the Internet Archive was doing something morally, rather than just strategically, wrong.
The IA is not paying these fees, and so there's some copyright questions around the distribution rights of scans of legitimate purchases to be answered.
Is it a good and moral reason? Not in my opinion. But it is a reason.
[1] https://archive.org/donate/
[2] Yes, I know about archive.today (formerly archive.is) but their extent is no way comparable to archive.org. Also, they don't archive pages from archive.org.
To your point, the Internet Archive most definitely needs to operate in a distributed, global fashion to prevent a single country from causing a loss of cultural data because of political winds or profits being put first. Mirror the whole thing on multiple continents.
I think there is value in the destinction if it's only used as a storage backend, but actually gets the media through different sources.
To be clear, I have a deep appreciation for SciHub and LibGen, I just don't have the energy to dive in depth in this forum.
They didn't have enough storage for their full library on the appliances previously. So that'd be like a caching proxy in front of the service
Maybe that changed with how tiny their library became over the years. (Edit:it didn't change. That's what it is.)
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/1-1-1-1-does-not-resolve-...
And that particular extension exists solely as means for DNS proxies to violate the privacy of their users by leaking client identity data to upstream DNS servers. There are several reasons why Cloudflare is evil and needs to die (especially ReCaptcha and associated attacks on TOR), but archive.is is firmly in the wrong on this particular point.
The Internet Archive is a precious initiative and by far the most well known in its field, but it is not a "single point of failure".
I've also listed many other projects that do related things in the ArchiveBox wiki: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...
note: it works in Firefox, not Chrome. YMMV.
The sooner we can put this data/historical records atop decentralized solutions, the better.
> Despite Google taking measures to provide full text of only works in public domain, and providing only a searchable summary online for books still under copyright protection, publishers maintain that Google has no right to copy full text of books with copyrights and save them, in large amounts, into its own database.
re: Author's Guild v. Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Fact is, the internet has made the business model of a middle man being required to deliver content obsolete.
I wonder how they feel about actual libraries, which make published works available for free to many people as well.
And with that knowledge would be locked away to those who could afford access (be it with money or some form of social capital to ensure inequality).
github stars.
You can easily see this if you look at more modern medium: Gaming.
nVidia created a service where we could play games we bought on their machines. The publishers immediately sued and demanded that we be prevented from playing our own games on those machines without paying extra.
Copyright law now has become cancer - just like real cancer, the original base might be something that provided important value, but has now started feeding on the creativity of society and killing progress and freedom.
Archive.org might as well rebase itself somewhere else.
FWIW I've studied copyright informally in UK, USA, and to a lesser extent other countries.
In UK our "Fair Dealing" is highly restrictive compared to USA's Fair Use.
Our (UK) archiving rights extend only to a couple of institutions and then only to people attending the library in person. We don't have rights to make backups; we don't have rights to format shift (except to help the disabled).
Yes, copyright specifics apply but wrt archiving USA is far from the most restrictive regime.
To what extent this reflects European rather than US interests I'm uncertain, though the latter certainly exist.
When those laws are passed they try to get the laws to be stronger than the treaty. Thereby leading to differences in laws and a push for a new treaty to "harmonize" different copyright regimes. Strangely, the new treaty harmonizes on the strong end of the laws passed, thereby creating a ratchet effect.
After decades of success on things like copyright terms, Disney finally reached the end of the road when the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement died. As a result Steamboat Willie, written in 1924, will become public domain in 2024, some 68 years after it was originally supposed to do so.
As far as it reflecting European interests, the Berne convention is against European interests as it pertains to US copyrighted work as it offers them less protection than US works and forces a higher standard for US copyright than domestic copyright in many cases.
That would probably be extremely expensive given the fastest way to mirror the IA is with a truck full of hard drives.
Although, it's probably more financially efficient for other nations to offer cultural grants for local IA non-profit entities to spin up infra in country and begin mirroring the South SF location.
(Just last week some shipping containers washed ashore on a beach in my local area – they had fallen off a ship [1].)
[1] https://coastcommunitynews.com.au/central-coast/news/2020/05...
Unless you're arguing that the First Sale Doctrine was only created because libraries are older than modern copyright, I don't think I agree.
People who do intellectual labor, such as writing books, must be paid because everyone must be paid. Nothing is free.
There are two options:
(1) Copyright law, which allows them to erect toll booths and charge readers and users for their work.
(2) A socialist type of system where writers and other intellectual laborers are supported publicly.
The cyber-libertarian crowd is unhappy with both these options. They want everything to be free in all ways.
Since intellectual labor is not free, Jeff Goldblum's Law (from Jurassic Park) comes into play: life finds a way. The way to support oneself in the cyber-libertarian everything-is-free world is by either overt advertising or whoring oneself out as a propagandist (covert advertising).
A third variation also exists that combines aspects of both: surveillance capitalism. In surveillance capitalism all the free stuff is placed on a platform that spies on its users and the data is used to drive both overt and covert advertising.
This is why a simple news web site is 20+ megabytes of trackers, ads, and surveillance crap, and why every platform seems user-hostile. It's also why an increasing amount of intellectual product whether it be books, news, podcasts, etc. is actually political or other forms of propaganda. You can make money by shilling for political parties or political agendas. You can't make money by being balanced and honest and level headed. The work will be much higher quality but nobody will pay for it.
The maths works out pretty well if you look at it as a marketing funnel for the author.
In the "traditional" model the author/publisher has to persuade a potential reader to part with money before reading the book, which has huge friction and costs lots of marketing money to persuade people that the book is good enough to buy before they read it - no "one month free trials" here. Using standard marketing funnel maths, they have to get the title in front of 10,000 people to get one sale (assuming a 1% conversion rate for the 2-step funnel). The net profit of this model is lower (for the author) because so much money is spent on marketing.
In the donation model, the author gives the book for free, and then asks for a donation afterwards. They only need to get 100 people to read the book (assuming a 1% conversion rate of people who have read it and want to donate). The cool thing is that those 100 people have read the book, and know it, will talk about it, will recognise the author when their next book comes out, etc.
If this work didn't have much value that would be one thing, but it clearly does. Otherwise people would not be clamoring for access to it. Nobody cares if crap is freely available.
People really want this stuff. They just don't want to pay for it either directly or via any public method. Meanwhile they spend the cost of a median price book or album in 1-2 visits to Starbucks without thinking about it.
There are all kinds of labor that people do with out being paid in currency for it, they derive other value from that labor.
You then present a false dilemma in that it is either copyright law or socialism (public funding), there are a whole host of funding models that have been proven to work over and over again that require neither. Open Source is a ripe with examples, YouTube also provides for some, but there are many others (including complete creative Commons books that are funding voluntarily, and voluntary "Pay what you want" systems)
It takes years to write a good book. Years. It's not something you just whip out.
The same applies to any non-trivial piece of music, art, software, engineering, design, or any other form of intellectual labor. People spend years and years on that stuff but only after they spend years and years getting good enough at their craft to actually produce it.
I guess there's another option beyond the two I cited above:
(3) Everything is low effort shit.
Open Source is almost entirely funded by large companies. Pick a popular FOSS project and look at who's committing to it. They're people being paid by large companies to do the work because the company has some vested interest in supporting it. The counter-examples are either SaaS driven (meaning they're not really open) or dual licensed (meaning they're using copyright law).
This sort of philanthropy has limits. In particular it doesn't work for consumer items, only for stuff that companies use directly.
I really don't think you want to bring up YouTube as it actually proves my point. YouTube is a cesspool of propaganda and divisive trolling. That's the kind of content you get when it's "free" and creators must find roundabout ways to get paid for it, such as by stoking society's divisions for attention to monetize ad views.
> It takes years to write a good book. Years. It's not something you just whip out.
nonetheless these works are freely available.
However, despite perhaps a few exceptions here and there (Kahn Academy is another), overall I very much agree. People have to be be paid. And while Patreon-type stuff is a great idea as far as it goes, it is not sufficient.
No one gets paid to "spend years and years getting good enough at their craft" of writing. Very few people get paid reasonably to "spend years and years on" writing a good book.
If we're talking about "digital" lending instead of physical books, the traditional libraries "play nice" with publishers by buying DRM ebooks and lending out a limited number of copies. This is what they mean by traditional public libraries being "participants in lawful copyright marketplace".
IA scanned books and unlimited lending circumvented all that.
In other words, publishers are ok with limited free lending on their own terms so that it doesn't drastically affect their book sales but they never agreed to IA's unlimited lending which is why they akin it to "piracy".
Not trying to play sides here but if you want to try to understand the nuance of the publishers' position, I'm trying to explain it in a neutral way.
The Internet Archive's Chris Freeland is the Director of Open Libraries and wrote the IA blog post[1] announcing the NEL change and he acknowledges that it is "unlimited"[2] -- and yet you say it isn't. I don't understand why you contradict IA's own representative. Are you affiliated with IA in an official capacity?
- >Stephanie Willen Brown: So, librarian to librarian, is this unlimited simultaneous users?
- >chrisfreeland: Stephanie – Yes, for the duration of our waitlist suspension![2]
[1] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...
[2] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...
Because the "proper context" in this case is what the publishers are filing the lawsuit about. It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with the publishers. To the publishers, unlimited simultaneous users is the same as unlimited copies. With public libraries, they paid for limited simultaneous checkouts of digital ebooks which is limited copies and that was acceptable by publishers. In contrast, IA did not pay publishers a license to make copyrighted works available to unlimited users.
The publishers didn't file lawsuits against public libraries; they filed it against IA. In your own words (since you don't object to the word "unlimited" and you thought my summary was unfair), what exactly did IA do that the publishers are filing lawsuit about?
I don't think the plan is to "become the norm". It's an 'emergency library', and it exists currently because the pandemic has forced regular libraries to close.
I don't think this is true for many books, which are scanned copies and available as PDFs or EPubs.
Whatever your thoughts on the IA's practices, it's worth being clear on this.
I'm not debating with you about the details since I haven't used IA's system myself but the last time this came up, a commenter explained that there were a bunch of loopholes in IA's "limits" that it was effectively "unlimited". E.g. after the checkout period expires, you just check out the ebook again. Again, I don't know if this is true.
EDIT to replies equating this to "physical books" : the context of my answer was "digital" ebooks. Physical books are already limited in the sense that libraries' limited budgets only buy limited copies of paper books. So library patrons renewing their borrowed book is "unlimited" on time but not a threat to the publishers because the # of copies are still limited.
I look at things differently though I suppose. I see each human as a parallel processing core, and our immediate consciously recallable set of knowledge as basically being Cached, our referentially recallable knowledge (stuff we know where to find, but don't have in mind) as a pagefile swap, and the unknown, but authored as a compressed, archived file on our collective population-wide hard disk.
So what we're suggesting here, is that certain cores should have to go without access to certain trivially reproducible archives so that the archiving program (publishers) can utilize the product of said cores (analogous to money earned by other work done) to pick the winners and losers of the process of making an archive(I.e. subsidizing authorial works) in the first place?
This sounds like a pretty terrible system to me, and like publisher's have an exaggerated role as gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas. I would not expect that in the presence of a zero-cost information replication mechanism such an entity performing such a task would be desirable except as an artifact of a programmer having something better to do than to refactor out that quirk of the old high cost implementation.
I wonder how far out I can extend this simulation of society as computing system. I suppose the analog of the necessary inputs for life would be the power electricity bill? Hmmmm.
You know, I think I just nerd sniped myself. I'm not sure if I can complete this post as intended now that I'm continuing to think on it. I'll leave it here in case anyone else wants to join in on extending the metaphor/figuring out where the breaking points are.
And just to drive this completely home, it's not an arbitrary restriction—if a library has a larger budget or a book is more popular, they can buy more copies of the book, which also benefits publishers.
IA's lending is not unlimited, as others have pointed out. From https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/borrow:
> The Internet Archive and participating libraries have selected digitized books from their collections that are available to be borrowed by one patron at a time from anywhere in the world for free. [emphasis mine]
I think we should be careful not to let publishers control the narrative here. Publishers interests in making profits are naturally going to conflict with the public good, and the point of copyright is to promote the latter.
http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-eme...
With that in mind: for any given component of copyright law, we should be asking "what would not have been produced if this particular exclusive privilege didn't exist, and does the public want to make that trade?".
Aside from that, insofar as US copyright takes inspiration from the Statute of Anne, I'd say that the interests of copyright holders were never completely indirect ("... and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families...").
re: The "what we should be asking" - I don't think we can conceive of the possible business models that could spring up if changes were made to copyright law. Sure-- some business models might become untenable-- but I don't think entire classes of works would just disappear. I'd rather ask "What new business models or classes of works would be permitted if this particular exclusive privilege were relaxed?"
Right. I was stating what should be, and what was originally intended. The clause in the US constitution authorizing copyrights and patents reads "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Any such exclusive right is granted (not inherent) and should only be provided insofar as doing so will "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
> re: The "what we should be asking" - I don't think we can conceive of the possible business models that could spring up if changes were made to copyright law. Sure-- some business models might become untenable-- but I don't think entire classes of works would just disappear. I'd rather ask "What new business models or classes of works would be permitted if this particular exclusive privilege were relaxed?"
Agreed completely. Another reason why it's a careful tradeoff for the public to make.
What about patronage? What about public performance? What about merchandising rights? (I actually have very little beef w/ Trademark law. It seems like it's functioning well and provides value to society.)
What about the idea certain livelihoods and classes of works just go away? Maybe that's sad, but maybe it's also just what happens.
I think the publishers are using the emergency library as cover for a much more broad-reaching lawsuit.
The copyright holders have already gotten paid.
I guess I never visited that part of archive.org, so never noticed.
Libraries pay for each copy of a book they have, and checkouts are limited to the number they own at a time. The IA doesn't pay at all, and there is no limit to how many people can access the content.
The key difference is the copying, the vary thing that copyright is meant to regular. A library doesn't turn one book into many. A digital archive does. That's the difference that draws in the legal system. Some libraries have developed schemes for this (one digital copy available for one person at a time) but this doesn't get around the fact that any digital copy can be copied or translated into different formats.
Of course, authors miss out on any royalties in either case, but the speed at which their income stream can dry up is oodles faster when there's a digital copy available.
Digital can be copied, replicated and redistributed very easily, but physical books require man handling to achieve the same goal.
Say what you want about the current copyright system, but buying a single book and lending it out one at a time and buying a new one when it wears out, is obviously different than handing out unlimited digital copies.
Imagine this:
"Good news, everyone! We've invented Star Trek-like replication technology. I can replicate and provide any amount of food or tools for everyone! It's the post-scarcity society we've always dreamt of!"
"Quick, we must now devise a way to make this encumbered so food and tools cannot really be replicated at will with zero cost, and instead make it resemble how we used to farm/grow food and build traditional tools, or else business as we know it may crumble. Also we need a way to identify and sue people who breach our business contracts!"
It's depressing. A bit like the future that The Murderbot Diaries depict.
We have to stick with the old way for now, otherwise it would only take one library buying one copy of anything, and it being available to any and everyone on an unlimited basis. That can't work.
It's depressing when people argue "but libraries can only lend as many physical copies as they have" as if this was a good thing about books instead of an accidental limitation.
Actually, that's the concept I was looking for: accidental limitations. It sucks when publishers and media companies seek to turn accidental limitations into mandated limitations, as if they were a law of nature, and when the technology could rid us of said limitations.
Isn't there an ongoing lawsuit against Amazon on this issue where someone is suing them for misguiding people about ownership when you "buy" an ebook from them?
[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/this-is-the-big-rea...
Of course much legal machination will be attempted to assert you don't.
YMMV.
> "Libraries must pay up to 4X the retail price for digital versions of books (which only one user can have access to at a time)."
As it is, real libraries are bad deals for everyone. Libraries spend too much on books that aren't read and they don't spend enough on books in demand. A digital system that charges per reader makes more sense.
But I don't expect anyone to believe this because people have some weird attraction to something that they think is "free" even though it costs millions in tax dollars.
It is also a good time to reflect upon the very idea of intellectual property. In this age, 15th century ideas about how to protect printers may not be ideal in the 21st century. Patents and copyright are constitutionally mandated: [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” It is not clear that our current laws are doing the job.
As an aside, I enjoy writing a lot and have released all of my later books under a Creative Commons license, so I hope my books do show up in IA. People who happen on my books may end up buying a copy sometime. One thing that bothers me though is when I find out of date versions of my books on the web. I have found my stuff in the web that is two or three editions old.
My friends at neighborhood watches in Minneapolis said some people have been trying to start fires at libraries, to say nothing of the pandemic. If you can't loan a book at the library right now, where the hell else can you?
This is quite the dilemma.
I don't for a second believe this is motivated by anything but people who don't want a permanent public archive of the statements of powerful institutions and people.
Anyone know the most effective way for me to protest this with my publishers?
Authors should ideally never give exclusive rights to publishers, because publishers invariably abuse them (as in this lawsuit). There are some countermeasures. https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/rights-reversion-p... https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/
They provide fewer and fewer valuable services as the marginal cost of content distribution approaches zero and they just seem more like rent seekers.
> Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House
The list is here, but it takes multiple seconds to render each of the many pages: https://publishers.org/who-we-are/our-members/
1517 Media
Academic Innovations
Albert Whitman & Company
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)
American Chemical Society (ACS) American Dental Association Publishing (ADA)
American Diabetes Association
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
American Medical Association (AMA)
American Physical Society (APS)
American Physiological Society, The (APS)
American Psychological Association (APA)
American Reading Company
American School for Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)
American Society for Indexing (ASI)
American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)
American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP)
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
American Thoracic Society (ATS)
American University in Cairo Press
Applied Educational Systems
Aquila Polonica (U.S.) LTD
Bar Charts, Inc.
Baylor University Press
Benchmark Education Co.
Berghahn Books
Bernson LTD (Big Hat Press)
BioZone USA
Blooming Twig Books
Bloomsbury USA
BMJ Publishing Group Limited
Bonnier Publishing USA
British American Publishing
Brookings Institution Press
Burn House Publishing
Cambridge Information Group (CIG)
Cambridge University Press
Catapult
Caslon, Inc.
Cato Institute
Cengage Learning
Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)
Chronicle Books
Cider Mill Press Book Publishers
Columbia University Press
City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
Common Ground Research Network Crossway
Davies Publishing Inc.
Davis Publications Inc.
Disney Publishing Worldwide
Experiment, The
F.A. Davis Company
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Fordham University Press
General Conference of 7th-Day Adventists
Georgetown University Press
Georgia McBride Media Group
Getty Publications
GoodKnight Books
Greystone Books Ltd
Group Publishing
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
Hansen Publishing
HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide
Harrington Park Press
Harvard Business Review Group
Harvard University Press
Hogrefe Publishing
Holiday House Inc.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES)
Humanix Books
Independent Institute, The
INFORMS
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
InterVarsity Press
John Hunt Publishing
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Johns Hopkins University Press
The Journal of American Academy of Business (JAABC)
Judson Press
Kappa Delta Pi
Kodansha USA
Libros Publishing
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc
Macmillan
Massachusetts Medical Society
Materials Research Forum
McGraw Hill Education
MedMaster Inc
Melville House
Michigan State University Press
Moody Publishers
Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Morton Publishing Company
Museum of Modern Art , The (MOMA)
National Academies Press
Naval Institute Press
New World Library
NY Media Works, LLC
NYU Press
Oak Knoll Press
Okapi Educational Publishing, Inc.
Oncology Nursing Society
Optical Society of America (OSA)
Oxford University Press
Penguin Random House
Pennsylvania State University Press
Princeton University Press
Pushkin Press
Quirk Books
RELX Group
Riverdale Avenue Books
Rosen Publishing Group
SAGE Publications
Scholastic Testing Service, Inc
Scholastic, Inc.
Simon & Schuster
Social Studies School Service
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
Springer Publishing Company
Stanford University Press
Story Plant, The
Tanglewood Publishing, Inc.
Taylor and Francis Group
Teachers College Press
Teacher Created Materials
Thames & Hudson
World Bank, The
Trialtea USA, LLC
Turner Publishing Company
University of Alaska Press
University of California Press
University of Chicago Press
University of Illinois Press
University of Massachusetts Press
University of Minnesota Press
University of North Carolina Press
University of Pennsylvania Press
University of Texas Press
University of Wisconsin Press
University Press of Colorado
W. W. Norton & Company
Walter de Gruyter, Inc.
Wesleyan University Press
White House Historical Association
Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Wolters Kluwer Health- Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins
Workman Publishing Company
Yale University Press
YBK Publishers
Pearson
American Federation of Arts
American College of Cardiology
Imbrifex Books
Waterhouse Press
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
In addition, people tend to vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a successful marketing campaign to actually sell books, in addition to the extreme difficulty of actually building relationships with distributors. Successfully selling a book is not that different than running a business. There's a lot more you need than just coordinating a "supply chain."
I feel like there are a lot of "experts" on publishing in this discussion, but few actual publishers who know the reality of the business.
Individual book sellers still could do some marketing simply to increase sales once such a good book shows up.
I'd love to know how much of the publishing and book-selling industries are coasting on inertia of "we've always done it this way", or the fear of "we've never done it this way".
It seems like electronic distribution should have massive ramifications for the business model. Does the publisher/distributor/retailer model really still need to exist in an electronic distribution world? I don't know enough about the value, beyond purchase aggregation, that distributors in that market actually provide.
What you see as "building relationships" sounds, to me, like needless middlemen exacting a tax on commerce.
Many businesses are little more than expertly coordinating a supply chain. That's a competency that offers a competitive advantage. Why is this business so different?
UBI would fully transform that industry.
Kickstarter is more about how good your pitch is.
In fact quality control is, I think, where publishers bring the most value today. Both in science and in the general case. Maybe the only one in the digital era.
(I should note that your percentages are way off, by the way – in the US I "get" 25% of the cover price for digital and between 7.5% and 25% for physical depending on the edition.)
So, yeah, it is similar to VC, and just like VC, they expect to profit off the transaction.
It seems like the marginal cost of the "last step" cost is still a very significant component, though. High-touch sales channels, handling returns (consignment sales), and co-promotion expenses all seem tightly coupled to that "last step" and sales of physical articles.
Yeah, let's get rid of all the authors, newspapers, magazines, journalists, etc.
I mean, what does the publishing industry even do? It serves no value! And the gall they have to actually try to protect their work and make a living from it? Ridiculous!
After dealing with decades of "intellectual property" industries waging war against general purpose computing I'm heavily biased against their interests. The amount of needless complexity I've had to deal with, and money I've seen wasted, service of DRM fills me with a simmering rage. They burned much of their goodwill with me a long time ago. Perhaps I take it too personally, but it certainly feels personal when the things I want to do with technology I own are thwarted in the name of serving DRM.
I'm exceedingly frustrated at the concessions made for owners of "intellectual property" in copyright law, too.
I'm particularly miffed by egregiously long copyright terms. These terms prevent derivative works from being made in a culturally-relevant timescale. They prevent the copying of "unprofitable" works that lack mass market appeal and become "out of print". They send orphan works in a legal limbo that prevents their use for fear of litigation. They hold back the progress of "science and the useful arts" for the benefit of incumbent owners by creating a barrier to entry. They create little incentive for new works to be created.
I'm frustrated that the "intellectual property" industry has worked to brainwash the public into believing that the public domain is the exception, instead of the default. They've promoted a believe to creators that their works need to be "owned" by rent seeking middlemen. They've sold a moral argument about creators being deprived of their compensation. St the same time, they use "creative" accounting practices to divert compensation away from creators.
All of that frustration fuels my hyperbole.
We live in a world with ubiquitous copying machines with ubiquitous connectivity. That genie can't be put back in its bottle. It can't be legislated away without ending up in a dystopian "Right to Read"[1] future.
From where I stand the "intellectual property" industries want the "Right to Read" future, to the detriment of the good computing provides to humanity. Rather than change their business models and cope with a new reality, the "intellectual property" industries claw fitfully at whatever legislative means they can to preserve their dying business models.
Perhaps it'll take a generation or two dying off before we can come up with new business models that'll make this all irrelevant. I don't have the answers, but I really think that "don't use technology to do what it does best" is a very viable answer.
I'd be very afraid that "new business model" is that you have to watch an ad every 10 pages or books are only available through a subscription model of some sort--and they're only available through a SaaS.
I'll keep buying physical articles as long as I can-- books, optical discs, etc. I'll reward creators who continue to make their works available that way. I'll buy a ticket when an author comes thru on a lecture tour. I'll attend a live concert and buy a shirt. (Admittedly, our current pandemic situation makes some of that difficult, but I do think it'll eventually pass, or we'll come up with new ways to do those things.) I've been reticent to enter into the patronage ecosystem (primarily because I'm concerned about the cut the middlemen take and the value they actually provide, as well as what the user experience is like) but I'm leaning more toward doing some of that too.
I'd argue this makes their services more important to writers because when anyone can publish content, you have to work harder to stand out from the crowd.
Anyone can publish to YouTube and you can see the likes, comments, and subscribes. Seems pretty easy to stand out.
The IA blatantly stole the work of thousands of people. They saw a problem and wanted to act - laudable. They could have done that be arranging to buy unique copies of each book they lent out. Or they could have tried to come to some agreement with the publishers. Or a bunch of other alternatives.
They didnt.
They stole the work and thankfully there is some players with enough clout in the market to do something about it.
If the big publishers ever do go away it will be a bad time for those like me who are never going to make enough revenue from our works to warrant a court proceeding while our works are stolen.
re: your business model being sustainable if the current "industry" goes away - Maybe that ship has sailed. You can't make a living being a buggy whip manufacturer or an elevator operator anymore either.
Presumably the author and/or publisher lost the use of the income they could reasonably have expected to receive corresponding to a certain number of copies of the work going into circulation.
Anyhow, physical articles are not the only things that can be stolen.
Most justifications for property (both personal property and real estate) invoke the fact that pieces of property are rivalrous (one person's use interferes with another's). Calling unlicensed copying "stealing" ignores the crucial difference between physical goods and digital files.
We have a term for copyright infringement. We have a term for unlawfully taking things that are subject to scarcity. They are two different things. The lack of scarcity matters.
Until then if you want to read an authors work then you need to pay their (usually very small) fee.
I would love to live in a society that would recognize the post-scarcity nature of many goods nowadays and de-commodifies them, including computer programs, basic food, and in certain cases housing.
There will be no more "scarcity" when the "value" of the time required to produce these works reaches "zero." Until then, there will be plenty of scarcity.
By the way, I think we would all need "immortality" in order to reach that point.
So, yeah.
Not going to happen.
Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.
But we don't live in that society.
I guess we could argue about semantics but depriving me of my ability to legitimately profit from my work while the IA wrapped itself in a flag of doing good seems like at the very least a very low form of behaviour, as well as illegal. And I doubt many people would describe us any word other than theft.
It is theft in the same way that someone squatting unused land in the north of Canada and being granted ownership is theft. The fact that we live in a system where this might cause loss of income for someone is neither necessary nor the moral responsibility of the Internet Archive, SciHub or Library Genesis.
Also Publishers: Oh, damn.... uhm... you want THAT book? Uhm... we don't even have a copy anymore... Sorry.
IA is claiming that they're mostly making available copies of out-of-print books that are hard to find.
But that's not true. Within their "Emergency Library," there are quite a few books that were published relatively recently.
For instance, I'm an author of several books. I found one of my books, from 2014, which is still in print, on their list.
Copyright is about more than sales. It's about the author having the right to determine who gets to distribute and profit from their creative works.
That's why you'll hear about authors and their estates turning down seemingly lucrative deals, such as movie adaptations. If the copyright holder doesn't want their work to be used in that way, they get to say no.
And the Internet Archive's "we presume you've said yes unless you opt out" system flies in the face of those protections.
This is not sound justification for the existence of copyright. You're asserting that an author is deserved a special personal benefit even if that benefit hurts the general public. What other worker is afforded similar protection?
In the case of the Internet Archive, they've taken a book you've already made money on, and are lending it to one person at a time. And if it's not affecting your sales, you are preventing other people from benefiting from the book for no good reason.
I understand the appeal of controlling your writing, but I don't think we as a society should be giving individual authors an unbridled license to decide how we share and experience works.
Furthermore, the legal (and historical) basis for copyright in the United States is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyright is a special monopoly, given only to promote the general welfare.
This is not to say I'm against any use of copyright in principle. But the purpose of granting such a monopoly has to be to provide incentives to create writings are art, not to protect a purported natural right. I hope my message doesn't come off as disparaging to your desire to support yourself or the importance of creative work.
Only to the extent that the general public doesn't, for some period of time, get to do whatever they want with a creative work that someone else invested time, effort (and in some cases talent) to make. The general public is no worse off during the copyright term than if the copyright holder had never created the work.
> What other worker is afforded similar protection?
Anyone who owns a patent or a trademark, or really any intellectual property at all.
> In the case of the Internet Archive, they've taken a book you've already made money on, and are lending it to one person at a time.
What you are describing is called Controlled Digital Lending https://controlleddigitallending.org. Under this system of lending, libraries treat digital copies as if they are physical copies -- meaning they can only be lent out to one person at a time. If you purchase or acquire 5 physical books and then digitize them, then under CDL you can lend out 5 digital copies at a time.
But that is NOT what the Internet Archive is doing under its emergency library program. Instead, it is acquiring a single copy of a book and then lending it out simultaneously to an unlimited number of users. It would be as if a public library purchased one copy of a physical book and then made unlimited photocopies of the book and lent those photocopies out simultaneously.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23381481.
I saw the NYT piece after I posted the press release.
A press release from a plaintiff announcing a lawsuit is, by its nature, one sided.
The NYT coverage is more balanced, including Brewster's response for example.
Based on how quick the press release jumped to the front page, I figured folks would be interested in the broader coverage.
Rather than making another submission, I added a note to this submission.
I thought the difference between a press release and news article was well known and did not need stating. I guess I assumed a level of information literacy that was not present in all readers, and should have said "and here is some popular reporting that gives a broader perspective than the press release I just posted above".
Based on the upvotes of my additional comment, I can only assume it added value for some readers.
~~If anything, they're a net positive for the environment, since they're sequestering carbon into books.~~
EDIT: I'll acquiesce that they may not be a net positive, since there are carbon costs associated with the entire process. But, using purpose-grown trees is hard to consider as a net negative.
And, if we're talking about the entire process, e-books are not carbon-zero products either.
2. They use our roads for giant logging trucks that degrade the roads and endanger other drivers.
3. They use our air and our water for paper processing which emits TONS of deadly chemicals.
These publishers have blood on their hands. Force them to publish online only. Close the tree farms, close the paper mill. Convert the tree farms into public parks. Save Mother Earth!
These wood pulp tree farms are producing luxury consumption items for the middle and upper class. Working class people don't read physical newspapers
Sounds like something worth fixing. Expanding libraries is one way to do so.
Back in the day, the Communist Party of Italy had legions of volunteers engaged in teaching people how to read, distributing the party's newspaper. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Literacy_Campaign
Also, contrary to what many people are told, pulp farming in the US is super harmful to the environment. The damage isn’t local to each manufacturer either. You might want to look-up into wikipedia for credible info on this.