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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

IA's lending is not unlimited, even with the National Emergency Library. The books are still restricted by DRM, they do keep track of how many copies are out for each book, and they do monitor the system to prevent abuse. It's a real library lending system, nothing like what they do with actual public domain works.

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>IA's lending is not unlimited, even with the National Emergency Library.

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...

This is only talking about 'unlimited' simultaneous users, and the term "unlimited" should be related to its proper context. It's 'unlimited' in a sense because the former limits have been suspended. Everything else is separate, so I'm not sure why we're being told assume that IA can't do their job properly.

>This is only talking about 'unlimited' simultaneous users, and the term "unlimited" should be related to its proper context.

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?

But for copyright to mean something and for the authors to get paid IA's emergency library can't become the norm right? If they don't enforce limits on the number of copies what does it matter that they monitor the number of copies.

> IA's emergency library can't become the norm

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.

Hum, many are starting to reopen which maybe helps to explain why this lawsuit is happening now. Regardless while it changes the morality I don't think it changes anything about the legality.

As long as physical libraries throughout the U.S. and in much of the world are shuttered due to COVID, something like the NEL makes a lot of sense. It's not the norm, but we're not living in normal times either.

> The books are still restricted by DRM

I don't think this is true for many books, which are scanned copies and available as PDFs or EPubs.

It's definitely true of copyrighted books in the NEL. You're not getting actual PDF's or ePub's, only DRM-based versions are made available.

But under the National Emergency Library, a very large number of people can read one copy of a book at the same time. That makes it completely different from a library "lending" system, regardless of whether user actions are tracked.

Whatever your thoughts on the IA's practices, it's worth being clear on this.

>IA's lending is not unlimited, even with the National Emergency Library.

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.

Shockingly, at physical libraries you can also re-borrow a book if there's nobody on a waiting list for it.

Often libraries put limits on the number of times you can do this, but also since IA is currently not restricting the number of copies of a book it loans out that must make a difference no?

Why would that matter? It's still only available to one party.

Well right now that isn't true. IA suspended limiting the number of loans they issue to the number of books they own.

And how is that different from a physical library.

A physical library pays based on maximum simultaneous checkouts. If they want to allow 5 people to have copies checked out simultaneously, they buy 5 copies from the publisher.

And the IA followed that rule too but opened up wider access with an "Emergency" library once lockdowns due to COVID-19 were put in place.

> Physical books are already limited in the sense that libraries' limited budgets only buy limited copies of paper books.

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.

I find it interesting that there is an inherent assertion against an equal right to access information in the stipulation that the publisher must be paid.

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.

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