Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive

arstechnica.com

384 pointsnixass260 comments

> In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even if IA only owned one physical copy.

This was a complete overreach by IA and they are paying the price. If you lend out digital versions all of which are backed by a physical copy, it is hard to argue that the publisher is being harmed. However, if you loan out unlimited digital versions of a single copy, that is much harder to justify, and that provided the the opening the publishers needed for a lawsuit.

I love what the IA has done, but i think they unnecessarily stepped into a minefield for not that much benefit. Even Google with all its resources has not directly challenged the publishers.

I still don't understand why they thought they would get away with it.

Did they think they could draw a confrontation with the publishers and somehow come out victorious? Or that the publishers and their legal teams would voluntarily look the other way?

I still can't tell what their plan was. Or what point they were trying to make. Or how they expected to handle the legal challenge.

It's a shame that they tied this to the Internet Archive. I seriously doubt the people who donated to the IA wanted their funds to be used on this.

I think they were considering being charitable by taking into account people's feelings and situations during a trans-national emergency.

I myself borrowed an old book (which I already owned, but I wanted to compare differences among versions), turned a few pages, but then got distracted and didn't open it again (the virtual loan expired).

I think it's a shame that people are trying to crucify an exemplary organization for doing a charitable act (no good deed goes unpunished, and all that).

And, to be quite honest... Most of the books are at least 20 years old... So it's not like they were distributing best sellers that were actively being sold.

I think it's a situation where publishers "are being forced" to be litigious, because they have an obligation to their shareholders to always take the option that yields more money; the Internet Archive just happened to leave themselves open to being a target, so they _have_ to do it.

This reminds me a bit of Commander Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity, and if I recall correctly, that David Bowie didn't own the rights to his own song and thus was unable to approve or deny an extension for Cmdr Hadfield's video on YouTube (and the controversy of the takedown).

> they have an obligation to their shareholders to always take the option that yields more money

This is not true, and I wish people would stop repeating it like gospel.

They'll probably stop doing it when it stops seeming to be the case.

Since this comes up a lot, I did some digging.

The actual standard, from In Re Walt Disney, is that business decisions aren’t reviewable unless “the exchange was so one-sided that no business person of ordinary, sound judgment could conclude that the corporation has received adequate consideration".

In, Shlensky v. Wrigley, the Chicago Cubs were sued for refusing to install lighting for nighttime games: their president believed baseball was best as “a daytime sport." This is absurdly nebulous (and kind of bizarre), but the Cubs nevertheless won. That decision was based on Davis v. Louisville Gas and Electric Co, which says “the directors are chosen to pass upon such questions and their judgment unless shown to be tainted with fraud is accepted as final. The judgment the directors of the corporation enjoys the benefit of a presumption that it was formed in good faith, and was designed to promote the best interests of the corporation they serve.”

While you can get sued for nearly anything, the legal standard is basically "Did you egregiously rip off the company so that you could make money?", not "Could you have squeezed ten cents more out of the public?"

When I've herd this concept invoked the source has generally been attributed to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.[1] That ruling seems to cut in either direction depending on the analysis. But in the end the most compelling argument seems to be lack of enforceability...

  the rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is
  virtually impossible to enforce as a practical matter. The
  rule is aspirational, except in odd cases. As long as
  corporate directors and CEOs claim to be maximizing profits
  for shareholders, they will be taken at their word, because
  it is impossible to refute these corporate officials'
  self-serving assertions about their motives.

  — Jonathan Macey

While the rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is not an enforceable law, it is a standard of conduct for officers and directors of a company.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Macey's whole article develops that idea a bit more (here: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/).

Ford's response to the Dodge Brothers was:

   My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the  
   benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
   number, to help them build up their lives and their homes.

and Macey says this was precisely the right amount to torpedo his case. If he had said less ("we're expanding"), he would have been fine. Had he said more and provided even a shred of a business justification (goodwill, better work from talented workers, expanding the customer base), he would have been fine. As it was though, he put the court in a situation where they more or less had to find that he couldn't openly do as he pleases with other people's money.

Shlensky has a fairly similar fact pattern. The Cubs decision was supposedly driven by non-economic factors, namely beliefs about 'proper' baseball and possible effects on the neighborhood. However, they left open the door that these factors might themselves affect Cub's business prospects, a door that Ford slammed shut on himself. As a result, the Court found:

  “Plaintiff in the instant case argues that the directors are
  acting for reasons unrelated to the financial interest and 
  welfare of the Cubs. However, we are not satisfied that the 
  motives assigned to Philip K. Wrigley, and through him to the
  other directors, are contrary to the best interests of the
  corporation and the stockholders. For example, it appears to
  us that the effect on the surrounding neighborhood might well
  be considered by a director who was considering the patrons 
  who would or would not attend the games if the park were in a
  poor neighborhood. Furthermore, the long run interest of the
  corporation in its property value at Wrigley Field might
  demand all efforts to keep the neighborhood from
  deteriorating. By these thoughts we do not mean to say that
  we have decided that the decision of the directors was a 
  correct one. That is beyond our jurisdiction and ability. We 
  are merely saying that the decision is one properly before
  directors and the motives alleged in the amended complaint 
  showed no fraud, illegality or conflict of interest in their
  making of that decision.”

(from https://casetext.com/case/shlensky-v-wrigley)

Just so you know, this is what a mobile user sees when someone uses code blocks to format quotes on HN: https://i.imgur.com/EDI0Ist.png

It makes people scroll side to side to read the quote.

Please don't use code blocks for quotes.

There's a link at the bottom to the text, if that's easier.

And frankly, the fact that there's no other way to indicate a block quote is absurd.

I agree, there should be one.

The trick is that there is no single standard you can apply for what constitutes wealth maximization. In the very simplest interpretation, you have contradictory behaviors that will maximize short term versus long term wealth. This mantra is usually invoked to justify any kind of short-term greed at the cost of everything else. Corporations are not obligated to prioritize short-sighted behavior that can damage the entire ecosystem just to make a quick buck.

This comment is a non sequitur to whether corporations have a duty to shareholders. Cited cases have nearly nothing to say for or against on that point.

Unless I'm missing something, that's at the heart of all of these cases.

In Ford v. Dodge, Ford was sitting on $60M, from which it had been paying dividends. These were stopped to reinvest the money in new factories. The Dodge brothers, who owned about 10% of Ford, sued because, per Ford's own comment, his decisions were driven by charitable interests rather than business judgement.

In Shlensky v. Wrigley, Shlensky was a stockholder who believed that the Cubs were leaving money on the table by not holding night games. He sued--and lost--because the Court found that to be a plausible business decision.

In Davis v. Louisville Gas Electric Co., Davis (or actually, his estate) held one type of share in the company, and opposed a reorganization plan that would have converted them to another, to his potential detriment.

In re Walt Disney was a derivative suit by shareholders over the hiring and firing of Michael Orvitz, and whether his (lucrative) compensation was in the company's interests.

The common theme is that the board of directors (and the CEO they appoint, etc) have wide latitude to run the company, even in ways that don't immediately benefit some (Davis) or even all (Shlensky) shareholders. They can certainly go too far (Ford) or fail to exercise much judgement at all (Caremark, where the director sold the company for a value plucked out of thin air), but as Mercantile Trading says "generally [...] courts will not upset the decisions of either directors or stockholders as to questions of policy and business management. An abundance of authority in other jurisdictions might be cited to the same effect"

Thank you for clearing that up; I know they must weigh in all the options... but currently --- given the current chaotic political climate --- I'm quite sure they expected to fly under everyone's radar.

It is not charitable when you give away another persons property and by the end to you are equivocating. Seriously the fact that book is well read or old does not matter, they do not have the rights to do what they are doing and they purposefully trying to use COVID19 by exploiting people's feelings to get away with it.

Publishers have standing and as such they have to file the suit. They are only being forced into this because IA is breaking known law and did so knowing they were.

We the people of the united states grant a monopoly to an individual for a certain amount of time. I personally believe it should have stayed with the original time period. How much time do you need a monopoly?

>The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.

> It is not charitable when you give away another persons property

Knowledge and culture is not anyone’s property. It is the collective work of all of humanity and ought to be treated as such.

That may be a great philosophical argument, but in the eyes of the law (which is what we're discussing here), IA was giving away someone else's property, so it really can't be considered a charitable act.

Even setting aside the law, there is a question of ethics. If I give you a license key to my software, and you give it away to 10 of your friends, would you consider your act charitable?

> That may be a great philosophical argument, but in the eyes of the law (which is what we're discussing here), IA was giving away someone else's property, so it really can't be considered a charitable act.

Internet Archive is a nonprofit with a philosophical mission. I don't agree with them all the time, but I view that their responsibility is to act primarily in accordance with their values. Unfortunately, they ended up taking on powers that they may not be able to handle, but I believe that they are in the right and the publishers are in the wrong, which is a more important conversation to me than whether their decision was strategically prudent (probably it was not).

> Even setting aside the law, there is a question of ethics. If I give you a license key to my software, and you give it away to 10 of your friends, would you consider your act charitable?

All software that I have worked on outside of my job is free and open source, so I would. I believe that it should be mandated by law that all non-trivial software be free and open source. To qualify this, I wouldn't do this on an individual level without your consent if, say, you were a small creator and you depended upon licenses for your livelihood. But small creators are not the plantiffs in this case, nor the people who primarily benefit from strict intellectual property laws -- massive publishing companies are.

You two are arguing at odds with each other. You're talking about how things are and they're talking about how they think things should be.

> Knowledge and culture is not anyone’s property. It is the collective work of all of humanity and ought to be treated as such.

This is a specious ideology without a mechanism to reward creators. At the moment that mechanism is money, either through sales, or for a rare few patronage. Without reward, creation is limited to the otherwise idle, and the collected work of all humanity lessened.

Personally I advocate the right to buy at a reasonable cost (as reasoned by society). Once a reproducible work is released to the public, you can't refuse my payment for it.

Reward doesn’t have to take the form of intellectual property. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_...

Intellectual property benefits publishers, not creators.

The most valuable possession people have is time and attention. Producing works of knowledge and culture involves people giving up their time and attention to produce something. If they have done so, they deserve to have ownership of it.

As Abraham Lincoln said “ That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. “

Whenever, you appropriate for yourself the fruits of other people’s toil, you are sowing seeds of tyranny.

> The most valuable possession people have is time and attention. Producing works of knowledge and culture involves people giving up their time and attention to produce something. If they have done so, they deserve to have ownership of it.

They deserve to be paid (eg, by a University), but they do not deserve ownership in terms of exclusive rights to its use. Can you imagine how far back science would be held if any applications of Newton or Einstein’s work required royalties to their estate? Are suggesting that the fact that they aren’t is tyranny?

> [Publishers] are only being forced into this

Nope. They may have standing, but they're responsible for their own actions.

> Seriously the fact that book is well read or old does not matter

It does, because it means the damages (lost potential sales) are low/nonexistent.

I'm curious just what percent of their revenues are from 20, 30 year old books.

Myself, I buy a lot of old books - but from the thrift store. The only reason the thrift store sells them is because people dump their valueless books on them.

> Nope. They may have standing, but they're responsible for their own actions.

Actually, they kind of are forced into action here. Even if they were okay with the IA doing this (which I'm sure they're not) they still have to defend their copyrights, otherwise they could be declared abandoned and the works would then be in the public domain and could not be defended when someone they don't want to use their works then uses them

You're thinking of trademark. That requires active defense. Copyright does not.

People buy old books all the time. The best-selling book of all time is thousands of years old, after all.

I assume you’re talking about the bible, which is obviously not copyrighted, so where does the idea comes from that nobody will continue to buy old content if it’s in the public domain?

Translations of the Bible are almost always copyrighted, unless it's the King James version, which IIRC isn't really that popular anymore. For that matter, all translations are copyrighted.

The copyrighted translations are not thousands of years old, which kind of defeats the original point. I mean I understand it was a kind of exaggeration for effect, but excepting a very few 'evergreen' titles, the value of a publisher's back catalog tails off very rapidly with age.

Yeah, it's generally a great organization, but that doesn't mean you can't do bad things.

When they announced it, I wrote a friend at the IA and told him it was a big mistake. I tried to get them to change their mind. They had plenty of warning and thought their good works would insulate them.

> doesn't mean you can't do bad things

They did bad things in regard to endangering their institution. There is nothing objectively, morally "bad" about the National Emergency Library though.

It is bad if you're an author. (Or if you're a reader who wants the authors to stay in business.)

Where can I find a list of authors who went out if business by this move in particular?

Either you believe in property rights or you don't. That's fine if you don't. But that's not the system we have.

Authors don't "go out of business" if their words are copied without their permission. So the answer to your question will always be "no one". But they have rights to their words nonetheless.

Theft isn’t charity.

Copyright Infringement is not theft, US Courts specifically bar calling it theft in court filings because it is not treated as theft in law

> I still can't tell what their plan was. Or what point they were trying to make. Or how they expected to handle the legal challenge.

I like the idea one of the Dreamwidth people threw up: it was probably intentionally aiming to bait a court case:

https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1244257620548038656

(Thanks to 'Apocryphon for posting it originally on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734145 )

This doesn't necessarily seem out of line with something Brewster et al. would do, and it is the simplest explanation, so I tend to be on the side of it.

It's a very reasonable explanation.

I wonder what they had thought their chance of winning was at GHG height of the panic, and what is it now.

I also wonder why would they risk their other, very valuable and unique work, knowing full well that the chance of turning bankrupt is definitely nonzero.

> I seriously doubt the people who donated to the IA wanted their funds to be used on this.

I'm not annoyed that my donation is being used for this. I trust them to do what they think is best. Although I do have my doubts.

I'm in the same boat. I am considering donating more to help them, because I truly want the IA to succeed. I also have doubts and feel that this is the wrong fight at the wrong time.

I'm conflicted. The wayback machine is a huge good for the world, and I've donated in the past to support it. It would be a huge loss if it were to disappear. On the other hand I can't support stupidity, and picking a fight with the universe of book publishers is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.

It may be the wrong fight, but with physical libraries closed, it was definitely the right time. Perhaps they thought the situation would last longer?

They could have partnered with those closed libraries and virtually lent out those copies. But they didn't.

> I am considering donating more to help them, because I truly want the IA to succeed.

I'm beginning to suspect this is why they tied their actions to the IA in the first place. It's a good excuse to get people to donate who otherwise wouldn't support this action.

> I still don't understand why they thought they would get away with it

This smells of a lack of risk management more than bad risk management.

Or maybe they're getting exactly what they wanted.

Maybe they let their political goals eclipse their IA goals, and they thought that tying this lawsuit to the life or death of the IA would force IA fans to donate?

I was thinking the 'attention grabbing' side as well. Maybe their resources and funding were so borked they decided to throw a hail mary and hope for the best.

Public archives are fundamentally political.

> I still can't tell what their plan was

If they win (seems unlikely?) they expand fair use. If they are destroyed, then they become a poster child for the excesses of $150K statutory damages.

Absolutely agree. But also, I think that IA was entirely morally right to do this. The publishers seized the opportunity to do something they've wanted to do for a while, and in my opinion, it's despicable.

> IA was entirely morally right to do this

That's fair. But the consequences should have been obvious. Part of launching a test case is segregating the liability.

If IA wanted to launch a legal challenge, they should have segregated the risk from the main organization. Setting precedent with out-of-copyright and licensed works would have been one way. Allowing a third party to run the National Emergency Library would have been another.

Instead, it seems they thought of an idea and ran with it. For an organization aiming for longevity, that's poor process.

Setting precedent with out-of-copyright and

They already did allow out-of-copyright works to be downloaded as many times as anyone wants, without DRM. They're out of copyright. That's unambiguously legal and always has been. There, they've done what you wanted them to, they "segregated the risk from the main organization" (you'd have to have a pretty warped worldview to imagine it makes a difference, but nothing in your comment would have actually done that).

Allowing a third party to run the National Emergency Library would have been another.

I've read this line over and over again. Is this what you meant by it? "The organization that has all of the books and is registered as a library shouldn't have run the library that's legally grounded in them being legally-recognized as a library and having all of the books that they have."

If so, I completely disagree with you.

This makes way more sense than you're giving credit for. IA isn't run by a five year old.

The assertion is that a new organization should have been formed that owns the books and performs the lending, but has no access to the rest of the IA's assets. Then, in the event of a lawsuit, the only thing the publishers could seize would be the actual books.

As it is, the entire IA infrastructure could be torn apart overnight.

The assertion is that a new organization should have been formed that owns the books and performs the lending

Wouldn't be legally recognized as a library, which was something the IA spent years clawing to be recognized as.

but has no access to the rest of the IA's assets

This would be incredibly stupid and would require a complete restructuring of how the IA works (despite the belief of seemingly many people in this thread, the IA is significantly more than the Wayback Machine).

Then, in the event of a lawsuit, the only thing the publishers could seize would be the actual books.

Which would still be bad and morally wrong, and is more likely to happen when it's its own, non-library entity.

As it is, the entire IA infrastructure could be torn apart overnight.

No, it couldn't. Not a bit more than it could be five months ago.

> Wouldn't be legally recognized as a library, which was something the IA spent years clawing to be recognized as.

That's an important nuance that I and others missed.

> No, it couldn't.

Why not? The publishers win a judgement for a value that exceeds that of the IA's total assets, and all of the IA's infrastructure gets seized and auctioned off in the bankruptcy proceedings.

Why not? The publishers win a judgement for a value that exceeds that of the IA's total assets, and all of the IA's infrastructure gets seized and auctioned off in the bankruptcy proceedings.

The data is backed up in many ways (including to some extent in a fully-distributed fashion, though I'm not in the know enough to give you an idea of how vast it is: https://dweb.archive.org/ ), and a non-profit can't be forced into bankruptcy in the way you're implying (which is another reason it's so important the IA is non-profit), so the physical assets are safe:

https://www.abi.org/member-resources/blog/a-non-profit-entit...

I'm confused. Are you saying that the IA should run the Wayback Machine and library under one entity, or two different entities? In your reply to JumpCrisscross, you seem to argue for one, and that two would have no benefit; but your link contradicts that.

Your link is about substantive consolidation, a process where the bankruptcy court combines multiple related legal entities into one. This can benefit the creditors of Entity A, since it may frustrate the debtor's attempt to shield assets by placing them in a related Entity B. Your link correctly notes that a nonprofit can't be forced into bankruptcy, and thus can't be forced into substantive consolidation. So if the IA used the two-entity strategy, then your link implies it would be quite effective--worst case, the publishers take all the assets of the library entity, and they have no way to touch the Wayback entity.

If both the Wayback Machine and the library are under the same entity, then that single entity still can't be forced into bankruptcy, because it's a nonprofit. But the creditor (i.e., the publishers with their hypothetical judgment) can still just collect against the single nonprofit entity, bankruptcy or no bankruptcy. If the judgment is for more than the entity's assets then the creditor gets everything.

The point of bankruptcy is to consolidate multiple creditors' claims into a single case, to be resolved more fairly, while destroying less value, etc. It seems like you might be thinking that no bankruptcy means no ability for the creditors to collect? But that's exactly backwards--bankruptcy is primarily a set of protections for the debtor (like the "automatic stay", which stops creditors from trying to collect outside the bankruptcy), with a few smaller benefits for the creditor (like that substantive consolidation) thrown in.

ETA: And I see that the IA describes itself as "recognized as a library by the government", but I'm not aware of any specific legal benefit from that. Regardless, if that's somehow important then they could leave the books in the library entity and split out the Wayback, instead of splitting out the library.

Wouldn't that be treated by the courts as an attempt to shield IA's assets?

Sure, I don't disagree.

The publishers waited until someone made a massive over-reach beyond any plausible deniability or defense, and that makes them despicable?

I mean... a little blame goes to the folks that made the massive over-reach beyond any plausible deniability or defense, right? Maybe most of the blame? All of the blame?

IA lofted the jolly roger and thought fear of bad press would protect them, and it's the publisher's fault for not saying, "never mind, you guys destroy the entire economic foundation of the publishing industry, no worries"?

I'm rarely in the anti-pirate camp, but defending IA in this context is pretty extreme.

It's so uncharacteristic of the way the IA normally behaves. Whatever special rights a lot of people think they have as a library, a lot of their archiving operations are on somewhat shaky ground. BUT they're a non-profit, don't monetize with advertising, bend over backwards (further than many think they should) to take down anything anyone with a legitimate claim wants taken down even retroactively, and generally don't do anything that makes them a particularly attractive legal target. Yeah, you can argue about them collecting so much content on essentially an opt-out basis. But, at the end of the day, they do provide an opt-out so it's probably not very attractive to sue them when you can get the same result by asking for a takedown.

Trying to use a crisis to return sanity to copyright law isn't an overreach. The blame lies squarely on those who have spent decades creating draconian copyright law, and those today who defend it. "I'm an author" or "Think of the publishers!" is no excuse for supporting unjust laws.

The argument is whether actions like this are the best way to "return sanity to copyright law," though, right? It seems to me there's a lot of space between "eternally extending copyright to keep the first Mickey Mouse cartoons from entering the public domain" and "anyone should be able to do whatever they want with other people's work at any point regardless of the creator's objections."

There is a lot of space, which is why you anchor with the opening salvo and then find middle ground. Keep in mind, the Internet Archive only opened the “National Emergency Library” during a global pandemic. Under business as usual, they put limits on access to scanned works.

Copyright isn’t an inalienable right. It was established for the public good, and up for renegotiation at any time. Now is one of those times.

An "opening salvo" has to be more than just throwing ammunition at your enemies. The "but global pandemic" argument will not be very convincing when they roll out authors that also wanted to eat during the pandemic.

No matter what you consider to be the morally correct outcome here, this seems to have been a very risky way to go about things.

> when they roll out authors that also wanted to eat during the pandemic.

This is a tired argument. Please prove authors experienced lost sales due to the emergency library IA offered.

I don't have to. The publishers do. And I'll bet they can make a better legal argument than "oh we just wanted to because pandemic".

Seems to be overreaching to me. They have put themselves into a position where they are likely to be sued into the ground, and force others into a position where the only choice is to lose their income or sue them into the ground. They weren't forced into creating this standoff, so at least share the blame.

I'm not sure what the point of owning a digital copy of a book is if I can, at any time, "loan" one from the IA in <15 seconds. In a way it's even more convenient than owning a copy, your basically using IA as cloud storage.

>"I'm an author" or "Think of the publishers!" is no excuse for supporting unjust laws.

Authors want to get paid, this stops them from getting paid...

>> "I'm an author" or "Think of the publishers!" is no excuse for supporting unjust laws.

What is sad is most of the people that use that excuse do not believe copyright laws are draconian enough, they want STRONGER copyright laws for publishers, they want it to not only be civil but criminal, they want to put people in jail in a cage if you happen to share your favorite song with a friend.

In short, copyright maximalists are insane

The real overreach is copyright law's hundred year plus monopolies on imaginary property and their lip service to fair use and the public domain.

And the solution to broken copyright law is to ignore it, at the expense of working-class authors, rather than ... working on the law?

You realize this undermines the ability of our society to produce the actual written works that we're arguing so damn valuable that we can't abide locking them behind a paywall?

People write for free constantly. We're doing it right now, Tumblr was absolutely full of freely available fiction, and there were plenty of stories and technical knowledge written and passed between people before copyright was even a concept in anyone's minds. The primary thing the copyright industry gets us in regards to writing is that some people can get paid doing things others will do for free, and a large body of advertising is created around the non-free works.

If you stop paying people to write, the only people who write are those who can afford the time. Writing a novel can take years of your life. Books are not fungible, and some books you would want to read will never get written if the author cannot afford to write it.

Sure, but we get into a weird place if we try to argue that every thing that possibly might be written must be written - no copyright law is strong enough, we have a moral obligation to buy books we have no interest in, etc etc.

So why is the current copyright system the exact correct system for getting people paid to write, where any stronger or weaker would be bad? I can think of at least a few other possible systems that would get people paid to write as well - maybe an entirely different set of people, so some things would get written that aren’t today and some things that would get written today aren’t under that system. How can we evidence that our current system works best?

> And the solution to broken copyright law is to ignore it

Civil disobedience is a form of peaceful protest.

> You realize this undermines the ability of our society to produce the actual written works

Creators aren't going to stop. They'll find a way. The solution is to somehow get paid for the act of creating rather than the finished work. Patronage and crowdfunding could be the answer.

I hate intellectual property, but I don't despise the publishers, they're just playing by the (broken) rules of the game.

I blame the politicians that do nothing to change the rules of the game in the first place, and the people that elect them.

It is perfectly possible to blame both the politicians that propagate unjust rules and the people that take advantage of them. Both are contributing to injustice, each in their own way.

Copyright is the way it is because of publishers of various media lobbying for stronger, longer protection. The politicians are the people they lobby.

I think one argument that they could make is that regular libraries are closed during the pandemic and there are thousands of physical copies that people can’t borrow because of the closures. Hence, their making available more digital copies than they physically own can be somewhat justified. The fact that they made that number unbounded is what’s most problematic. Had they just increased their limits by some guesstimated number of unavailable books, it would’ve made for a much easier day in court.

> Had they just increased their limits by some guesstimated number of unavailable books, it would’ve made for a much easier day in court.

My guess is that this is exactly what they did and specifically, that they're cooperating with a number of currently-closed libraries so that they can still claim to have one book kept in storage for each book that's lent out, when accounting for those libraries' physical holdings. They just used the word "unlimited" as a convenient shortcut in describing their new policy, much like ISP's and their "unlimited but not really" data caps.

This is just a fantasy. We are now just pretending that IA did something other than what they actually did?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/books/internet-archive-em...

> Public libraries get licenses from publishers for the e-books they lend, and publishers receive payments, according to the terms that are set. Internet Archive doesn’t get licenses from publishers but instead relies on donated or purchased books or copies it acquires through collaborations with physical libraries. The books are then scanned and made available for one borrower at a time, for 14 days. With that restriction removed, the archive is now operating more or less like a free digital book site.

Sorry but that article is definitely inaccurate. As I wrote in a sibling comment, the NEL is still lending out books with a DRM-enforced "check out". That restriction is very much in effect! And my point is that we simply don't know how far their claim to "unlimited" lending should be taken.

They made no claims to this effect, have announced zero partnership, and instead made claims entirely contrary to this. It seems remarkably specious and apologist to imagine this as an argument now.

I don't even get why IA did this, or why they threatened the project itself with this side project. Many people gave money to the project for the internet archiving, not some sort of robinhood book distribution system. Whoever did this should have created a completely separate side project instead of effectively bankrupting the meaningful, justifiable project in the process.

> They made no claims to this effect, have announced zero partnership, and instead made claims entirely contrary to this.

It makes sense that they would do this if they were actively trying to lure the pro-copyright camp (Authors' Guild and publishers) into a difficult-to-defend and highly unpopular position. I agree that it seems a bit unrealistic, but surely the IA had to know that a lawsuit would be filed given their public claims wrt. the NEL.

It makes sense that they would do this if they were actively trying to lure the pro-copyright camp (Authors' Guild and publishers) into a difficult-to-defend and highly unpopular position.

That position being that the IA shouldn't do what the law says you aren't allowed to do? That doesn't seem very difficult to defend at all, and it's going to be unpopular with the kind of person who thinks copyright shouldn't exist but probably less so with the people who created those works if they aren't getting paid as they should be.

I'm a little wary of saying much here because copyright disputes often seem to end up having relevant details that were omitted from some reporting on them. But if the IA really is making and distributing an unlimited number of copies of a protected work, isn't that exactly the act that copyright was designed to prohibit?

> That position being that the IA shouldn't do what the law says you aren't allowed to do?

But does it say that? Their status as an officially-recognized library means they're operating by different rules than most private citizens. Libraries are (sometimes) allowed to make copies of copyrighted works without asking anyone's permission. It's entirely possible that the limitations they imposed on digital lending prior to this event were merely a expression of courtesy—or excess caution—and not an actual legal obligation.

> Libraries are (sometimes) allowed to make copies of copyrighted works without asking anyone's permission.

Libraries can make copies for preservation purposes, but that's not the same thing as making those copies generally available. The latter is not something that they're permitted to do outside of special circumstances. So I think your argument is going too far - there are clear reasons why the Open Library's lending works the way it does.

There are a number if different (if somewhat overlapping) copyright exceptions for libraries. Some do allow copies to be made generally available to the public, though none are intended to mass distribution of any one work.

Section 108(a) allows the library to make a single copy of a work and distribute it to the public.

Section 108(b) allows up to three copies, for preservation or security or for deposit in another library (but not distributed directly to the public).

Section 108(c) allows up to three copies to replace deteriorating or obsolete media, but does not allow distribution outside the premises.

Section 108(d) applies only to excerpts.

Section 108(e) allows apparently unlimited copies to be made for "private study, scholarship, or research"—this is the default assumption, so the library would need to know that this was not the case to be in violation—provided that the work "cannot be obtained at a fair price". However, the copy must become the property of the user (i.e. not a loan).

Section 108(h) allows more widespread copying and distribution of abandonware within the last 20 years of their copyright period.

Ironically, section 108(e) would probably offer the best protection, but only if they were actually handing out permanent copies and not limited-time loans.

In the US, as far as I can tell, there's no such thing as an officially-recognized library--at least at the federal level unless you're talking about the Library of Congress.

The IA is a 501(c)(3) organization but they're not a "library" in that filing (which may not even be a specific option).

Classification (NTEE) Human Service Organizations - Multipurpose (Human Services — Multipurpose and Other)

Nonprofit Tax Code Designation: 501(c)(3) Defined as: Organizations for any of the following purposes: religious, educational, charitable, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition (as long as it doesn’t provide athletic facilities or equipment), or the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.

But, sure, they look like a library so they're free to call themselves one. But that doesn't actually confer a lot of special privileges.

17 U.S. Code § 108[1] grants copyright exceptions specifically to "libraries or archives". This is completely separate from their status as a 501(c)(3) non-profit origanization for tax purposes.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108

Yes, it does say that. Libraries generally don't allow people to make copies of complete works, and for good reason. Copyright laws often have special provisions for specific purposes like archival, but that isn't what's being described here.

It's baloney. Powell books was open and hiring staff to handle online orders. And if you must, there was also Amazon.

A book store is not a library. We taxpayers have already paid for libraries.

Well, taxpayers have paid for certain libraries, which have mostly been closed. If you want to get what you've paid for, you should probably talk to your municipal, state, and perhaps federal representatives.

The fact that you paid one entity for a service (which they are not providing,) does not entitle you to collect it from another entity.

I never said anything about being entitled to anything, please don't put words in my mouth. I'm just pointing out something that should be obvious - a bookstore isn't a library. And telling people who have already paid their taxes to go use a bookstore is offensive.

Turns out "people are bored and entertainment isn't as freely available" is maybe not a great justification for stealing people's stuff.

I also know of a large number of libraries (e.g., NYPL) that suspended their requirement that people verify their address, so realistically, anyone anywhere could register an ebook-only library card and avail themselves.

> Turns out "people are bored and entertainment isn't as freely available" is maybe not a great justification for stealing people's stuff.

Luckily absolutely nothing was stolen.

You can assert copying isn't stealing, but the part where "I have something I didn't have a minute ago, and would normally have to pay money to acquire it, but didn't" is pretty clear-cut.

Just because someone wasn't deprived of the thing you now have doesn't mean they weren't deprived of something of value, and pretending otherwise is a juvenile see-no-evil defense.

That's literally why it's not stealing. It's not legal, but it's also by definition not theft.

Agreed. "Piracy isn't theft" is such a cliche in these arguments.

The people downloading the books, music, movies, etc are getting something that they want, that normally costs money, for free.

Come up with a new word if it isn't theft. But it looks and acts like theft.

> and pretending otherwise is a juvenile see-no-evil defense.

And luckily I did not say that anywhere.

Once they started doing video games just directly embedded in the site I figured their MO was just to keep pushing the boundaries and see how far they could go until they got slapped.

Still, you have to be mr Scrooge to punish IA for trying to help during an international emergency.

I have to agree. This hurt authors everywhere and authors can't allow this kind of precedent to take hold or authors can't afford to eat. Nor can readers, really because without well-fed authors, there's nothing to read.

There were definitely authors before copyright existed.

I for one can't wait to return to a time where the only people who could afford to be writers were members of the upper class who didn't need to rely on publishing for their income; we might be spared the next Dan Brown.

It's no wonder copyright reform has completely stalled out over the last 20 years when all discussions devolve into the same repeated canards.

If you're one of the majority of writers and relying on publishing for your income, you are probably not relying on publishing for your income but rather food stamps.

Publishers aren't really on authors' sides.

Many authors are their own publishers. Writing (and most arts) pays so little because society values their work so little. We seem to value a decent novel at about $5. An author already sees about $0.50-$1 of that. Respected, well reviewed, award winning (but not best selling) authors I know would still be hard up earning a living wage even if their income increased tenfold by them getting 100% of the proceeds.

(Isn't this what mp3.com did?)

> However, the publishers may not be interested in forcing the Internet Archive out of business. Their goal is to get the Internet Archive to stop scanning their books. If they win the lawsuit, they might force the group to shut down its book scanning operation and promise to not start it up again, then allow it to continue its other, less controversial offerings.

Some context is useful. The IA, due to the coronavirus, is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending." Now, an "unlimited number of people can check out the same book at the same time."

I can understand why the publishers would be upset. The IA need not go bankrupt for this. They may simply capitulate and revert this new feature. I am not convinced the publishers want to take the IA down; they merely want to threaten that unlimited concurrent checkouts should not be permitted (and perhaps, even more, that no books at all should be scanned).

> is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending."

This is definitely inaccurate. Many elements of CDL are clearly still in effect, such as the use of DRM to enforce the "check out" provision. It's a real lending system. The only thing that's new is the "unlimited" claim wrt. the number of copies that can be checked out at any given time - and we still don't know how far that "unlimited" actually goes. We should wait for IA's legal response on this.

Is the extent of the 'unlimited' important? Lending a single book more than they own is an impossibility if they are respecting IP - no different to a physical library photocopying entire books so they can lend more.

As I understand it, the lawsuit is a result of IA refusing a request to revert the feature.

IA will lose and even if they do capitulate now, they are probably going to have to pay the plaintiff's lawyers.

"(and perhaps, even more, that no books at all should be scanned)"

I believe this to be the publishers' goal; they have been complaining about the IA's digital copies for years.

And that includes out-of-copyright and out-of-print books.

That would be an immeasurable loss to humanity, the IA should be protected by the government. I've contributed some very old cartoons I managed to find on VHS rips and was very glad that the IA exists to safekeep them, many 30-somethings in my country have fond memories of these cartoons.

Terabytes upon terabytes of historical data would vanish if the IA were to go bankrupt.

IA is not a national treasure, it is a world treasure. They can do anything they want in my eyes, because absolutely 0 organizations are doing the work they do publicly. If IA is bankrupted by this, the publishers, lawyers, authors, everyone involved should feel like complete assholes.

IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers!

Fuck everyone who's saying IA shouldn't do this. You're all seeing the world through your wallets.

> IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers!

Just a crazy thought: they weren't just depriving publishers of revenue, they were directly depriving authors. People already not widely renowned as rolling in the dollars, and also hurt during a time of decreased discretionary spending.

But they don't count as people, right?

How many people who read a certain book on IA would actually be able to buy it during the crisis? I think that that number is really low, so the loss is really low as well, but sometimes authors prefer not to sell or give away even when there is no perspective or benefit. Some time ago, I needed an old book that wasn't popular, but nobody wanted to sell a new copy of it at even a remotely decent price...

It's like a car dealer said "you fool came to buy a car in that hard time. I see that you really need it, so I will charge 10x the price" "But look! You have an entire parking lot of cars that nobody wants to buy. Maybe you could give me a discount?" "You are right. I will charge 40x the price!"

If random for-profit companies can be deemed too important to fail, then the IA absolutely deserves that designation.

> the IA should be protected by the government

Bankruptcy doesn't mean dissolution. If the IA goes bankrupt over this National Emergency Library boondoggle, the servers will still be around. A new organization could lift them out, clean them up and re-launch the service with a more focussed mandate and better internal processes.

> A new organization could lift them out

... please watch this 30 second Google ad to retrieve your archived content...

The question is what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted material). Ideally someone will scrape them and a new similar entity will spring up. Is there anything in law that would prevent that from happening?

> what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted material)

Presumably, they legally hold those data. As such, it could be purchased by a new organization out of bankruptcy (assuming IA loses and goes into liquidation versus restructuring).

Yeah, but could they give it away?

Prior to a court judgement, yes. After? Uncharted territory.

If for-profit companies can be deemed too important to fail, then the IA absolutely deserves that designation.

> the IA should be protected by the government

The IA should be protected from governments.

Corona-specific issues aside, I'll bet that publishers don't care that much about the current situation.

I do believe however that they're after a precedent being set, and though I'm definitely not a lawyer, I know that at least for brands and trademarks, you have to defend your property or lose it. The same might apply to their literary IP. If IA does it, then 'anyone else can do it', in which case the entire value of publishers business is vaporized.

My instinct is that the publishers want the IA to 'stop doing it' and the situation will likely end up something along those lines.

Reinforces sentiment I heard lately from the AG. History is written by the winners.

We are in the middle of a national emergency and the IA made an aggressive an panicked move to try and improve people's lives at a time when frankly people really needed help.

I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked.

The IA probably overstepped, but given the circumstances I hope that any court decision amounts to little more than requiring the IA to roll back their unlimited policy. No damages awarded. We should encourage people to help each other in times of crisis, any judgement granting damages sets a very bitter tone for future crisis management.

> I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked.

This could be read as:

> the end justifies the means

"Compassion" can be stretched to mean anything as long it's good to someone. I think IA's cause is a very noble one. I can stand behind that. However, noble causes don't give you legal exemption.

Love the IA and I am a donor, but kinda agree they stepped over the line here, maybe got a little overexcited when the pandemic hit. Hopefully they can be humble, admit the mistake, clamp down on the book piracy part and get things legal again so it doesn't put the rest of their great stuff in jeopardy.

I don't understand why the IA people thought this change would go unchallenged. Seems like a pretty suicidal move to me, although I wish them luck.

We need to put Internet Archive on IPFS or something similar, finding a single location for 50PB+ archive is going to be difficult but one can easily find 50000 people with 1TB of free space and a stable server+internet connection.

> one can easily find 50000 people with 1TB of free space and a stable server+internet connection.

That's not how this works. There's currently no truly decentralized storage that could handle the IA workload. IPFS certainly doesn't cut it. People have tried. It didn't work.

Not to mention I'd take a single, stable, commercial Internet link over 50k consumer Internet links where you can't even tell if the other side is temporarily shut down, the network got partitioned/congested or the hard drive got wiped.

Is there a way to cut the archive down to a manageable yet relevant subset based on one's interests? Say, "I have 500GB free space and I care about mathematics, what do I take from the archive"? Because 50000TB is too much for crowdsourcing, particularly if it's supposed to be crowd-served rather than just crowd-hoarded. I would guess a high percentage of that is video, which perhaps should never have been part of the archive to begin with due to its signal-to-noise rate.

In 30 years with our 2^largenumber drives, we’d be regretting we didn’t add chive more video.

But will we have "2^largenumber drives"? Aren't SSDs already beginning to have problems with bit flipping?

Addendum: QLC is one way some SSDs are made slightly denser¹ that comes with a cost: decreased reliability and extended sustained write performance (the amount of data you can write quickly in one go is limited, and decreases as the drive fills up). https://www.howtogeek.com/428869/ssds-are-getting-denser-and...

[1]: 25% denser than TLC

Yes, start building your own local archive with something like ArchiveBox.io or Webrecorder.io.

I don't want to make my new archive (I mean, I don't mind, but that's not my point). I want to crowd-host a piece of the OG Archive.

Yeah, I do agree that crowd-hosting a piece of Archive.org on a distributed filesystem would be better. I say exactly that towards the end of my "Intro to the Internet Archiving world" talk here too:

https://github.com/pirate/internet-archiving-talk

I think they've thought about IPFS and BitTorrent in the past, but 50PB is a lot of data and they already have a few redundant backups around the world that are hard enough to manage as-is. Hopefully the latest round of lawsuits and public support pushes them more in the direction of letting the public help them with hosting.

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....

> IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.

https://decentralizedweb.net/

This is so frustrating to hear. A lot of comments mention the IA "overreaching" with this. While I agree from a legal perspective, I don't agree morally. The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. Is there any individual who argues that 120 years of monopoly is reasonable?

The worst part for me is the lack of agency I feel. I see something so vehement being enforced globally, and it makes me feel like I'm being ruled by some enemy mafia, not a representative democracy. Similar to the war on drugs in the US, I see this as actively sabotaging society for the benefit of a few.

> The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law.

I agree, but I don’t see why that automatically makes the recent modifications (that brought on the lawsuit) by IA morally right.

Even if some works should already be in the public domain and are not yet, the IA modification was also taking money away from relatively recent works.

The argument that is made in this article on behalf of IA that millions of books are locked up in libraries during the pandemic won’t hold. Almost all libraries during the pandemic have dramatically increased access to digital lending. Library usage has increased with many books fully checked out at libraries. Meaning these locked up copies are in use.

IA rocks, yet this new program hurts authors. Not just publishers.

Even if the library books were _entirely_ inaccessible during the pandemic, that doesn't mean that they temporarily become the property of IA to disseminate as it wishes.

I can understand if IA were to make the argument, "Because libraries are closed, we are buying more copies of books so we can make them accessible via Controlled Digital Lending."

But IA's argument has been, "Because libraries are closed, we now have the authority to pretend that those inaccessible physical copies belong to us, and we're merely lending them out."

Full disclosure: I'm an author, and at least one of my recent books has ended up in IA's emergency library. I'm all for copyright reform, but I'm not for an all-out end to copyright, which is what would need to happen for IA's scheme to be legal.

IA haven’t come out with an official argument so there is no need to put words in their mouths.

Also if the IA scheme becomes legal it would certainly not be a an all out end to copyright. Just the realisation that limiting an unlimited digital asset is stupid and copyright in the digital age should be defined in a new way. Ppl still would not be able to use your work for free.

Edit: Like back when we only had physical things it made sense. There was a physical limitation. Now we are trying to apply the same concept in a very different world. I just think that doesn’t hold and we should just have a new definition.

E.g: there is no reason to own a physical copy to lend a digital one as the medium should not hold the copyright. Maybe charge a fee for access and then if you want the physical book you only pay for the medium but if you want the digital one there is no additional fee.

My point is more the fact that the medium limitation is something that never really gets the focus and that is a very broken part of copyright in the digital age.

Their official argument is:

> [Readers] don’t have access to the books that only exist in paper, sitting inaccessible on their library shelves. That’s where our collection fits in — we offer digital access to books, many of which are otherwise unavailable to the public while our schools and libraries are closed

http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-eme...

They make explicit reference to these inaccessible books to justify why they are distributing more copies than they own.

I agree with your point about digital media being intrinsically different than physical media, especially when it comes to marginal costs of publication/dissemination. Ownership and possession of a physical copy of a book is a good proxy for a license to use the book, and copyright law was largely built around that premise.

Controlled Digital Lending seems to be a good way to adopt the same principles for the digital age. IA was using CDL prior to its emergency library, and I had no problem with that.

I also don't think lenders need to have a physical copy sitting around somewhere to be able to lend a digital copy. Publishers' onerous licensing terms for digital content have been met with deserved criticism. A CDL system that permits ownership of either physical or digital copies seems like the right approach.

In fairness, I think that line of defense is more a moral, rather than legal, argument.

" Like back when we only had physical things it made sense. There was a physical limitation. Now we are trying to apply the same concept in a very different world. I just think that doesn’t hold and we should just have a new definition."

I don't think is true historically though. The idea of copyright for books is that another publisher can't start printing copies of a book someone else wrote and start selling them. This doesn't involve physically taking any of the author's property, and indeed they probably had to buy a copy first before they could make their own copies. I don't see how what the IA is fundamentally different from this, and it seem pretty clear that copyright law was created to stop this sort of thing.

> The idea of copyright for books is that another publisher can't start printing copies of a book someone else wrote and start selling them.

But with the historical conceptual constraint that:

a) it costs enough to make copies that a physical publishing industry is necessary to produce copies of books at scale

b) it is unthinkable that copies may be made for $0

c) were it somehow thinkable that a person could magically receive a book from a neighbor with the neighbor never losing their own copy, the free transfer of copies clearly trumps any benefits or incentives federal copyright may have.

Lucky for us Jefferson saw in human ideas the same novel properties that we take for granted with digital data, and he wrote explicitly about his priorities regarding those novel properties:

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

So the one relevant historical commentary I know from the time is clearly on the side of the person you're responding to. You can't apply the same copyright logic to non-physical things (or more broadly, things for which a recipient can receive a thing without the giver having lost one). And if you try, then free distribution outweighs exclusive rights.

Suppose "c" were true. I invest considerable time, effort, and (possibly) talent to produce a creative work -- let's say a novel. My neighbor purchases my novel and then makes a free copy available to anyone who wants one. Naturally, getting it for free is better than having to pay for it, and so everyone who wants a copy gets theirs for free from my neighbor. And so I sell a total of one copy -- then my book effectively ends up in the public domain. Does it make financial sense for me to write novels under this system? Absolutely not! Creators become disincentivized from producing creative works. The public good suffers as a result.

Jefferson's point was that in most cases, Person A's sharing of an idea with Person B doesn't take away anything from Person A. If I know how to tie a necktie and you don't, my teaching you how to tie a necktie doesn't deprive me of that knowledge. It just puts more knowledge into the world, which is a good thing. But there are certainly cases where this is not true. If I run a business and I freely share all my trade secrets with my direct competitor, and they use that knowledge to drive me out of business, that's bad, and it's not what Jefferson is talking about. Similarly, if I'm a creator and depend on sales of my creative works to make a living, giving away all my creative works for free means I've not only screwed myself over, but also I can't continue to produce more creative works, which deprives the public of their benefit.

That's why "c" doesn't appear plainly true to me. Copyright is meant to advance the arts and sciences by giving creators a mechanism to be compensated for their efforts for a period of time, while also protecting the public interest by limiting that period of time. Both of those considerations need to be balanced.

"Almost all libraries during the pandemic have dramatically increased access to digital lending. Library usage has increased with many books fully checked out at libraries."

Do you have a source for that? My understanding was that digital lending and physical lending came out of different pools (in fact most digital lending is through something like Rakuten OverDrive); using a library's physical inventory would likely violate it's digital license.

Source: https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/public-library-associat...

Hope this helps. The main point I was trying to raise raise was in response to the article where an advocate of IA argued that IA was justified because books are "locked up" during pandemic. Yet libraries are putting their licenses of those works to use.

Yeah, I'm not aware of any "normal" libraries going the CDL route, all the digital lending I've seen takes the form of licensing ebooks and using Overdrive or something like it, and those ebooks are totally separate from the physical holdings (and they're also, from the library's perspective, priced totally differently, with significant restrictions on usage and total number of lendings and things like that).

Anecdote but my local library uses Hoopla for digital loaning, and they went from 10 loans a month to something like 30 or 40.

I don't see any information about how many books were actually "borrowed". Somehow I have the feeling it might be fewer than sitting in the shelves of all the physical libraries.

Has this emergency library been popular? I read about it on HN, not anywhere else. The world is not full of HN readers.

I'm considering writing to those publishers that I will stop buying books published by them and borrow them from a (physical) library instead, copying pages I want to keep. Be the letter of the law whatever it is, this was a exceptional situation and it was not done for personal benefit.

It's in https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-l...

> Trying to compare a physical check-out of a book with a digital check-out is difficult. Assuming that the number of physical books borrowed from a library corresponds to digitally borrowed books that are read after the first day, then the Internet Archive currently lends about as many as a US library that serves a population of about 30,000.

Of course you won't find any real information in the publishers' complaint. It's all rhetoric and no substance, except where they claim everything and its opposite.

I hope this news isn't drowned out by the current protests. Unpopular lawsuits, bills, etc. tend to appear and get a hard push during times when media attention is focused on some other larger outrage.

The timing of this is extremely opportunistic and reinforces the idea that the IA is in the moral right (not necessarily the legal right). Imagine if this was filed when the only news was about COVID-19 and working from home? What type of outrage would it have manufactured by all of the working parents stranded at home trying to fulfill the duties of being a teacher too? Of course publishers wouldn't do that. It would be a PR death move.

I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea. Considering that a large part of HN makes fat salaries writing software which is either sold for high price(MSFT types), or mining user data and advertising (GOOG types). If their work was being distributed for free (SQL server, Windows), software developers would make much less money and would be up in arms here. Why should authors be deprived of the value of their labour. If not, will you be happy if all software was made free in "National Emergency Software Library", and you were being paid peanuts? After all , people also need a good OS and Database apart from books.

"If their work was being distributed for free (SQL server, Windows), software developers would make much less money and would be up in arms here."

Most of us are paid based on the value we provide to employers by the capabilities we provide through software, not based on the value of the software itself. (Trading software for money is a relatively niche market in the industry. Enterprise software for the win! :-)) Most of the software I write isn't distributed at all; that which is distributed is available for free.

> I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea.

I'm not sure how many people are thinking that. Some must be, but not necessarily many.

There's a difference between "giving" and "lending". The IA have never given away copyrighted books.

I've used the IA's lending library in the past and the copyrighted ebooks were protected by Adobe DRM. You were allowed to take out a few books for a few weeks (like in a real library). You were required to return the books before a given date. And if you didn't, the ADOBE software wouldn't let you read the book anymore (because of the DRM).

According to the article, until recently, the IA would scan a book and would lend out the created ebook only to a limited number of people at a time, based on how many copies of the physical book that they had.

What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

I don't think anyone has any problem with the original lending scheme. That was totally fair.

> What changed recently is that they began lending out to a potentially unlimited number of people at a time. But, you still didn't get to keep the book for more than two or three weeks (I forget the exact number).

This is the relevant part, and what has prompted the publisher lawsuit. Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why books.

> Do you think people should be allowed to take out any software they want for free for 2-3 weeks for a "National Software Emergency Library". If not, why books.

I'm not sure what the IA was thinking when they made that modification. Perhaps they thought that during the pandemic such a change would be found temporarily acceptable.

I agree with your point that programmers, software publishers, authors and publishers should all be able to make money and get paid for their work. I'm not sure though what are the best business models for making that happen.

What I've settled on myself, for the moment, is buying physical (paper) books, buying ebooks without DRM, downloading old ebooks in the public domain for free (or buying them cheaply from sites that do a good job on the markup) and taking out books from my local library.

My wife buys Kindle ebooks (with DRM) from Amazon, because she requires a very large font size, and the Amazon solution was the best that I found (biggest selection of books of the type that my wife reads).

I don't see anyone saying the IA was giving away books for free. I see people saying they made it so people could check out books and they would allow people to do so on an unlimited checkouts basis. So they will lend to many instead of one at a time.

Who makes any salary on 50 year old software licenses? I expect most people's salary comes from software that was written in the last 10 years max.

That is because people don't want to use older software and use newer software that is better. It is not the fault of the authors that their work is more timeless than software.

Since I'm neither of the types you mentioned, do I get to say such things in your opinion?

Everyone gets to say anything in my opinion, I am no-one to stop people. But they should also try to ponder over the question over why authors don't deserve to be paid for their labour.

No one deserves to be paid for their labor. The mere fact that you put labor into something does not entitle you to other people's money. You get paid because you have something other people want and they are willing to pay you to give it to them. This is completely at odds with the way publishers are used to operating, which is founded in legally-sanctioned monopolies and disproportionate punishment for anyone who dares to infringe their special privileges by using their own labor to create their own copies of existing works without consulting the copyright holder.

If you want to be paid for your labor, withhold either the labor itself or the finished product (i.e. the original copy) until you have negotiated a contract for payment. Don't put the content out in public where it can easily be copied and then expect people to pay you large sums for the trivial work of distribution which they could easily accomplish on their own.

As far as I can tell the main difference to software seems to be the ways the software businesses found ways to enforce the rules they dictate via SaaS or government sanctioned monopoly license contracts.

Do you have any evidence that copyright on Windows has resulted in more wages for developers?

For developers working at Microsoft? How are they paid via? They are paid out of Microsoft profits. If Microsoft stops making the humongous amounts of money of Windows, Office, SQL Server, the salaries aren't going to be paid out of thin air.

Majority of software firms either sell software (Sell fully or SaaS), or make money by advertising. If they are not going to make money by selling, who is going to pay the developers?

"Majority of software firms either sell software (Sell fully or SaaS), or make money by advertising. If they are not going to make money by selling, who is going to pay the developers?"

The majority of programmers don't work for "software firms" that sell software. They are paid by, yes, advertising, financial services, various industrial things, the government, and just about every other industry.

You can also sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html and, in the publishing world, many publishers make money selling public domain books. So your premise is incorrect.

I'm not asking for hypothetical reasoning, I'm asking for evidence that more copyright brings more wages to developers and less copyright means less wages. Surely there are experiments that looked for such evidence? (And if not, how are you so sure?)

Yeah, selling free software doesn't work out in the practical world. There are astonishingly few business (RedHat) making money selling free software, and we don't really want authors using that business model. (Want to know how Dumbledore died? Buy an expensive subscription and get access to Harry Potter technicians). The premise that because a handful of business are able to survive on a different business model, authors should be forced to do the same, is abusurd.

> I'm asking for evidence that more copyright brings more wages to developers and less copyright means less wages.

Very simple. Look at the real world and the business models of top 10000 software companies. There would be <10 companies selling free software. And authors can't go the subscription route.

>many publishers make money selling public domain books.

Nobody here is saying IA couldn't provide "public domain" books. The point is they shouldn't be giving out the labour of authors for free, just like you won't like if people took out your labour for free.

I see you don't provide evidence, only anecdotes. If you want to start looking for evidence, let me know and I can suggest some ways to look for relevant studies. Here's one: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/content/study-estimating-displac...

"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"

-Alternatively attributed (in one form or another) to Edmund Burke, George Santayana, and Sir Winston Churchill, and possibly your high school history teacher, as well!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationis...

Also, if you're criticizing or downvoting this (which I am completely OK with, BTW!), you're equally-and-oppositely criticizing and downvoting all of the links above.

I see myself only as a messenger... a simple "knowlege-mover"... I only move knowledge from point A (the links above) to point B (Hacker News)...

That, and I see myself as simple, humble student of history...

OK, now that that's said, you may proceed to downvote and criticize to your heart's content! <g>

In fact, I'd be glad if you did!:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

The Internet Archive is worth at least 1,000 Googles -- because of the History it provides... it's the closest thing to a record of our Civilization (through the years that it was active) that we have at this point in time.

Destroy History, and you destroy Civilization itself...

Disagreeing with you or your post is not disagreeing with the content of those links. Neither is critizising you transitive.

Giving more context and explaining your points besides name-dropping would be helpful. I get the impression, that your comment, disregarding complaints about possible downvotes, could be reduced to:

"censorship"

The IA is good, but the decision they made is very bad and has put their entire operation at risk.

Their leadership clearly both cares about archiving the web and also for advocating an expansionist view of content distribution (that in an emergency, any private organization has the right to distribute whatever content they want however they want to without regard for the right holders of the content?).

That's fine for them to hold both views but both roles are now at risk. It's a very sad and completely avoidable situation and I hope that the IA will course correct and avoid disaster.

A lot of the comments claim that publishers could collect $150k per work in statutory damages. However, that usually only works if the book was registered timely with the USCO. I don't know the rate among book authors, but most photographers don't register, so they don't qualify.

If the IA was clever to only choose books without registration, then the maximum they can be trialed for is the financial damages that publishers can prove. Given that everyone is trying to save money nowadays, it's very hard to convincingly argue that everyone would have bought the book if there had been a waiting list for renting it.

I also see the possibility that the IA is just trolling publishers. Maybe they did keep track of the numbers internally and never lent out to more people than they had licenses available through their partners. In that case, the publishers would incur large legal costs only to later be told by the court that nothing illegal had happened.

EDIT: There's also the claim by the IA that the average user only looks at the book for 30 minutes. That, in turn, would mean that what the publishers call "borrowing" here is more akin to me browsing an in-person library without actually checking out anything. So there's a good chance that 2-3 copies of each book are enough to make it difficult to prove this illegal, meaning maybe this is clever trolling after all.

https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-l...

The lawsuit is about 127 books which have a copyright registration, listed in the attachment: https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us...

The publishers have already proposed an alternative to statutory damages:

> Alternatively, ordering Internet Archive to render a full and complete accounting to Plaintiffs of Internet Archive’s profits, gains, advantages, or the value of business opportunities received from the foregoing acts of infringement of the Works and entering judgment for Plaintiffs against Internet Archive for all damages suffered by Plaintiffs and for any profits or gain by Internet Archive attributable to the infringements alleged above of Plaintiffs’ copyrights in amounts to be determined at trial;

https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us...

This would probably be a very long discovery process, like ACS and Elsevier vs. ResearchGate: https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643

Agree, this can potentially take a long time and a lot of money to go to court. That's why I am considering the possibility that the Internet Archive is effectively trolling them by doing everything legally but talking about it in a way that upsets publishers.

BTW, thank you for the link to the attachment. Some books, like RE0000172597 The Magician's Nephew will likely be too old for statutory damages. Others, like TX0005757057 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Leadership Fable were not registered timely and will likely be blocked from statutory damages due to that. But TX0008865827 The Man Who Solved the Market for example is registered timely, so that one would qualify for statutory damages, if they can prove that this book was willfully infringed.

But the last one - i.e. the only one in my 3 examples that could get statutory damages - looks like it was uploaded by a contributor and the preview page was only viewed a mere 621 times... So that could be a DMCA safe harbor defense, that IA simply didn't notice before that this unpopular contributor-uploaded book wasn't legal.

https://archive.org/details/manwhosolvedmark0000zuck/

BTW, it looks like the IA has now disabled the group pages for suing publishers, which might gently nudge viewers towards other books, potentially driving sales away to their competition.

622 times is on the high end! The average is less than 50 and the median I'd guess less than 10. But that scan was uploaded by the Internet Archive itself, only the physical book was donated by a prominent Internet Archive employee. I wonder if the publishers selected it out of spite for him, or even to keep the door open to including him personally in the suit (that would be nasty).

Why do you say C. S. Lewis is too old for statutory damages? Do you think the Internet Archive can claim it looked like it could be in the "last 20 years" phase (<https://archive.org/details/last20>)? I don't know... The publishers will probably claim the Internet Archive should know better, but at the same time they claim it doesn't understand a thing about copyright:

> IA erroneously decided that they were public domain works based on elementary misunderstandings of copyright law.

As for harming sales of books by making those publishers less visible, it will be interesting to see, but it's hard to make predictions. Just to be sure, publishers in their complaint write that IA's lending both increases and decreases sales at the same time:

> the traffic that IA drives to Better World Books [by having copies of the books] results in more book sales

but:

> IA competes directly with Publishers’ works in all formats (including, without limitation, print and digital) and market segments (including, without limitation, commercial, library, and school).

Indeed the complaint is mostly focused on purely hypothetical damages based on speculative predictions like:

> Consumers begin to view works as cheap and become increasingly unappreciative of what it takes to produce them and unwilling to pay fair value for them.

The problem with all these arguments is that they would apply to libraries lending physical books as well, if they were not established yet. Kyle Courtney makes this point: https://kylecourtney.com/2020/05/18/libraries-do-not-need-pe...

What can users do to help the Internet Archive in its time of need?

Donate please!

Done. Some quid that I could have spent in a book by Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley or Penguin Random House went instead to the Internet Archive, and I'll be doing the same every time I plan to buy a book by the above publishers, which I have just put in my do-not-buy-from list.

Clarification: not that their reasons were unsound, they're perfectly understandable, but going straight with a lawsuit without other attempts to solve the problem equals to bullying, and I'm not supporting it with my wallet.

They did first try asking the IA to stop unlimited lending, so they did not go straight to a lawsuit.

And we need to form an IA backup. Some org that has all of the (non-book) data so if IA goes down, the important content is still available.

Concerning as they seem to have been foolhardy.

I'm a donor and am now torn between donating more so they can get through it or cutting donations as it's all going to get passed to the publishers (given what appears their legitimate concern with IA's behaviour on this)

What's the best approach?

Donate as usual: the money doesn't stay on the Internet Archive's bank account for long, it won't go to publishers. You can donate more later if the Internet Archive asks for donations specifically for the lawsuit, and at any rate after the lawsuit to accelerate operations (whether they win or lose).

in a society with digital technology the publishers are basically rent seekers. aggregators will end up replacing them.

a business model for aggregators other than advertisement is needed.

Publishers are rent seekers and software companies are not? Microsoft selling windows and office is ok but publishers making money is not?

Sure, Microsoft is even worse.

> Perhaps the most successful global monopoly is Microsoft, which has succeeded in gaining global market power not only in PC operating systems but in key applications such as browsers. [...] Microsoft's monopoly power leads not only to higher prices but to less innovation. [...] The failure to develop a global approach to global cartels and monopolies is yet another instance of economic globalization outpacing political globalization.

Joseph Stiglitz, Making globalization work (2006), §7.2.2

https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Stiglitz&o...

That's 14 years ago. The few monopolies they have left involve providing services that come with their software.

Microsoft actually makes something in crude terms. Software companies create value with the product they build. The IP is the product.

Publishers take someone’s work in crude terms. They might build a bit on top of it (proofread, format, etc) and then put it on a medium for distribution. Medium is technically the product here.

To me a better comparison would be a company writing the windows installation to a CD and then selling = publisher.

I could be wrong so am very open to hear the reverse argument.

PS: recently a friend wanted to publish his own book and the publisher asked for him to pay the entire printing cost and a lot of other fees plus taking a % of sales. This is the closest I got to interact with the industry and was a bit shocked and also understanding that they can’t find everyone but still... came to be as a bit greedy

Microsoft just charges you for math. Historically speaking what they make are contracts with hardware manufacturers and lawsuits over patents on that math.

Mainstream publishers lend authors money to write books as advances, edit their writing (don't knock editing until you see the difference a good editor can make to your writing), produce and distribute the resulting work across media and platforms (don't knock book layout until you've tried to do it), promote the books, manage book-keeping on the resulting revenue, and various other tasks that I've forgotten about.

Your friend was targeted by a vanity press. Vanity presses don't do any of that. As you saw, they just gouge you to exploit your desire to see your name on a book. So they are not a good model for actual mainstream publishing houses.

(None of this has anything to do with my support for the Internet Archive.)

> Microsoft actually makes something in crude terms. Software companies create value with the product they build. The IP is the product.

Software companies create and sell products out of the labour of software developers. Publishing companies create and sell products out of the labour of book authors. Both are tangible products. Windows is no better stream of bytes than Harry Potter. The IP is the product for "Harry Potter" also.

Also, you are trying to convey as if authors have no harm in books being distributed for free. They receive royalty from book sales. Giving their books for free is like saying a FU to them. I doubt any software developer is going to work for free, so why expect the same from authors.

They have to sell enough to cover the advance before they get royalties. Most authors never get there. "Piracy" is not the reason.

I am an author and I support the IA in this decision.

Whilst I agree with their archival mission for the internet, I find it abhorrent that THEY are charging people to access other people's books (and not paying the copyright holder anything).

Take a look at the screenshots at page 25 of the complaint filed before the court.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit-interne...

The Authors' Guild said that the Internet Archive said:

"has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author."

and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) said:

"It is the height of hypocrisy that the Internet Archive is choosing this moment - when lives, livelihoods and the economy are all in jeopardy - to make a cynical play to undermine copyright, and all the scientific, creative, and economic opportunity that it supports."

Who is 'they'?

We still don't understand digital ownership and the copyright laws are lagging far behind against the consumers.

Before Internet, once you created something, the only way for someone to steal your "work" was to steal/copy an actual thing. In the digital age, everything is just ones and zeros. Law makers are clueless to what awaits us.

That's arguably backwards. See Breyer's article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs" [1], where he made the argument in 1970 that because copying was relatively slow and expensive, and most works made most of the money in a limited window after release, there really wasn't much need for long term copyright protection. By the time copiers could make and distribute copies there wouldn't be enough of the market left for them to get back their costs.

As copying technology becomes cheaper and faster the case for copyright gets stronger, at least if we are going to stick with the approach we currently use. That approach is based on the idea that a free market is an optimal way to determine the allocation of resources and we should use it whenever we can.

The mathematical economists can actually prove that is true in markets for goods that have certain properties. Copyright law (and patent law) artificially imbue certain intellectual works with those properties.

There are, of course, other systems we could use. One approach would be to treat these works as a public good. Have some tax funded government agency give out grants to authors and film makers and so on to make new works, and their output is public domain.

Some problems with that approach include determining the budget, and determining what works get funded. It's hard to see either of those not getting politicized out the wazoo.

Another possibility is similar, except you give out the grants after works are created. An author creates something, releases it to the public domain, and the agency determines how many people are actually reading/viewing/etc the work. Then pay the creator based on that.

Another approach is similar, but without taxes. Creators can be funded by charitable foundations, or by directly soliciting donations from the public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright

The argument that this book is making (albeit not intentionally) is that copyright gets more and more expensive over time. As copying becomes easier you need more and more intrusive regulations with increasingly draconian punishments to achieve the same effect.

This is not an argument in favor of stronger copyrights; it is an argument that copyright is the wrong approach. It doesn't scale. There was a time where it was irrelevant because copying was too difficult to permit mass distribution. Once copying started to become easier it "worked" for a while, because copying still required significant effort and specialized equipment. It pretty much stopped working altogether—i.e., even imperfect enforcement costs society far more than it gains by subsidizing the creation of new creative works—once the effort became trivial and the equipment ubiquitous. It's long past time to let it go.

> That approach is based on the idea that a free market is an optimal way to determine the allocation of resources and we should use it whenever we can.

While "applying the free market to creative works" is a common justification for copyright, in fact the opposite is true. Instead of allowing the free market to operate in the labor of creating new works and the distribution of new and existing works we artificially restrict distribution to subsidize labor. Both areas suffer from misallocation of resources as a result. We waste huge amounts of labor creating minor variations on existing themes and (inefficiently) distributing them when what we already had would have been perfectly adequate if only we were allowed to distribute it freely.

The part of copyright that trends the other way as copying gets cheaper and more trivial for anyone to do is the statutory damages component. A fallback of $150,000 per work as an alternative to expensive and lengthy discovery of actual damages makes sense in a world where your "threat model" is basically a large-scale commercial copying operation, but less so in a world of millions of users glibly making one-off infringements at the click of a mouse. The $150,000 figure is a maximum, and requires a finding of "willful" infringement, but even the lower boundary of $750 per work maps poorly to the current landscape. (You may recall waves of outrage over high demand letters, lawsuits and settlements against individual internet users in the days when the record labels were aggressively suing over "file-sharing," and those figures pretty much all arose from the statutory damages provisions of the copyright law.)

The concept of statutory damages still makes sense, perhaps even moreso now given the difficulties in calculating damages, but the range of amounts is all out of whack, as is the hinging of enhanced on "willfullness" rather than some more relevant factor.

That's a really interesting topic. I wish there was more... realistic discussion about those things.

I remember 10 years ago, when the pirate party was hyping up, there were a few propositions of basically a tax based system: remove copyright, but add a 10€ entertainment tax. It felt unrealistic to me to replace a multi billion dollar industry with 80million/year. Digital objects might have nearly zero reproduction cost, but producing the art still costs money. Splitting the cost of a single 320$mio movie on 8bil people, still costs everyone 4cents.

In a similar veine the limitations for artists to monetize their money and rely on others: artist could market directly to consumers instead of having advertisers! But that would mostly select for people that are good at advertising themselves, what morphed to influencers.

A movie doesn't have to cost $320M - by way of example, the Blender Institute's freely available movies cost far less than that to make. Movie making is a "multi-billion dollar industry" only because of the incredible amount of sheer waste that's involved in that pursuit.

While I believe there is quite a lot of waste, I still think that such a change would have a huge impact on movie making and other things.

I don't know enough about the Blender movies and the cost involved, so I have to adress it in a "strawman" like way by comparing it to open software: Having volunteers working on it for free greatly reduces cost, but diminishes that those often have jobs in the related industry, indirectly funding the project and helping the peoples skills. Switching to free software for everyone (forbidding advertisements and data collection for further income of course!) on a small tax scheme would very likely have a devastating consequence medium term for open source software as well.

But all of this is just speculation by me.

I really like what IA does, but I can't see a justification under copyright law that would allow them to have unlimited checkouts of the same book. They'd be well advised to drop the policy and hope the limited time they offered this, and their status as a non-profit, is enough to get those who filed the suits to drop them.

It is a bummer, but they messed up.

Is it possible they were under financial duress anyway and were looking for attention grabbing move to garner support?

I don't understand it, and I find it hard to believe that their legal counsel green lighted it.

Speaking of the Internet Archive, what happened to the "MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video]"[1]?

That link was HN front page[2] material less than a month ago, and the link never worked for me.

[1] https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-colle...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867

There was a takedown request shortly after it was posted. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200511/11291844477/copyr...

MTV decided they wanted to remain historically irrelevant and sent a takedown notice.

Anyone remember when MTV was "Music Television"?

Yah, me neither.

The dataloss would be over 18 petabytes. Why not stop lending? Could one claim Force majeure? Ia is a library.

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that IA allowed authors to remove their books from the national emergency library. This doesn’t make publishers happy because they can’t make the decision for their authors.

They're just going to make everyone use libgen which won't end piracy.

Is there a backup on the IA? If this lawsuit takes down IA, will the wayback machine content simply be lost forever?

Where can people donate to their legal defense fund?

For now there's always https://archive.org/donate/

they’re just a few months ahead of themselves on the collapse of the legal system

Is there a way to mirror IA?

Yes-ish: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive

50 petabytes as of 2014, yikes.

50k people each donating 1TB in a loss-resistent schema could do it. Miiight? be achievable?

Yeah, something like ArchiveTeam's Warrior virtual machine [1], but instead of connecting to a JSON tracker to coordinate and download content for archival, it connected to the Internet Archive's bittorrent trackers [2] and consumed then seeded the least available items constrained by the disk space available to the virtual machine. As more virtual machines are launched, item coverage increases automatically.

This doesn't take into consideration data the Internet Archive isn't providing as a torrent, such as the Wayback Machine archive or OpenLibrary. OpenLibrary can be replaced by Library Genesis [3], but I am unaware of any replacement for Wayback.

EDIT: I'd like to see a rack of Archive storage nodes in every museum or other cultural center in the world, all contributing some space, power, and connectivity to distribute digital cultural archives globally.

[1] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr...

[2] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004715251-Arch...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

That’s OK. Archive has been deleting all kinds of content because it ruffles their Bay Area feathers. It’s clear that projects like this aren’t ready for the long haul and once you let activists become curators it’s all over.

They didn't delete it, they hid it. It still exists and will probably be made public again when it becomes historically significant

What content have they been deleting or hiding?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com