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