That's not at all self-evident, indeed quite likely false.
We had a similar discussion here a few times and content/program creators have said they made more money when their product was also available free - people tried it and bought it.
That probably only works for content creators who's stuff is good - publishers still want to sell stuff that's not good but just is packaged as if it were.
People who want free literature will find it, regardless of whether publishers consent.
As a sidenote, game publishers appear to be using a model of giving away an older game when a sequel is due out - it a similar game from the same company. Naturally one might think that this would eat in to potential profits, but I'm assuming they get more users for the new game, or at least profit more overall this way.
There's a difference between making your work free when most work is non-free and making most work free. When things are generally pay-walled, free content can get extra attention at the expense of paid content. When the expectation is that things are free, well, there isn't any more total attention to go around, so all that changes is that content creators stop being able to charge for their work.
More generally, positional goods exist, so you cannot reliably extrapolate from individual interest to group policy goals. When people want a bigger boat than their neighbors, you cannot subsidize boat-buying until everyone has the best boat on the block.
IA didn't release copyrighted books for free; at the very least this depends on your definition of "release" and personally after checking out a book I find that I no longer have access after ~2 weeks. This kind of timeline is much more like a library than a bookstore.
I think any smart author who cares about their craft, and knowledge in general, would much rather their publishing representative find a way to moderate and proactively track this new approach than turn the whole thing into a war, making a library--of all things--into the enemy.
Publishers repeatedly asked the IA to stop obviously breaking the law before filing the lawsuit, and were ignored.
IA now has a lot of social leverage thanks to these publishers being about as creative and flexible as a concrete patio.
Its right there in the article.
>In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists
Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
Last I checked, there was, I think, 3 public libraries in California that allowed you to get a library card without being present. One of them required verification in some other method (fax? I can't remember), the other two had a second level card that didn't give access to ebooks or other library resources.
I'm not 100% sure that this was in place before COVID-19, but I think it was.
To check out physical books, you have to visit a library in person and upgrade the virtual library card to a physical library card.
NYPL, for instance, suspended address verification for issuing new e-library cards, with the caveat that it was restricted to borrowing ebooks.
You lot realise IP law is supposed to encourage innovation for the good of society right?
Not stifle and opress it.
>Its right there in the article.
The grandparent isn't questioning the motivation for breaking the law, they are asking why the organization would possibly think it's a good idea given the likely consequences.
Q: "Why do you rob banks?" A: "Because that's where the money is."
Q: "Why did you violate that segregation law?"
A: "Because it's immoral and bad for society."
But really that's besides the point. If someone wants to argue the IA should gamble the entire organization on this issue, they should explain why rather than pretending its obvious and "right there in the article".
And they did it in the most blatantly illegal way possible, with a press release that removed any doubt as to whether the infringement was willful. Brilliant!
IA could have, for instance, reached out to local libraries to see if IA could "use" their physical copies for proxies of the digital ones IA was loaning. This would likely have been illegal, but far more palatable, justifiable, and importantly not willful infringement.
And it was a gesture that was not theirs to make. Did they ever consider just asking the publishers for permission? They might actually have gotten it. Companies were quite eager to do things to show they were trying to help back in March and April. But I've looked and found nothing saying they asked, so I'm guessing they didn't. Probably because they thought asking would look bad if they were told "no" and did it anyway.
We are a society of laws passed by representatives, not formed in one's mind on the spot.
But there are things in that response to distinguish IA actions and motives from other bête noires of Copyright law (The Pirate Bay, etc.) That would give IA and their supporters something to work with; intents, outcomes, and the limited nature of IA NEL would (hopefully) harness publishers opportunism in the view of the law.
[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/laws/hearings/Sen-Udall-Response-N...
And they will ask "why did you not put forward a good faith effort to work with publishers?"
Then they will ask "why did you not reach out to any legislators or executives to seek an exemption?"
And IA will have no answer other than "because we are a law unto ourselves".
In this country, laws have a interesting way to bend during national crises. I'll keep my fingers cross for that in this case.
The courts will understand this to effectively be "we are a law unto ourselves". Those determinations are properly made by the mayor, governor, president, or legislative body-- not some random .org.
Whatever special role you or I think it plays in the world has zero bearing on the outcome of this case.
As I said, we'll have to wait and see. I do look forward to it. In the mean time these are the tiny actions I'll be taking in support of IA (1) I double my donations to the IA and match donations of any friends and acquaintances, (2) the four conglomerate publishers are boycotted until further notice.
And remember, the Internet always finds a way, if its short history has taught us anything.
The Archive could have eliminated the two-week loan period by distributing the books without DRM.
There's a long list of national and even worldwide problems I could solve, if only I was allowed to use other people's resources without their permission and was not required to compensate them in any way for that use.
I want to tackle all of those, but they would not get past the "ask a lawyer how much legal trouble it would be" stage, and so I do not actually do them.
Do you have any data on that?
Also note that the publishers' problem is not just the 3 months of waitlist suspension (supposed to offset the closure of physical libraries during the pandemic), but the practice of controlled digital lending of books scanned from physical copies (ie handing out a digital copy for each physical copy you've got sitting on your shelf) without additional royalty payments.
Except requiring the physical book (or single book digital equivalent) controls the pace. If a standard checkout is 2 weeks, and if the book is always checked out, it will still take 4 years to hit 100 lends. And a thousand lends? Close to 40 years.
Be careful to avoid reasoning from an axiom that the way things worked when you grew up was the correct way. It's a pernicious psychological bias we all suffer from.
You over-estimate the lifespan of physical books and the physical stress of lending. 25–40 times is a more likely lifespan for a physical book. With digital lending, there are actually specific contractual limits on the number of lends and the cost per lend which vary based on the publisher. And the average number of lends per library book is probably close to 1.
The actual issue is much more complicated.
Also it would a balance of what was free / what was purchased that would determine the net impact.
1. There actually is other material available from the author to buy. If there isn't, it's simply a loss. 2. If there is other material by the author, you have to assume the reader was not going to read any of the author's material without having access to the free book first. 2. If additional material exists, and the person would have never engaged with the authors work without a free "trial" of their work, less than 100% of people who access the free material will go on to buy additional material. Some because they are uninterested, some because they don't want to or can't purchase it for the same reason they couldn't purchase the original. In the former case, thats a net loss. In the latter, its a wash. 3. Even if there is additional material to buy, and even if the reader only becomes interested in the author's work through the free book, and even if the reader is inspired to go out and buy it after reading it, it only offsets the original lost revenue of the first, free book (assuming they are priced similarly). So its only if a reader is inspired to go out and buy at least 2 more works by the author that they would actually become a net positive for the publisher/author.
Clearly the number of people accessing the free material who would actually be a net positive for the author/publisher is quite small, and the free book in general would almost certainly be a net negative. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want, but at the end of the day, its still theft. People will argue that publishers are all rich and so we shouldn't care, but thats a different argument, and doesn't apply to the majority of authors who don't actually make that much money.
You can argue about the size of this group, but the counter argument would be that there is a valid fear that if it is normalized and allowed to continue, this group will grow larger and larger over time. You can argue by trying to compare this to libraries, but libraries still buy their copies of the book, and checking a book out from a library comes with restrictions that don't exist here. There really isn't a way to spin this where it doesn't result in some amount of lost royalties for the author.
There's plenty of totally reasonable hypotheses for why giving away content can be profitable OR unprofitable, and plenty of real-life examples of both as well. The fact is, with regards to this situation, we don't know, and this conversation shouldn't center around a problem that some people have only hypothesized exists.
Clearly, we should shut down all the other libraries, too.
We finally have the technology to protect knowledge and culture forever and instead we are trying to invent ways to artificially limit this that could result in important literary works being lost not not mention misused for censorship and suppressing of "unwanted" information.
Not in the US.
https://stevelaube.com/will-libraries-eventually-pay-authors...
In the UK/Ireland, "the author received about 10 cents (U.S.) per use, with a max of $8,500 (U.S.) per year" but "the copyright holder must be a citizen of that country to participate".