Hacker News Reader

Comment by theferalrobot | Hacker News Reader

> In total, 650 million books were locked up just in public libraries alone. Because of that, we felt we could, and should, and needed to make the digitized versions of those books available to students

Libraries also have movies and music... should they have put those out for free too? I love wayback machine but I’m not sure I follow the logic on this one. I’m no legal expert but that seems like pretty iffy reasoning.

View on HN

Using controlled digital lending, yes. Why not? The libraries hold licenses to lend this media in physical format but were temporarily shifting to lending using controlled digital lending.

They didn't just give away unencrypted copies to be pirated. They did what libraries do, lend media.

They lent unlimited copies. The limit is very very key to being covered under CDL.

Have you ever borrowed a digital book? It's for a limited period of time usually a couple weeks, in an app of some sort. That's what they did, that's CDL.

They temporarily removed waitlists which did allow more people to borrow a title than they had licenses, as physical libraries closed and as schools tried to get online. It was an unprecedented time. They had the support of major libraries. They stopped early when they got sued.

The lawsuit should be dropped.

These two statements contradict:

>It's for a limited period of time usually a couple weeks, in an app of some sort. That's what they did, that's CDL.

>They temporarily removed waitlists which did allow more people to borrow a title than they had licenses

That is not CDL, by definition (lending out more copies than they had licenses). Official source, March 30th: http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds...

Relevant quote: >And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.

So it’s just to create artificial scarcity, this brings back the problem of piracy, what’s the difference between lending 100 copies vs 1M? Or why they charge more to “buy” a digital copy of a movie vs “renting” it? The key problem here is that we’re trying to adapt old models to a totally different medium like trying to attach the horses to a car.

And the problem was that by rushing into that without thinking we might end up much worse for wear after a judge thinks that digital sharing in general is totally bogus. You can't just try doing something to see if it works and then magically assume that people with entrenched interests won't come after you.

The article itself appears to be claiming this is not true: every book they lent was endorsed by a backing library, such that the physical book was guaranteed to be sitting in the stacks, not lent to anyone, whenever the digital copy of the book was in circulation.

This justification appears to have happened after the fact - As far as I can tell the endorsing library program postdates the National Emergency Library. They’ve never mentioned the endorsing library program in connection with the NEL until very recently that I can see.

Additionally, they explicitly waived all waitlists when they launched the program, and spoke about is as if controlled lending had been temporarily abandoned (whereas now they’re saying it was still CDL, just with a larger source pool). As far as I can tell, this is all a post-hoc attempt to make the whole affair more legal.

That could very well be true, I'm simply pointing out that OP appears to be stating as fact something that the article denies.

> Additionally, they explicitly waived all waitlists when they launched the program, and spoke about is as if controlled lending had been temporarily abandoned (whereas now they’re saying it was still CDL, just with a larger source pool). As far as I can tell, this is all a post-hoc attempt to make the whole affair more legal.

Well, obviously a post-hoc justification wouldn't make it legal. But on the other hand, if what they did was legal all along, the fact that they misleadingly described it at the outset in a way that made it sound illegal presumably wouldn't make it illegal.

It's not 100% clear to me what the justification is supposed to be. The article clearly seems to be implying that their lending was 1:1 with physical copies. If that's false, then obviously making this statement is not going to help their legal case, because the truth of it will be revealed in the course of the lawsuit. If it's true, then what was novel about their approach as discussed in the press release back in March? My best guess is that it has something to do with the physical libraries all being closed - that this enables more 1:1 lending because of the "650 million" books locked up, even if not each individual book was scanned separately. If that's not what they're claiming, I'm not sure what the point is.

Official source, March 30th:

http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds...

Relevant quote:

>And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.

I hate the concept of intellectual property as much as anyone but this was obviously illegal from the get-go. They lent out copies of books they didn't possess. Now they've put the entire legally-grey concept of copying physical books for digital lending in the judicial cross-hairs.

I think the idea is: the library has 5 physical copies. IA loans 5 digital copies while the physical ones are locked up.

The number of library copies of the work in circulation is net zero.

Except they didn’t limit it to 5 (in your example).

HN: Pirating a movie isn’t the same as stealing it

HN now: Digital lending should be treated the same as physical lending

Both can be correct at the same time. Pirating a movie is copyright infringement, not stealing. Digital lending is currently legally gray-zone, but the pragmatic end-game for lenders is to make it so a physical book can be digitally lent so long as the physical book is unused during the lending period. This is because it can easily be shown that the publisher doesn't incur damages, since the same amount of books are on the market at any given time.

Digital lending is widely established and supported by publishers generally. It's not especially new at this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverDrive,_Inc.#Libraries_and_...

Now I'm waiting for a Netflix of lending, where I declare what movies I physically own, and can lend them out for credits to watch other movies. The middle man distributes a digital copy. You agree to legal responsible for any movies they distribute, that you claimed you physically owned but don't.

I believe that old movie-rental-stores needed more of a license than just owning the movies in order to rent them out for money.

In the UK, copyright law does not allow your Holme bought vhs/dvd/etc to be used for public viewing in places like oil rigs and schools, nor lending for money. I don’t recall about lending for free.

Your local blockbuster had very different (In a legal sense) videos than your local Tesco - they cost more to buy.

This doesn’t apply to books.

Aero. Didn't work out so well.

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

> This is because it can easily be shown that the publisher doesn't incur damages, since the same amount of books are on the market at any given time.

This strikes me as an approximation. If, in digital lending, the licence can change-hands instantly and across any physical distance, then it's not analogous to physical lending. Two people might be able to 'time share' a single licence, in a way that wouldn't be possible with a physical book.

HN: privacy is absolutely critical

Also HN: overwhelming support for one of the world's largest privacy violators, the Internet Archive, which can never comply with GDPR or any other stringent privacy laws under any circumstances because they have no idea what's in their archive and they intentionally make it difficult to remove privacy violating content from it (which they hoovered up without permission and now you can't even stop them from doing it because they ignore robots.txt)

Yay for massive, epic scale privacy violations and being an abusive parasite that intentionally doesn't follow proper site directives!

Even if IA survives this debacle, they're going to get wiped out by privacy violation lawsuits in the coming decade. Their entire archive will have to be dumped, or combed line by line for privacy violating content (at extraordinary cost).

Libraries lend movies, too. I'm not sure where that fits into your metaphor.

Libraries lend physical copies of movies just like they lend physical copies of books

E-lending is increasingly a thing, actually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com