Hacker News Reader

Comment by aahhahahaaa | Hacker News Reader

It's in their best interest to settle in a capitulating way that will hurt them but not kill them. This might have to include a public apology that admits they're in the wrong because publishers can be petty about this type of thing.

It doesn't seem like they're willing to do that, and while I agree with their viewpoint and the troubling future with licensing... it may be the hill they die on and I'm not sure it's worth the trade off in this specific case. IMO the Internet Archive is incredibly valuable to humanity.

I admire them for taking the stance, but worry about their future. Hopefully they're playing tough publicly and aren't as willing to die by the sword in private.

View on HN

I'm astonished and dismayed by all the comments calling for capitulation. It's very clear that the publishers in this case are bullies, plain and simple. You don't kneel to bullies if you want them to stop, you fight back. Not to do so leads to tyranny and feudalism, where the whims of the large become the law.

I think this does not mesh well with their mission.

They are the Internet Archive, the archive of freely (in the past) available stuff that can't be found anywhere else, in most cases. This is much more fragile than old books which likely exists in thousands of copies anyway.

I do not admire their stance, and am unhappy that they are recklessly jeopardizing their unique thing to make a case where they have a very big chance to lose, without any circumstances forcing them to do so.

This is not how you serve as a warden of a valuable archive. (I know, I know, it's their right and their choice.)

> The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."

First sentence of the Wikipedia article.

And how will they achieve that mission when someone makes the following edit:

> The Internet Archive was an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."

They certainly won't achieve their mission by giving up on it because someone didn't like it.

SciHub and Library Genesis still seem to be doing well enough. (To be clear, I don't think IA is even remotely comparable. I'm just directly responding to what you said.)

I understand you, and vehemently disagree.

There is a real and serious risk of having ALL published material eventually fall under "licensed use" instead of ownership.

We're rapidly tipping towards a society where you pay rent to license everything, and own nothing.

In the short term, I find this model abusive. In the long I think it guarantees we will have a competitive disadvantage against countries that don't enforce this style of licensing.

IA does NOT own the books. IA is only referencing that they own some of the books to distract readers. The vast majority of books IA is “lending” come from the purported “endorsement” from 130 libraries. Yet there is no explanation if the endorsement means a general “Hey we love IA” or “a contractual relationship that allows IA to lend out copyrighted works licensed by the endorsing library”

That was only during the Emergency event, when the libraries were closed, and which they already ended.

Every book IA lent, they physically owned at least one copy of. Suspension of waitlists meant that they were lending more copies than they owned; copies physically held by partner libraries.

You'll own the things you create.

You make a reasonable point, so let's accept it for the sake of this discussion. Shouldn't the response then be to update copyright law, taking into account modern trends in technology and society? Surely the answer can't be to let one private organisation decide it's above the law and infringe with impunity.

Sometimes the path to legalization of something requires ongoing and widespread illegality before the question will even be considered.

That's not a strong argument, IMHO, since it would similarly condone any other law-breaking activity where the perpetrator disagrees with the law. It's not as if copyright wasn't controversial before or the IA's actions here have any realistic prospect of moving the needle.

If you're talking about civil disobedience, that's a different matter, but one of the key things about effective civil disobedience is that large numbers of people have to break the law and accept the penalty in order to overwhelm the system and thus show that the law does not have popular support.

You don't get to large numbers of people disregarding the law before first having a few.

I suspect you're glossing over the accept the penalty part of my previous comment, which is quite important.

Besides that, how many other Internet Archives do you think will follow the one we've been discussing by also flagrantly violating both the letter and the spirit of copyright law?

Let's go ahead and put to rest this theory that they're going to cease to exist. They don't have enough resources to be destroyed.

Suppose the naysayers are right and they're going to go bankrupt. What happens in bankruptcy? They sell their assets for fair market value.

To a new non-profit that uses them for the same purpose.

All that requires is that they raise an amount of money similar to what they ordinarily have to raise to continue operating regardless. They do, after all, replace all of their computers with newer ones from time to time already.

Right. And furthermore, if they could be taken down, that's a bug, and it ought to be fixed. As I understand it, they're already somewhat decentralized, and it wouldn't be a huge stretch to become fully decentralized.

> What happens in bankruptcy? They sell their assets for fair market value.

Maybe.

The other thing that could happen is that their assets get valued by some 3rd party and the publishers own IA's assets as part of the settlement (who presumably destroy them).

Right but we're operating in the reality of the American court system. Idealistically I agree with you, but it's not pragmatic — the law is very obviously in the publisher's favor (they whimmed it to their side years ago).

At the end of the day I think this will be a battle over whether or not the Internet Archive can continue to exist... and it's incredibly important for them to live to fight another day.

> I'm astonished and dismayed by all the comments calling for capitulation. It's very clear that the publishers in this case are bullies, plain and simple.

That's not clear to me at all.

Here are IA's words:

"as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. ... During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist"[1]

That's pretty open and flagrant copyright violation, even if you believe that controlled digital lending is legal, which isn't clear. Piracy isn't a criminal offense - it's a tort. The way to halt and recover from the damages of a tort is to file suit.

___

1. https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...

You don't kneel to bullies if you want them to stop, you fight back

If you get a speeding ticket on a road where you believe the speed limit is unreasonably low, do you "fight" with the cop at the side of the road, or with the transportation department in a meeting room at city hall?

They're doing the former, which just wastes everybody's time and money.

I've read elsewhere, via HN, that speed limits are generally set to the 85th percentile of traffic speeds. So in order for a speed limit to change, you probably need to show that more than 15% of drivers are speeding. You might do that by showing that this stretch of road is generating a disproportionate number of tickets.

You need a critical mass to be "on the wrong side". That's how marijuana was legalized, for example. Someone has to be the seed crystal around which the critical mass can grow.

Here is my comment on the IA blog post, suggesting other ways IA could respond ranging from expanding their lending program for format-shifted physical books to changing the laws about copyright duration and taxation: http://blog.archive.org/2020/07/22/libraries-have-been-bring...

That said, sometimes bullies can be turned to buddies through understanding and changing your reactions (see Izzy Kalman) -- but not always. So no simple answers.

If the IA as a specific legal entity if going out of business from this, then what's next for the people and resources involved? As in, how can we archive the archive? Or how can the ideas spread in new ways?

I did not post this there, but as another idea beyond books, the IA could also expand its programs in other ways. For example, as an idea I submitted years ago to a Knight News Challenge on the future of libraries, public libraries could be used (via to-be-written browser plugins or proxies) to archive their local resident's public social media posts and public blog posts and comments on blogs. This archiving would happen as such comments were and submitted to social media services. The people making the posts would be granting permission to their local libraries to archive and republish the content. This could create a freely-accessible and archived public web as essentially a shadow of these social media services. The IA could coordinate that.

IA is being "bullied" under the letter - and likely spirit - of the law. They are the ones that did not do their due diligence and put themselves at risk. The publishers are no saints, but IA opened themselves up to this kind of legal liability.

I think it would be pretty hard to argue that the spirit of the law demands the unprivileged be barred from accessing library books during a global pandemic.

It would be very easy to argue, unfortunately. Neither our legal system nor our political system favor the unprivileged in general, so why should the laws they produce and enforce?

Any way to refocus on the bully publishers? Boycott these folks (Hachette, Harpercollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House) so they respect the public service IA is giving to millions of people - beyond just the content in question. Actions can speak wonders.

I think it's hard because the bullying has been done and the law is already in their favor. This isn't a grey area case of "is it legal or not" it's a case where the IA broke the already established rules. They're fighting upstream.

Despite its importance I don't think the Internet Archive is a common household name on the level of Wikipedia and I don't think any sort of boycott would have the legs (I would love to be wrong about this).

Should you also bully self-published authors? With knowledge of how hard it is to become a full time author already.

It seems wrong to me to give person hood to corporations. I think letting John Smith do what ever he desires is fine. Letting some entity get legal protection in the form of limited liability should remove a large number of liberties. In other words bullying a company to me is different than bullying a person, but that's some what orthogonal to my other point.

Though I think in this context by bully the OP probably meant something like boycott.

I bought every Cory Doctorow novel through his publisher Tor because he gives them away for free and I enjoyed them. Tor have been acting like bastards to libraries. I now boycott Tor, so I am not buying his books, and I suppose that means I'm bullying the author.

Have any self-published authors complained about their book's presence on IA? Has anyone shown (or seems likely to show) material harm? AFAIK IA has legal, physical copies which they scan for digital lending. If that is not the case, and they will serve any random ebook, I would like to know because it would definitely shift my opinion.

They will indeed serve any random ebook. However, it comes encumbered by DRM (thus controlled digital lending) and they "own" an instance for each copy they lend at any given time (hence the waitlists they refer to).

Note that many other libraries across the nation engage in exactly the same practice. Of course the legal problem is that digital goods are "licensed" instead of "owned" ...

So if I uploaded a pirated copy of an ebook for which they do not own a physical copy, they would let people read it? That's what I mean by "any random ebook".

In the long term if they accept all kinds of trade offs I am afraid that they will become less and less relevant, and that's why they are taking a stance here.

Yeah like any legal battle it's a lot of posturing and back-and-fourth. It's just anxiety producing to not see what their survival plan is (and of course it wouldn't really benefit them to share that publicly!).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com