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Comment by pyk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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