What were they expecting? How can they possibly expect to win this lawsuit? I hate copyright with all my soul but this is just stupid. You can't just decide to take the law into your own hand. This is just a waste of money and effort.
The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more.
It's about selecting for the common good over the extremely low-value proposition of helping rent-seekers preserve an infinite zero-effort stream of income.
TIA is one of the best things to emerge from tech, all thanks to the tireless and complete dedication of the founder: Brewster Kahle.
I don't know if they still do it, but pre-pandemic they offered tours of their HQ in San Francisco. It was really cool to meet the team and see their setup, and an amazing opportunity to meet Brewster and hear the conviction in his voice as he described his vision for The Internet Archive. It's a very special thing.. imagine if it didn't exist? I am feeling tears coming just considering such a possible reality.
Just look at the body of unelected officials that, as a whole, are hell-bent at dismantling precedents in the name of constitutionalism, allowing for states to pass inane laws restricting rights under the guise of morals.
There is cancer in our society and it begins with our swill laws that are selectively enforced, are never revisited, and likely do not reflect the will of the people, and ends with legislative incumbents that do not represent modern progressive values.
This can be taken as being positive about piracy or negative about libraries. I think the real question is not which way I mean it but why does the average user see one as positive and the other as a negative, thus causing the conflict when the two are linked by this statement.
The natural state of copyright is that it doesn't exist, it's only created because governments believe there is a benefit in enforcing it, be that benefit a greater production and distribution of works or more money in politicians pockets from lobbyists.
Implying that there is any legal copyright piracy is ridiculous as by it's definition the copyright does not extend to that area so there is no piracy. The closest you can come to the concept of legal piracy would be copyright privateering across legal jurisdictions.
In most countries around the world libraries pay a license for loaned out books, so not really.
I'm not suggesting they do that. I like the old buildings. But it's important to note that copyright holders are coming up with many new and innovative ways to help readers get books and authors get paid.
How much do you think you personally pay for libraries? 1 cent a year? Half a cent a year?
And it's not "many publishers support <a proprietary thing>", it's "libraries are obliged to have all books, and in many countries publishers are made by law to provide libraries with copies of their books".
> But it's important to note that copyright holders are coming up with many new and innovative ways to help readers get books and authors get paid.
None of those ways are innovative.
More on the order of $40/yr.
https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/pub...
Still three times less than a Kindle Unlimited subscription :)
Plus one can put their own content on Kindle, thereby taking lots of titles on trips or elsewhere.
I know I've taken advantage of getting software from the IA that is still commercially sold on places like gog.com, so while overall I regard the IA to be "morally in the right", there's little doubt to me personally there is a ton of content on there that shouldn't be.
The Internet Archive does a lot of good things, most clearly legal, others gray areas that I think should be legal. This stunt was different.
If the nation was founded today people would never build a single library and they would be deeded evil.
Requiring libraries to buy books is an evil practice. As a function of copyright you should have to donate a book for every 10 numbers sold. Libraries create readers who are necessary for writers/publishers.
That genuinely may be so, but "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.
Also, what you call "rent seeking" others would call "return on investment". I do think there is a grey area here, "fair use" being one example, but i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance.
There is no end to the greed. Fuck 'em.
It actually happens more often than you might think.
[1] https://www.rcfp.org/court-finds-right-jury-trial-copyright-...
Which they've largely already enjoyed many times over. I have precisely zero sympathy for the poor widdle publishing corporations.
/s
Your argument would make sense if developers got paid per run of their code, instead of only for new code they write.
If you think it would be nice to get paid per run, then you should have gone into mainframe programming, because that is (more or less) how it works (licensing fee based on how many units the code could process, which would go up if you upgraded the CPU). Moving away from that was one of the innovations of UNIX and PC style licensing.
It puts the extreme absurdity of modern copyright law in context. 20 years is extreme. The modern "standard" is the entire life of the author + 70 years on top. This is indefensible.
Contrast with publishers, where it's the other way around.
Without strong copyright laws, the choice you make is just as enforceable as the choice they make.
It doesn't matter how the output is licensed; I'm paid for the process of creating that output, not for the perpetual profiting over that finite output. That's the point you're missing.
That depends entirely on the level of support for the defense, and is precisely the only way unjust laws ever change.
> i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance
I don't think anyone's discounting anyone here: there's a big difference between discounting and challenging.
It may or may not succeed in courts, because our "justice" system is anything but. Even if it doesn't succeed in court, it's still a worthwhile stance and it may succeed in other ways. Especially if enough people who recognize where justice actually lies stand up to support those taking the risk to point it out.
The line between "rent seeking" and "return on investment" lies at the spot past which those who produced a work have been fairly compensated for their time and effort, past that, it's rent seeking. If you want a good metric, break the return down to an hourly wage for each participant in producing the work. Does it seem obscene? That's because it is.
Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps.
We live in different times. Holding on to artificial constraints for old-times business model nostalgia will look so quaint in a few decades.
Without it, why would anyone choose to view the movie with ads when they can just download it and watch it with no ads?
(Legally, since in this hypothetical, copyright doesn’t exist.)
Or are you just arguing for ad-supported viewing of content? Which is what currently exists for an enormous body of material. See, for example, YouTube.
I support a wide range of monetization strategies and access to content by the most amount of people.
The courts are the most efficient way to repeal something you don’t like. There are hundreds of legislators, you need teams of lobbyists to influence them, and there’s no guarantee that they will take up your issue in their agenda. Furthermore, if you want to change one thing, everything gets thrown on the table as being liable to change. You may win in one area but lose in a lot of others, and sometimes you will lose in non-obvious ways.
The judges don’t want to rock the boat as much as politicians do. If they make a decision that makes precedent, it will be very focused and very specific. But, if you want to take an issue up in the courts, you need to sue, or be sued. Courts are not hypothetical in the way that legislatures are.
I think fair use is a perfectly valid legal defense. Grey area is one way to put it, another way to put it is a legal area lacking precedent. If it were not for fair use, copyright law would violate your right to free speech. Fair use let’s you use copyrighted material for criticism, parody, and education. Covid created a situation where people’s access to works was restricted, with the only reason being legal limitations (copyright law). IA sought to educate people irrespective of the limitation. I don’t know how IAs legal team is planning to defend their client, but fair use would provide a defense. This case could end up with a precedent that says that under exceptional circumstances, the scope of what activities are covered under fair is expanded.
Wrong. Ultra-vires laws can be challenged after the fact that they were broken. If the law in itself was invalid, that is a valid legal defence.
Taking a copyright infringement case before one of the most textualist and conservative courts we have had in decades is not a good plan for people who want a right to whatever it is that the IA was doing read into the Constitution.
If you want access to these works, which you seem to be arguing for, then you are saying these works do have value.
I suspect you are just misusing the term.
I think what happened is the term "rent seeking" entered the zeitgeist, and a lot of people didn't bother to look it up but rather just tried to infer the meaning through context, and arrived at "somebody who rents things out" which can easily morph into "the software company that makes you have a subscription rather than just purchase it" or something like that.
People come by it honestly as for most people that's how they learn the words, and certainly the vast majority of human history language and meaning has been transmitted that way.
To be honest, I'm having a hard time getting upset over this lawsuit. As best I can tell, IA isn't getting sued over having scanned the books. They're not even getting sued over lending them out. Instead, they're getting sued over lending out more digital copies than the number of physical copies they had purchased.
The books would be no less well preserved if IA had not decided to do this. Access would have gone down, temporarily. The pandemic would have sucked that one little bit more (though honestly, a drop in the bucket for what the people most impacted were already experiencing). And... that's it. It really has no long-term ramifications, aside from whatever legal precedent it sets (if any).
I really like being able to write open source code in my day job, and I appreciate information freedom. But I don't think those principles apply here. I really do think this is just a straightforward case of an organization overstepping their bounds and getting slapped down for it.
OK, well enough.
But TIA then does something that clearly violates copyright. And the fig leaf that is "But COVID" really doesn't make a difference.
And, yes, copyright terms are too long etc. but I'd actually be willing to bet that most extra lending TIA did was for recent works.
The lack of legal foundation for CDL is not entirely an accident, however. First sale and similar copyright exhaustion doctrines are hard-fought and won rights of the reader. But these rights rely on the fact that no actual copying is taken place. When you interact with any copyrighted work using a computer, there is an almost gratuitous amount of copying going on. If you so much as cough on the work, you are breaching copyright. Publishers know this, and they have been very successful ramming "licensed and not sold" language through the court system.
The funny thing is, while pirates have been stereotyped as waving their hands in the air and shouting "technology" to opt out of the law, publishers have been way more successful at doing the same, even though they fought tooth and nail against digital distribution.
[0] In the ReDigi case the "digital resale" software was even specifically engineered to erase parts of the file as they were sent to the new owner so that the number of duplicate bits floating around would be negligible at any particular time.
A decade and change later when Intel started asking for hardware copyright[1], Congress actually realized their mistake and created a sui generis right for integrated circuit designs ("maskwork rights"). We never complain about maskwork cases because they are incredibly limited, have a 10 year lifespan, and basically only cover direct copying. Software would have been no different had Congress not made the mistake of handing the full enchilada of copyright monopoly protection - including all those pesky questions about derivative works - to software companies.
[0] e.g. is linking infringement? can you copyright interfaces?
[1] Fun fact: before this, it was entirely legal to X-ray chips and reproduce them. In fact, the NES famously shipped with a bootleg 6502 that only had decimal mode missing because that was the only thing MOS could patent.
>And... that's it. It really has no long-term ramifications, aside from whatever legal precedent it sets (if any).
No that's not it.
The amount of books some people can afford is zero. Lawsuits like this are making the general population dumber, more ignorant, poorer, it accomplish nothing besides increasing inequalities and making society worse for everyone. Libraries can be good if you're into very mainstream topics, and you're fine with brushing the surface of the subjects you're interested in or if learning outdated stuff is ok to you, and of course you still need to live somewhere where libraries are decently funded and where book banning isn't a thing. All books should be accessible freely, to anyone, at anytime, anywhere.
This just doesn't work, even if there's a rich person who is willing to pay quite a bit for the first copy. The rest of the people get excluded from the decision making and the rich person is the only one who decides which books are worthy of being rewarded.
Based on what? Rights-holders are able to make a living because of copyright protections, it makes no sense that your rhetoric raises up these cultural works as vital for preservation but simultaneously dismisses the creators as unworthy of being paid.
If you want to preserve human culture, you want to make it possible for the non-rich to help create it.
If you want to write books for free, go to it. But what the IA did was just plain wrong. Plenty of bookstores like Powells were operating remotely during the pandemic. Many libraries had curbside pick up. Amazon was still delivering. There was no reason to run up the pirate flag.
And any arguments along the lines that libraries actually lead to increased numbers of readers and thus overall increase book sales could also apply to this instance as well (I've even seen such arguments made about piracy in general, though I've never seen any conclusive research indicating if the argument is realistic or not).
I dunno, man. It's hard for me to imagine being in that position and not pressing the button. I imagine the archive (and their lawyers) went into the decision with eyes fully open. I doubt they had zero contingency plans for the worst case.
But if there was no malice or net harm from such technical violations – or indeed if the breaches effectively prevented greater harms – society and the courts will often find such "law-breaking" to be forgivable or even praise-worthy. For example, you are allowed to break trespassing laws to save a life, and in other situations of private or public necessity.
With regard to reading & education in early 2020, publicly-funded schools & libraries that were supposed to be operating were closed with little warning, for a potentially indefinite amount of time. Millions of purchased books that were supposed to be circulating sat idle in locked buildings. A crucial cultural & civilizational function was stopped dead in its tracks.
Against that, the Internet Archive rapidly deployed a novel technological workaround to re-enable some (but not all) of the pandemic-impaired booklending/reading activity. It did so in a way that had no more effect on the publishers' economic prospects than normal-times library operations, and was arguably within the 'fair use' & format-shifting rights well-established for book owners & libraries in the United States.
So I think IA expects to "win" the lawsuit because they did a good deed for the world's readers, as a temporary & reasonable adaptation to an extraordinary emergency situation, that caused negligible harms to the publisher plaintiffs.
Presumably, even if they are hoping to change law with the case - it’s putting up the rest of IA’s (almost irreplaceably invaluable) mission as a gamble on whatever chances they think they have here.
An example is Uber 'invents' smartphone taxi's and says the laws of employment and taxi's don't apply to them. They make a ton of money and here we are.
Maybe I am being overly cynical.
No one, who is anyone, got to where they’re at because they followed the rules. At a certain point anyone who is successful took a risk in their past and it paid off.
When you take a risk for profit, you can hire the lawyers you need to cover for the sins you committed. Most of the time it’s cheaper for parties to settle out of court and this puts you at the negotiating table and integrates your success into the existing power structures. You live long enough to become the villain.
When you take a risk and innovate for the greater good, you don’t have the profit, you can’t hire the expensive attorneys to cover you, and you get eaten alive by the parties you offended. You die the hero, which is why very few do this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_procedu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus
The publishers lawyers will argue they are just a warez site, and use everything in their power to do such, jurisdiction, case law, confusing terms and obfuscation, etc.
Libraries/archives actually have fairly limited exceptions. And the category isn't even especially clearly defined. It's definitely not an anything goes get out of jail free card.
Just think that if people would never take the law in their hands some countries would still have legal slaves, or legal segregation.
See Uber, Lyft, AirBNB..... Just get big enough and buy enough politicians that it's not going to be a problem.
Also, the term "abandonware" is hugely overused. There are tonnes of shareware premium versions on there where it's super easy to contact the creators. I've never failed to do so.
> What were they expecting?
This concisely describes how I felt about Sci-Hub the first few times I read about the project. There are some differences, e.g. the Internet Archive chooses to operate within US jurisdiction.
Of course not! The IA lacks enough money or donations to crooked politicians to get away with that. Strict adherence to the laws is for common folks, so they should have complied.
(Shrug) That's why we're not stuck with a 55 MPH national highway speed limit, here in the US. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
That only works if you are capable of handling the legal trouble that results.
Right?
The Internet Archive appears to have simply decided they could break copyright law, which is a very well supported area of law unlike taxi regulations, and they made no efforts to protect themselves. Pretty stupid. I certainly would not donate to an organization that might waste my donations on stupid things like this.
Feels more like an regulation that an law.
Strange that you hold copyright laws so above all.
In this case “ask for forgiveness” could mean going out of business in the process. You can only afford to “ask for forgiveness” and break the law if you’re willing to lose it all.
Why the IA did this as part of their long established archive business instead of a separate venture is beyond me.