Whilst they were objectively “wrong” in their actions, what they did was clearly for the greater good. Requesting a summary judgment reminded me of that. Respect to the IA for upholding their position.
How so? Can you explain?
Are libraries, too, "objectively wrong” in that analysis?
cheers
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/14/cucd-j14.html
Libraries can rent books they’ve purchased. Generally they can’t fire up the photocopier and make copies of books they’ve purchased.
When a library buys a physical book, they can loan that copy out to patrons. They own the physical book.
For over ten years now, libraries have taken a single physical book, scanned it and removed the book from circulation, and lent out a single ebook. This has been a common practice founded on an interpretation of fair use laws, which allow format shifting (recording a vhs to DVD, for example) and lending, and also copyright laws which explicitly mention the legality of digitizing books for accessibility reasons, to serve the visually impaired.
This "one physical book in storage equals one ebook" lending is the "controlled digital lending" the archive does, and is the issue at stake in this suit. Publishers argue that libraries should not be allowed to lend any ebook except those which they set a specific lending limit to- charging the library a fee every X number of checkouts or every X number of months.
This is obviously not how lending physical books works- the library can buy a hardcover and loan it out to patrons, repairing the spine and binding over and over, eventually moving it to a special collection for viewing on site when it's hundreds of years old and can't be handled.
As a seperate, and legally shaker issue, the internet archive created the "national emergency library" during the pandemic. The logic here was that nearly every library in the country was closed, there were within those libraries physical copies of these books that weren't being lent out, and so the same concept as controlled digital lending could apply. This move by the archive was signed onto and supported by thousands of libraries around the country, who agreed that their uncirculated physical copies could stand in for the extra copies checked out of the archives emergency library.
It's important to note the archive does not loan any book published in the last five years, period. This is a self imposed limitation that your neighborhood library does not work under, but it means that the "lost sales" publishers allege were not of new books. Nobody ever got screwed out of bestseller status because too many library patrons read their book, and that goes doubly so in this case.
All that said, the issue isn't whether the internet archive messed up with it's national emergency library. It's whether the whole concept of loaning a book is limited to printed copies, and thus ebooks must be repurchased by libraries ad nauseum-- or if libraries can keep a physical copy in a storage room and loan out a digital copy one at a time, exactly as they do now.
Bottom line, our libraries (and especially their ebook collections) will be much poorer if this decision goes to publishers.
so this is yet another attempt at digital feudalism, where you bought something, but must pay the supplier a subscribtion or a cut forever?
This makes more sense for real-world libraries (where books are physical objects with manufacturing costs) but this doesn’t really translate to digital files.
During the pandemic, when real-world libraries were shut, the Internet Archive took it upon themselves to give away an unlimited number of copyrighted works. Libraries are a net public good to society, and unexpectedly we found ourselves without them. The Internet Archive was uniquely positioned to share knowledge and educational materials with the world, free of charge, at a time when many people had no other access to them.
The publishers would rather rent them a digital copy for a lot of money, that is either time-limited or has a cap on the total number of times it can be checked out before the Archive would have to pay again.
It doesn't have anything to do with morals, it's a procedural process that avoids the need for an expensive trial to defend a hopeless claim.
Of course, a party might lose a summary judgement application but ultimately win at trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...
Casting aspersions with the land-mine word "piracy" does not increase the intellectual level of the discussion, nor is it even accurate here IMO.
At any rate, "changing the rules" can't be a blanket get-of-liability-free card, can it? I mean, if you walk into a convenience store, grab a Coke, and walk out without paying for it, you can't claim "I'm not disregarding payment, I'm changing the rules, rules in which money plays a role." Money plays a role, in the sense that you are expected to pay for the Coke and if you do not, it's theft.
It's uncomfortable to grapple with this, but the publishers were largely looking the other way with respect to the IA's lending library up when they were following the principle of "we've scanned X copies and thus can lend out X copies". Technically, that may still be considered copyright violation, in that the publishers didn't give permission for the copies to be used that way. But they let it slide until the IA decided that the closures of libraries during the pandemic constituted a rationale for "we've scanned at least one copy and thus can lend out as many as we want." SamReidHughes and I don't always see eye-to-eye on many things (hi, Sam), but legally speaking, he's absolutely correct, even if you'd prefer "flagrant copyright violation" rather than "piracy."
I can't believe that the IA did this without knowing full well it was inviting a legal challenge. The original CDL concept at least seems plausible to me, and in any case, I think the terms publishers offer libraries for digital copies are frequently bonkers (e.g., pay $X for a maximum of Y lending times, then be forced to buy a new digital copy). But either the IA deliberately violated copyright with the intent of trying to change the legal standing here -- which necessitates this trial happening -- or they deliberately violated copyright because they are, not to put too fine a point on it, blooming idiots. I would like to think the former, but I'm not sure they have very solid ground to stand on.
Copyright's value proposition is providing a monetization framework by allowing people to prevent others from sharing. Its only function is to limit creating copies. This made sense in the days of the printing press.
Nowadays we have many other monetization models which aren't predicated on limiting sharing. Many large and in some case (open source) leading systems are built on these non-restrictive models.
I think the negative aspects of copyright - the chilling effect on the free exchange of information - is non-linear. The more information we have, the more collective cost is paid by society having to worry about the chilling aspects (is my youtube video legal? Is my software? etc).
If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure.
I think we probably hit this point in the 1990s, unfortunately. We are long overdue to repeal copyright entirely.
I think it's worth considering not just the number of works, but also the number of copiers.
In the days when copying meant printing presses, the physical act of making copies was overwhelmingly a commercial activity performed by a relative handful of businesses. Making a copy of a substantial work was not something the average person had a serious opportunity to do even once in their entire life, so copyright law only meaningfully restricted a small number of entities. By the mid-1980s, with the proliferation of human-scale media technologies like the photocopier, VCR, camcorder, tape deck, and floppy drive, the number of meaningfully regulated entities began an explosive growth that has not stopped since. Copyright law has been amended with hacks like the AHRA and DMCA, but has never come close to a true reckoning with the modern reality of a copy being just a click away for countless millions of people, never mind cultural phenomena like meme generators, mashups, and fanfic that tend to functionally treat authorship less as a matter of negotiable consideration and more as a matter of tribal history.