The Internet Archive's battle for libraries
battleforlibraries.com
battleforlibraries.com
Should have started with this. I agree with everything being said, despite my slightly right political leanings, but that's only because these kinds of issues are close to my heart.
Other politically right leaning people would likely have switched off before they got to that paragraph. Make these things less emotionally charged and political, and you'll get more support.
Are we using the same Internet? Clickbait, outrage and emotionally-charged drivel triumphs over measured rational discourse every day of the week
Not for effect. Not to be gratuitous - but because I genuinely cannot stand misinformation spreaders who have the same internet as me but they prefer to get things wrong and stick with it.
Some people insist that those lights in the sky are not jupiter and instead are drones following them. Mr. Rogers isn't going to cure these broken brains.
> Are we using the same Internet? Clickbait, outrage and emotionally-charged drivel triumphs over measured rational discourse every day of the week
Yeah ... for ad-driven content and messaging about wedge-issues meant to hold together electoral coalitions. Is this one of those things?
If you actually are about issue X, it's probably not a good strategy to let it get polarized along political lines, you might slightly increase your support with one polarization, but you'll increase opposition from the other. That's a recipe having your issue stagnate.
Current copyright law may be good for (some) authors and publishers, and it may provide some incentive for writing new books, but it seems like a huge loss for humanity as a whole, who miss out on the benefit of being able to read any book via the internet, essentially for free.
It's sad that Google scanned entire university libraries, only to lock them up and only allow access to small snippets. And it's nothing less than absurd that students and faculty don't even get access to scanned books from their own library.
Though there are some real digital libraries that are less observant of copyright law. They may not be as easy to get to as the internet archive, but they're often much better in terms of access policies.
I don't agree with the publishers opposition to CDL, but it's disengenous of IA not to mention that nobody sued them over it until they went much further.
Edit: And when they first announced the NEL plenty of people pointed out that their announcement was heavy on ethical arguments, light on the law, and threatened to blow up an ok status quo.
This has never been a real problem in the past, because libraries were limited by how much they could loan out, due to having a limited number of library staff, and a limited amount of shelf space.
The Internet Archive is also similarly limited, due to having a limited budget to hire engineers to scale up the platform to support more users, and a limited budget for digital storage space.
But it's enough that it really changes the equation, and I think that if the IA wins, we'll see less physical books printed, and the ones that are will have an increased price tag. I expect that the government will adjust the laws to keep the balance, somehow, however.
From the publisher's perspective, I don't think staff or shelf space were a constraint. In every library I've been in, inventory far exceeded demand for total books - lots and lots of books were available on the shelves. I.e., they weren't running out of books.
Availability of a particular book might have been limited, but that wasn't due to shelf space. It was due to available copies and to budget, both of which still impact electronic lending by libraries and the Internet Archive. The IA will only lend out as many copies as they own.
IA is very different in terms of availability: Because they distribute electronic editions, and because the Internet provides near-free, near-instantaneous global distribution of electronic editions, the reach of one book at IA far exceeds the same at a local paper library. That means library services become centralized (maybe not good for local libraries), and the new central electronic library (IA) will have far greater supply.
That should mean a far greater selection and, due to the law of large numbers, more stable availability. It doesn't necessarily mean greater availability because demand will also be much greater.
(Which is another reason publishers are not overjoyed that the IA doesn't really operate any geofiltering.)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/publishers-sue-i...
A complete discussion by a lawyer directly writing might be better, but I haven't seen one that isn't working for, or aligned with, one side or the other.
Here are some links collected by UMass: https://blogs.umass.edu/copyright/cases-and-statutes/hachett...
Your local library has a limited geographic reach (even when it partners with other libraries it's still limited to its own state boundaries) and has to loan out in one to two week blocks.
To use their example of the Boston Public Library you can only register if you are a Massachusetts resident.
Not on their main page (a la Wikipedia) or on their blog page.
Of course publishers want to turn books into a subscription service. Fuck that.
Author remuneration is possible without further entrenching the absurd idea that some corporate entity can claw back information put into the world.
If you would, what, it your opinion, holds back other authors from doing the same?
Publishers really help with marketing, editing, typesetting, cover design, fronting cash, and other things, which is why people go with them.
But they also tend to take the rights to the book, and I didn't want that for my books. As such, I make about $100/year in donations, and paper book sales are in the hundreds of dollars per month range. My day job subsidizes this work.
And all books are DRM-free once you remove the DRM from them (which is trivial to do). I try to make a product people want to pay for, not one they have to pay for.
But that's just me. Jack London famously hated writing and only did it to support his lifestyle.
Isn't IA offering the same, only differing in that it's not for profit? IA is not offering ownership.