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While you are correct on the tactical level, with this I do not agree:

> The National Emergency Library was a serious lapse of judgement - a moment of madness amongst a backdrop of widespread Covid madness.

NO! It was a moment of sanity prompted by an exceptional situation in an absolutely insane world, a world that pretends to value property yet undermines property using IP. It is IP that is the real madness. It is IP that is used to suck every drop of life out of culture the same way Exxon sucks oil out of the ground. And it is IP that is used to bind people when other measures are not effective.

I get that the thought that the world is absolutely insane and absurd may not be a popular idea in the startup space which relies on a blind optimism, but IP is simply part of the cancer afflicting this world.

You are correct that it was a tactical mistake that endangered the rest of the project but the values that prompted that decision are some of the values that should guide us in building a better world if we want to stand any chance of avoiding a Black Mirror like dystopia on the path towards which the world is very much on.

But sadly, going to argue about it in a room with a mandatory dress code from the 19th century is not going to overturn pre-digital norms.

I strongly agree. My taste in classical music in my formative years calcified around the 1940s mainly because I couldn't easily obtain sheet music any more modern. I think it's crazy that I lack appreciation, taste, and exposure to nearly a century of music (with some exceptions) simply because of copyright law.

Maybe video game music might catch your interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKWgLe-jQjc

Such a coincidence that I was just recently listening to the Persona 5 (then Baccano) soundtrack but that's as close to big band as I get.

While copyright is the main culprit, there are others. Electronic aspects reduce the chance music can be played with your acoustic instrument. Composers like Varese anticipated challenges in reproducibility and instruct their readers to record their own samples so that no two performances will ever be identical. Of course that very action shifts the performer to a more active role: from musician to conductor. The closest I can approach are pieces for prepared piano, such as the music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh.

The newfound electronic diversity also pushes composers to invent their own notation, such as Ianis Xenakis, George Crumb, and even as far back as Henry Cowell.

Last but not least classical is a highly curated genre. Which contemporary composers will be remembered a century from now? The current contenders are sufficiently popular to swap for their sheet music (the exceptions I mentioned). I have no trouble obtaining the minimalist works of John Adams, Philip Glass etc.

I still blame copyright to a large degree. Copyright enforcement suppresses the sheet music trade which reduces discoverability and renders the entire genre static, preserving the status-quo of established artists. You hear stories of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt debating and inspiring each other across Victorian drawing rooms. Copyright suppresses the modern equivalent.

Contemporary music notation is unfamiliar and alien due to lack of exposure, which once again is exacerbated by copyright.

As for electronic music, I'd like to imagine that composers are free to share their samples alongside their sheet music - like source code samples to a computer science textbook - but I doubt it.

It's ironic but your video shows how less regulated public meetups are compared to virtual meetups. Show up to a jam session, grab a fake book, and start playing. Totally illegal online though.

> As for electronic music, I'd like to imagine that composers are free to share their samples alongside their sheet music - like source code samples to a computer science textbook - but I doubt it.

Tracker music is exactly that.

Also I do agree that the concept of open source should be spread to other fields. Sharing just the mastered recording or the final picture is equivalent to sharing just the binary for software.

> I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here.

This is a civil case so plaintiff not prosecution. This comment made me double check that there wasn't an associated criminal case I was unaware of.

Very little of what the IA does is strictly kosher under current law more or less anywhere in the world. They've mostly gotten away with it because, for example, they've mirrored websites that the owners put out in public and generally respect even retroactive requests to take them down. And, as you say, lending out 1 digital for 1 physical is reasonable enough that it's easy enough to believe publishers would overlook.

(And, yes, they're a library/archive but that basically means nada in the digital world.)

I used to donate to them every year, but I stopped when they did this stunt because I was afraid any money I donated now would go to pay for lawyers in a lost cause that I don't believe in. It pains me deeply in my heart because I think the Wayback Machine is a great and noble cause, and I would like to keep donating to it, but I don't want to contribute to what I see as a pointless crusade against copyright at the same time.

I am also a strong supporter of them, but I wrote them immediately and said that this plan of theirs was both very illegal and insulting to artists, writers and creators throughout the world.

The only reason we have professional or semi-professional artists and writers is because they're able to sell copies one way or another. The EFF and the IA would like to believe the writers and publishers are outrageously wealthy and able to sustain the kind of bleeding and pseudo-piracy they endorse. The reality is that most are barely getting by. It's sad to watch the richy riches of Silicon Valley steal from the artists and writers.

I think you have the story backwards: the artists starve not because the IA shared books in a planetary emergency. It's because publishers don't remunerate the creators fairly but turn cash to the executives and shareholders instead. Doctorow and the EFF have multiple explanations of why this happens and it has nothing to do with Napster-like tech.

Yeah. Strictly speaking, the reason why the music industry shat their pants over Napster was because someone found out a more economically efficient way to scam artists. They'd been fighting for decades to ensure that they would be the one ripping off artists, and then charging the public as if the artists were actually making a decent living.

Every time I see an artist worry about online piracy, I roll my eyes. It's not not a threat, but it is a rather weak one unless you're a best-selling author or musician. You're far more likely to either get ripped off by a "for exposure" bro[0] or music label, or just have your work languish in obscurity.

There's actually a bunch of authors that signed a letter of support for the Internet Archive in this suit, specifically because libraries are very, very good at getting mid-list authors into readers' hands. They value the author's work at the expense of the publisher's ownership, which is why publishers hate them. An author that gets a bunch of library exposure can sell people on another book tomorrow, but the publisher is out on "lost sales" today.

[0] I expect this to be replaced with GPT/SD enabled hustles eventually

Is this true? The author Charles Stross wrote "Your typical book publisher is not like the music or movie industry; they run on thin margins, and they're staffed by underpaid, overworked folk who do it because they love books, not because they're trying to make themselves rich on the back of a thousand ruthlessly exploited artists. I think their effort deserves to be rewarded appropriately." (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder...)

You're blaming the Internet Archive (an online library) for the sins of publishers and the broad devaluation of digital content due to the Internet? For example, Spotify pays pennies per stream because that is what the content is worth when there is so much available. Piracy didn't kill copyright value capture by artists, the Internet did (just as LLMs will devalue intellectual work). This is scarcity inertia having an existential crisis with technology enabled abundance.

This started during Napster times, and is why bands derive most of their income from touring and merch.

Please reconsider your position based on the evidence. We need to figure out a way to compensate creatives, but the Internet Archive providing access to content in a controlled manner is not of material impact to the economic situation. Z-library and LibGen make content available with no controls already.

> the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. Controlled Digital Lending is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis.

What is that based on? If you could share an expert analysis, that would be great (or do you have expertise?).

"Controlled Digital Lending is a controversial legal theory"

DiVX might like a word with you.

> is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis

let the court decide that, you are essentially pronouncing judgement. Maybe "internet" or "digital" has changed the situation?

The post asked people to support IA

The IA is not a religion. We love them dearly but we're still going to call them out when they do something that's blatantly, provocatively illegal, and we're sure as shit not going to support them when they lie about what they did. Especially when everyone was there when they did it and were screaming "oh my God, please do not do this idiotic thing, they are going to smash you like a bug because this is obviously not even hypothetically legal."

I was sad to see the EFF jump off a cliff trying to keep the Register of Copyrights unaccountable to the public and I was sadder to see IA jump off a cliff with this boneheaded move.

Some actions are just catastrophically stupid, even when viewed from orbit.

What I want to know is who was behind it. "You can't drive to the library therefore copyright is suspended" is a feat of such mindbending idiocy it had to be driven by a single powerful individual or a small group. I want to know who, because now there's somebody in the IA management that nobody should ever trust again, and until that info comes out the entire organization is suspect. Can you depend on them when they might decide to play legal Russian roulette at any moment?

> What I want to know is who was behind it. "You can't drive to the library therefore copyright is suspended" is a feat of such mindbending idiocy it had to be driven by a single powerful individual or a small group.

Don't underestimate echo chambers. In this case there were at least two echo chambers at play. The first being IA team itself, generally all being on the same wavelength as transgressive mavericks accustomed to pushing the bounds of copyright law. The second was much broader, mainstream society itself panicking about Covid, creating a zeitgeist of flaunting the rules to do something about Covid.

I would be surprised if any part of the IA org pushed back on this idea.

I'm all for pushing the bounds of copyright but the IA is too big and too centralized to blatantly flout it. For that you need a small team, like Z Library. The IA is way too important.

To be clear, I'm not defending what they did. Only explaining why I think they thought they could get away with it. They were already accustomed to operating in a transgression gray-zone (and generally getting away with it), and when covid hit and the zeitgeist became "do something!", they felt they had extra license to push boundaries even further.

Digital changed the situation, for the worse. In digital there is no first-sale rights, because bits cannot be sold, only licensed. This was decided a decade ago in exactly the same court the IA is being sued in[0]. The only way they could decide in favor of IA would be to make a very narrow ruling (e.g. 'libraries are special' or 'the DRM makes it OK') or go full judicial activist in ways our extremely conservative SCOTUS would not tolerate.

The reason why libraries are even allowed to exist in the first place is because physicality allows you to do things with books that are not "copying" them. Everything you do to a digital file is covered by copyright. When you "move" a file from one computer to another, you actually copy and delete it. When you "read" a file, you copy it from one storage medium to another[1]. If we want digital first sale then we have to fatally wound the existing copyright system.

I would absolutely love for the IA to be able to roll back this madness even a little, of course. I don't see that happening. They will put up a good fight, and the judge will roadkill them for the trouble.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp....

Yes, this is that court case. The one that says "RAM is storage and loading programs into it is infringement".

Would you share any expert analysis that your comment is based on? All I see are comments by random people on the Internet.