Ars: “Book publishers with surging profits struggle to prove IA hurt sales”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
As I understand it, if I wrote a manuscript that I didn't want published at all, my rights would still be violated if you published it. I didn't lose any money; I just wanted to assert my right to control it.
I could imagine this being an issue in the penalty phase, but they're not there yet. Can a lawyer explain why this is relevant here?
The fourth factor is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work," which is where the monetary aspect is going to be considered. If the judge is pointing out that the publishers actually saw market growth as the Internet Archive expanded its lending, that could signal that they are going to find the fourth factor in favor of the Internet Archive--and that would utterly destroy the publishers' case here.
But that's why they hired lawyers and I'm merely a logician.
I would think that depends on how I gained access to it and whether my work was transformative or not. Merely publishing a copy is a clear violation, but publishing an annotated critique of the work might not be. Public interest may bolster this, and expectation of privacy may tempter it.
> to assert my right to control it.
If you sold it to me then those rights don't exist without a separate contract. Copyright is a two way street.
It's that particular argument that doesn't work for them. Others still may.
Someone else gets to tell me that I can't arrange bits on my computer in the same pattern as the bits on someone else's computer, just because they arranged their bits in that order first? It just doesn't compute for me.
Property laws exist because if I take your shoe, you don't have your shoe anymore. If I arrange bits on my computer in the same order as the bits on yours, you still have yours, and you can still do all the same things with them that you could before. I don't see why you should have a right to tell me how I can or can't use my property just because you came up with a specific way to use yours.
This is especially true if we're talking about ideas and not digital copies, like with NDAs. Telling me I can't tell anybody else about the thoughts in my brain because someone else prompted me to think them just boggles my mind.
I think "intellectual property" is a contradiction in terms.
That conflicts with the natural rights that people would otherwise have to do what they want with atoms or bits they possess.
not natural rights but natural possibilities - which by the way are totally disjoint from "rights" which are a legal/moral/civilizational construct/convention. And property (be it about physical or "intellectual" goods) is exactly one such right i.e. a legal/moral/civilizational construct/convention. Outside of the individual's own life and body (and very few subjects directly related to that), it quickly becomes very muddy and subjective at best to argue with "natural rights", especially when it comes to property rights.
Whether or not my property claim to my PC or my garden is more justified than the property claim of some IP creator or publisher to their works, they both have in common that the property right, for as much as it exists, is a legal/civilizational norm that exists by virtue of being defined and enforced by the civilizational system we live in.
So at the end of the day, like so often in legal matters when there is a conflict of interest and priorization between two rights or legal principles (i.e. legal/moral/civilizational construct/conventions), it all comes down to how the legal system is set up to balance and prioritize the conflicting principles/rights depending on the case configuration.
To publishers who want to equate violation of that monopoly privilege with theft, it's a very good term.
This is a common misunderstanding about property law, and speaks to a broader misunderstanding about law in the tech community.
In practice law in the US is not based on first principles thinking, though first principles thinking lays out some of its corner stone ideas. The law should be thought of as being primarily consequentialist. A tool to uphold the legislative spirit of the constitution and bills passed by the legislature. You can get some pretty wild readings of the law in order to uphold the law's "spirit". Note that the bias towards adhering to older rulings is also consequentialist, the preference is a stable if slightly interpretation of the long than many small refinements over time.
It's natural to wonder why the law isn't made to be based on first principles, the answer is that no one will accept the consequences! All legislative bodies move slowly and people who find loopholes move fast. Truly strict interpretation of the law is bedlam. (Which is not to say you can't move the needle)
> Although creating its own unsanctioned e-books triggered the lawsuit, Gratz argued that IA’s digital lending is fair use, precisely because it makes copies of the physical books in its Open Library collection. That, he said, is “transformative” fair use, utilizing technologies to transform millions of physical books in order to improve the efficiency of lending without encroaching on publishers’ or authors’ rights. Gratz said that IA avoids the conflict by only lending out e-books to one user at a time, causing no harm because it honors traditional lending in brick-and-mortar libraries that has been practiced for years without impacting publishers’ bottom lines.
> The only exception to this one-to-one ratio was when IA launched the “National Emergency Library” for 12 weeks when the pandemic started, offering “an enormous universe of scanned books to an unlimited number of individuals simultaneously,” the plaintiff's complaint said.
You can rip a movie or scan a book you own and share it with a million people at once. VidAngel wasn't doing that. Every stream was 1-to-1 with a real physical copy. If they had 1000 people streaming the movies at once, it meant they had 1000 physical copies as well.
You might also be thinking of Locast, which tried to take advantage of a very specific loophole Congress put in that same law that killed Aereo. Basically they didn't want to criminalize existing community antenna systems, so they said that ones that were operated as non-profits could still operate. They could recoup costs but that's it. This regime is so very specific that the judge was able to cut Locast out of it by merely pointing out that they used money recouped for costs to expand their operations.
how can Congress overturn a case? Are you implying that they would create new legislation that specifically makes rules to attempt to fix the loop hole the judges allowed in the first case? Clearly, that would start the march to the Supreme Court over to challenge the new law. However, I would disagree with the phrase "Congress would overturn the case" as anything accurate
CDL is the interpretation of law that many libraries rely upon to make digital copies available, and if the IA is on shaky ground here legally, then so is our library system.
When copyright was drafted, the idea was to protect a publisher (and his pipeline) from someone just selling cheaper copies. This was changed when our friends at the RIAA would win cases against music infringers but then were able to collect $0.00 because the infringers weren't charging or making a profit. This needed to change to discourage infringing (rather than, adopting a more reasonable pricing structure).
Looking at it through that lens, VidAngel was a commercial entity looking to profit on the (performance?) of the streamed videos, where the Internet Archive (to my knowledge) doesn't charge patrons for materials, akin to a library.
IANAL, but it seems feasible to me that the judge could agree that IA is in complete infringing territory, but COULD assess a fine of $0.00 as that was the "damage" caused. I think the preferred outcome is that he finds for their theory of fair use, as that allows all libraries to continue as they are today without fear another venue could assess a non-zero fine.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
Once in Google Legal, I found a snippet of a book that looked promising for patent-busting. I really had to read the book to know if it was worth buying a legal copy of it. Out of 100 possibilities you run across in searching, maybe one is actually worth it. You can't tell until you read it. The same is true of scholarly articles, btw.
Of course, the old Books project had it on disk, like they have almost every book ever published. They told me I could come over to the actual cubicle of one of the engineers and read it there; they could not even send me an URL. That's how tightly access was controlled.
I don't remember why I didn't. Maybe the case changed, or I didn't need it after all.
The Union of people’s thoughts on the matter is very amusing, though. People don’t want ads, or drm, or to pay. It should be totally free, effort be damned.
Personally my main criticism is that in schools certain editions of text are required. Ideally all problem sets and answers would be provided without having to buy a given text, and you can consult any resource that teachers the relevant material as a supplement, rather than an issued textbook.
Assuming the IA wins, though. It would be curious to setup a website where people can donate physical copies of a book and you download the ebook and can loan it out in accordance to the amount you have physically. Yes, this is a library, however unlike a regular library it’d be interesting to push this to the limit. Even per page checkout on demand.
This really does mirror the Library model, but on the internet.
(For example, libraries are not allowed to convert their VHS collection to DVD and lend them out)
But if the books are digital, suddenly it becomes magically illegal to do anything without consent of the publisher because it now violates copyright to give your copy to somebody else. And the publisher is arguing that it's morally reprehensible for someone to attempt to build a digital equivalent to lending for physical books.
No, they loan out a digital copy, protected by DRM, of an asset that they physically own.
The idea that only the publisher could produce an e-book version of a paper book for public distribution protected by DRM, and that the e-book version needs to be licensed, is completely ludicrous.
If they only went after the emergency library then fine—I am curious, and the judge is too, how they would've computed monetary damages, but that was clearly a copyright violation. But shutting down CDL altogether would be a lot darker.
Fun fact, the only time I used the IA to borrow a book I ended up buying it. But it was out of print, so I bought it used and the publisher didn't see a dime. Based on this case I think they wouldn't have deserved it anyway.
If the answer ends up being that it's fine (I imagine in either scenario it will end up being appealed to near the Supreme court), it would have pretty interesting implications.
I'll also note I amusingly mixed up IA with AI, such that I was very confused on how the story was relevant to the headline here. :D
You don't need to swear. Textbook publishers already have done. I'm sure conventional publishers would too, if they imagined for a moment they could get away with it.
https://www.universitystar.com/opinions/opinion-textbook-acc...
The publishers would like the IA to stop doing that. If the IA wants to keep offering things which are out of copyright or which the copyright owners aren't going to challenge, great. Go for it. This isn't an assault on the concept of a library which is what the IA is trying to pretend. It's a challenge on the IA's pretense that they are a library and not a stock of pirated books, amongst other items.
This was only true for a twelve-week period at the height of the pandemic, it hasn’t been true since then.
I dispute that. I did some work with a large book publisher in the UK. They hated libraries and had all sorts of tactics to work against them.
1) The ebooks available through IA's Open Library are offered under a controlled lending scheme similar to a commercial service like OneDrive and Amazon. Users are limited to 10 books at a time, and can borrow the items for up to 14 days. After that period, the ebooks -- which use Adobe's DRM tech -- are disabled.
2) The number of "copies" available for lending are restricted to the actual number of physical copies that IA has in storage, permanently out of circulation.
3) Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and the rest of the publishing industry is fairly hell-bent on "squashing lending" that doesn't happen through their exclusive and extremely lucrative ebook channels. The steep increases in pricing along with tightening restrictions on access have public library institutions such as the ALA concerned about the very existence of book lending in the future.
4) In their PR blitz, the publishers talk a lot about the "National Emergency Library," which did allow for unlimited lending during a 12-week period at the beginning of the pandemic; but the suit is not confined to this short-lived program.
Ah yes, the "it's your own fault we want to end libraries" approach. If they had their way, the only "fair use" left will be through time-restricted DRM after paying a licensing fee.
The "assault on the concept of a library" thing isn't from this specific lawsuit, but just general publisher behavior. The publishers want libraries to become a shittier Netflix for books - i.e. the last rung on a very tall windowing[0] ladder, with them being paid per rental and books being able to be pulled from circulation at a whim. This is Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A good parallel for this would be the Epic v. Apple lawsuit. Legally speaking, there was no way in hell a private company was going to get standing for an expansive, Stallmanesque antitrust lawsuit against the very bedrock of platform capitalism. And morally, Epic is a worse company than Apple. However, practically speaking, their ability to get discovery woke every legislative body up to a lot of industry dirty laundry. The EU Digital Markets Act would not have passed without Epic v. Apple airing all that out.
If IA is able to get discovery, they could do something similar for book publishing. Just put all that dirty laundry out in front of the public and let them make sense of it.
[0] The practice of releasing creative works in stages. Think like how movies go from theaters, to home video, to rental or streaming, to airplanes, in roughly that order.
Pushing the boundaries is kind of their thing but I think they went too far here.
At least they know what they’re up against.
This is a bad argument. It's very likely that brick-and-mortar libaries do impact publishers' bottom lines, and they're allowed anyway. The concept of libraries fundamentally conflicts with publishers' concept of "reasonable" profit from their copyrighted material. Capitalism conflicts with socialism.