Judge decides against Internet Archive
file770.com
file770.com
The current law is broken, we know that, but most of us don't grasp broken laws as a threat until it is challenged (and we as a society usually lose), and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable
This circuit should be shortened, we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society like with DMCA and PATRIOT act
If anything has proven this lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws, be more involved in the legislation process and actively propose and push for fixes
It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?
Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…
Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.
But also, I think we are well past affecting change through voting and so forth. Not that you shouldn’t vote. But if we want to see actual change in the United States, we need to start taking some cues from the French and other countries where they go on strike aggressively until they get what they want.
As long as we keep getting fucked and showing up for work anyway the powers that be are just going to keep fucking us.
What did the senate do this week? Interview the TikTok CEO. Meanwhile our economy is in shambles, inflation is out of control, housing and rent is unaffordable, the middle class is dying.
Why are they over there arguing about wokeness, screaming about communists and facists being on the precipice of taking over the country, and interviewing the tiktok CEO? Because that doesn't require any action. It distracts the public from real problems. The partisan inflammatory and meaningless screeching is enough to get them re-elected, so why do any hard work fixing problems?
And so people who do try to get involved in order to fix real issues like the economy or housing, end up getting blocked by pointless debates. It's system-wide filibustering.
(My current longshot hope? Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. If we just start making online group decisions and scale it up, that's a power bloc that can run its own parties and strongarm existing gov processes - assuming the network even wants to interact with them... )
Politics is the set of activities associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals.
Throwing technology at these human affairs isn’t an answer.
Something like liquid democracy.
Not sure what a "functionally meaningless vote" is; is that simply a vote cast for the losing side? If something is to be decided by a vote, then one side of the argument is going to lose, otherwise you don't need a vote.
So in the end your individual vote does little, because real power is at the hands of much better resourced interests.
It may seem terrible and unjust that there are some now that are as rich as a Roman emperor and can buy a great deal of influence, but the world was once thousands of unaccountable tyrants, free to brutalize their peasants and slaves.
Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless.
Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.
What can we do? Uncap the House. Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929. The billionaires easily bribe 435 reps, several thousand would be harder. And in line with historical representation.
That's something of an outlier but $25-50K is common.
So don't only vote for a president, vote for everything you can. Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides.
I think after that, you shouldn't be afraid to 'throw your vote away'. Gerrymandering and other stuff made most voters in the presidentials irrelevant. So the only voice left there is the signal function of 3rd part vote. Make it clear yo don't like the hobson's choice you've left. You did what you could in the previous round.
Don't succumb to nihilisms. The powers that be seem to have dividers in a dumber and smarter half. The dumber half gets very simplistic reasons to vote for some extremist side. The smarter half gets tamed by nihilistic passiveness. Both get all kinds of divisive news as a side dish. Don't fall into this trap. A big enough group of people aligned around a common cause is the biggest danger to any powerfull entity, and they fear them and do anything to break them up.
That's not permitted in any state which I know.
I am a registered voter in "NO PARTY", which gives me the option to request a ballot from any party in a primary and vote within that party.
Any registered voter can vote any candidate or issue in general elections. I think what would improve our abysmal two-party system would be runner-up benefits, and coalitions, rather than winner-takes-all.
If I were king, I’d do away with party primaries completely. Run a jungle primary with all candidates on a single ballot. Ranked choice to pick the top 4-5 for the general. Then ranked choice in the general to select the winner. Something like that.
I’d also ditch the EC for direct election of the president. And legislate the size of a House district be derived from the smallest state population. This adds hundreds of members to the House, and brings voting parity back to CA and TX (who currently have districts substantially larger than Wyoming’s single seat.
This usually isn’t allowed. At least in my precinct (in an open primary state), both primaries are on the same day, in the same location, and you select which party’s ballot you want when you arrive. Anybody can vote, you don’t have to be a party member.
Some states have closed primaries, where only party members can vote. Usually you declare party membership in advance. Not sure how these states prevent people from joining both - I suspect there is a state register of party affiliation.
As the parent post alluded to, the US is at a bit of a crossroads. The protections built into the political system that were added to protect minority political groups from the tyranny of the majority has been turned on it’s ear over the last several decades and we’re now stuck with an ever-decreasing population of angry christo-fascists making decisions against the will of the vast majority of the nation.
Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem.
> or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still elect three presidents in that time
...The Chief Executive is determined in a two-fold election pipeline. A popular vote to elect State electors to cast votes for the President The number of electoral votes is set by a Constitutionally defined function that strikes a balance to ensure the most populous states can't steamroll the less populous. The means of choosing who the electors are are up to the States. Original intrnt was that Electors were unaccountable to anyone, as the Founders wanted a specific check on demagoguery, as they greatly feared the charismatic charlatan who could work a crowd, and believed a second smaller unaccountable party of voters would either eventually reconfirm the majority if it was a genuinely uncontroversial decision, or conscientiously object if they could not in good conscience believe it was in the best interests of the nation to cast that vote. The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.
The popular vote literally was antithetical to what the Founders set put to do. It was specifically not the system they wanted to get anywhere near.
>Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate,
This is by design. The Senate represents the States. Not the People directly. Each state gets two Senators, no matter how big, no matter how populace. Only the House Scales as a function of Population. The Senate is specifically a check on the House. It was recognized that the House would be the Heart/Vehicle of the People's passions. The Senate was intended to be a smaller, more rational filter to keep the House checked as Reason is the check on Passion.
Again. Working as designed/Civics 101.
Actually, America was designed to be a slave state, with laws explicitly laying out why African people are less entitled to rights than European descendants, and laws working around different states' positions on slavery. Working as designed, right?
> The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.
And yet, the people voted for the less charismatic candidate, and the electoral college elected the swindler. Working as designed, right? Now we have executives directly trying to influence the electoral college, and it seems to be working (supreme court stepping in during bush's election to force stop a recount that would have led to him losing the election, which we know as fact now).
Not only is it absurd to suggest the USA is a deterministic system like constitutionalists claim, there's a very easy retort: ok, it's a bad system then. Americans need a better design.
If America is working by design, then it's designed to be easily exploited by haliburton to send its soldiers to die in foreign countries so as to feed the military industrial complex. It's designed to have one of the largest prison populations on earth and a systemically racist police system. It's designed to have an outsized homeless problem, massive painkiller addiction crisis, and a population of people with no savings, no hope for retirement, and one paycheck from homelessness.
Why can't it be both? All this does is keep us busy looking where the 'root cause' is and never actually solve anything because the mechanisms to fix those things don't exist... all the while others reap its benefits.
That's not the right characterization of the argument. Judges are there to tell legislators that they can't make certain laws. The abortion dispute is not about judges making abortion legal, it's about judges telling politicians that they cannot make abortion illegal. Without that, politicians would literally have the ability to do anything they want.
It should concern everyone that these types of top down authoritarian mentalities are more prevalent as people without a tradition or culture based in western philosophy that has led to what used to be a clear separation of powers, become more prominent even all over the western/European based world.
It will not end well for most of humanity, even in this community, regardless if how much we believe ourselves to be doing good here, or at least not even considering the destabilizing consequences of what we do here.
Do tell, what people specifically are you referring to?
I think you are wrong here. We, the people with “lived experience” in authoritarian countries, look with astonishment at how the American people dismantle the basics of their own political system “based in western philosophy”.
You know, Stalin’s constitution of 1936 was one of the most liberal and progressive at the time. Then 1937 came. So the suggestion that judges should stop looking at the code of law and just eagerly follow the Party line - produce cries of “danger” from my very own carbon-based neural network.
So my estimate is quite opposite - the “native” Americans took the benefits of the political system based on western philosophy so much for granted, that they’ve stopped thinking where these benefits were coming from.
Look at how the 2nd Amendment basically does not exist for some of the most populous states because SCOTUS refuses to reign in the more egregious examples of judicial/legislative reacharound like Wickett v. Filburn, or the vast majority of firearms legislation in places like NY and California.
Roe v. Wade is a shining example of how legalism can get turned on it's head just by changing out the authoritative judge who has the last word, or a new case coming up and being heard that threatens a change in viewpoint of SCOTUS.
The Writ of Certiorari is in my opinion the most overpowered political lever in the entire U.S. in the negative sense in that it's not being granted robs millions of an opportunity for redress of real harms, and in a positive sense in that when it is granted it can completely alter the judicial landscape for decades without legislative action.
These right declarations aren’t super clear so the political leanings of the court weight heavily.
9th Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution does not define rights, rather it defines the limits of the government's power to abridge those rights.
It's frightening that so few seem to really get this.
The judicial is there to decide if a given law should be enforced (and if a given enforcement method is valid)
This is why I’m not a big fan of originalism: that is almost always a subjective decision.
Otherwise we would just have a legislative and an executive.
The Executive is there to implement an enforcement mechanism, even if the decision os to implement a null mechanism.
The executive cannot (or normatively should not ex nihilo) just materialize enforcement infrastructure without Congressional approval. The existence of Administrative law, however, rather shopts down the original intent of the Founders in terms of Governmental architecture.
I don't think there was ever any serious doubt that the Internet Archive would lose their case as they are clearly in violation of copyright law. The issue in the case is that the copyright laws are bad laws that have become contrary to their purpose of "promoting the useful arts and sciences" due to the copyright terms being absurdly long (and the lack of any serious deterrent to fraudulent DMCA claims which has allowed for the proliferation of such claims as a censorship and/or doxxing technique) and need to be reformed. It was unwise for the Internet Archive to violate copyright law just as it was unwise for Bowser the ROM site owner[0] to violate copyright law because flagrantly violating copyright law is an effective way to get yourself bankrupted via lawsuits and an ineffective way to get bad intellectual property laws changed.
[0]: https://venturebeat.com/games/gary-bowser-has-to-pay-nintend...
It's a library. A library does that.
One much needed copyright law adjustment would be to limit copyright protection to a period where the work is actually commercially viable meaning the owner is making an effort to sell it. It doesn't benefit anybody to have old works locked up for years and years with no way for the public to acquire them legally.
It’s unfortunate that you would demonstrate such logically compromise in such a blatant manner, ironically, in a post about “bad law”. Ironically, overturning Roe specifically was good law, in that it followed the law the ruling was a blatant violation of.
The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that.
You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.
> If anything has proven this [that 'we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society'] lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws [...]
No. The reason Roe v Wade was overturned is because conservative middle-aged/old white-guys with money are not happy about people, and by people I mean women, having reproductive choice.
It's one of the areas that fundamental islam and conservative "Christians" have significant overlap, and that's not a good thing.
It's political. It's always been political. It always will be. The judges that want abortions illegal will find legal arguments to make that happen and vice versa.
The way people are supposed to support better laws is by electing better legislators. Easier said than done I admit, but I think that's better than giving judges power beyond their role.
I think many agree that copyright needs to be shortened, but what does “broken” mean, exactly?
I have good feelings for the Internet Archive, but in this case it’s about a handful of books that are being copied and distributed a mere 5 years after initial publication, which I think a lot of people who want copyright shortened would still agree is quite a bit too short. Books frequently get popular long after initial publication, they’re not anything like blockbuster movies that make most of their income in a few weeks (which used to be true before streaming but might not even be true anymore).
Keep in mind that this isn’t about the Internet Archive specifically. If the court ruled it’s okay for them to copy and rent books, then anyone can copy and rent books, it undermines the entire market for books (and also web sites and images and other media, because this is the Internet Archive). Think about what it means for the company you work for, or the creative works you or your artist friends create, if people can copy their things legally and take away their revenue streams after only 5 years.
I wonder why the Internet Archive doesn’t keep things unpublished on their site until it’s not generally available online, this would keep them clear of the most obvious copyright violations.
And basically all the schemes to make copyright more expensive, difficult, requiring jumping through hoops and paying increasing amounts of money to renew? That just basically screws individual creators (who already don't make much money for the most part) to the benefit of the major content rights holders who are not going to forget or be unable to pay for copyright renewal. Which is probably not the objective of most of the people dreaming these up.
The US actually took a pretty big step towards benefitting more small-time creatives when it aligned with the Berne Convention and did away with explicit notices being required.
I only recently learned that the US has a bit of a Berne Convention loophole in the sense that you are required to register works with the copyright office before you can seek damages for copyright infringement (otherwise you can only demand they cease and desist). That fine print seems like it undermines the spirit of the Berne Convention just a bit, and most other countries that adhere do not have this extra hoop.
Having no-effort century-long copyright might narrowly benefit a tiny number of small-time creators, but it robs the public of our collective culture.
“Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Part of the intent behind the law is to promote the sciences and the arts through these exclusive rights. The idea is that creators will have an economic incentive to create, because they’ll have some protection from copiers. The idea was not primarily to promote culture by releasing works into the public domain. This framework acknowledges both means of promotion, the short term protection of profits, combined with the long term acknowledgement that society will benefit from works becoming public after some time. So it is trying to be fair to both authors and to the greater social good, and it requires deciding & balancing what the term length should be.
The original (US) copyright term was 14 years with registration + another 14 years with renewal. That seems to me, in broad strokes, like a good balance between promoting new works vs. giving public access to previous works.
The century-long term only benefits a vanishingly small proportion of creators (which is to say, a vanishingly small proportion of creators' inheritors). The primary beneficiary is a small number of very large monopolistic media/publishing firms, who have e.g. bought up the rights (for peanuts) to the past century of back issues of thousands of scientific journals, and now keep them behind a paywall.
But the harm to the public is incalculably large.
I certainly might have misunderstood your comment about being “fair” to authors. I guess you were saying that the US copyright law isn’t doing anything to distinguish between independent authors, small businesses, or large corporations? It certainly does allow for big business to have an easier time of things, and is not at all fair to individuals and small businesses, that’s true.
In my opinion the Berne convention (which is instead premised on authors’ supposed natural rights, without much concern for the public) is a incredibly harmful and anti-social system which should not have been ratified by the USA. It has become even more harmful in the digital age.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on copyright history, law, or philosophy.
* edit, since I didn’t see your edits about the Berne Convention. That’s an interesting take. I thought most copyright progressives viewed Berne as a marked improvement over US copyright pre-Berne. The most important aspect of Berne is that it’s globally adopted, so the discussion about terms really needs to be about Berne more than US copyright law, I think?
Unlike working on something physical (say, a bushel of grain, a shirt, a bookshelf, or a house), when the work is an idea (like a better mousetrap or a catchy song) if someone copies it they can profit from your labor at your expense because they pay none of costs of creation, so can undercut and outcompete you.
Therefore, the thinking goes, creators won’t bother making new intangible creations like textbooks or paintings or inventions if they can’t have some kind of exclusive right over publication or use. (I’m not quite sure what empirical evidence there is for this claim. That seems like an interesting question, but it’s probably pretty tricky to investigate.)
The goal of the copyright and patent system is to encourage creators by granting them limited-time exclusive rights, whereby they can benefit from their hard work. Those creators then do useful work they otherwise would not bother with, and the public benefits.
But the premise is not an abstract ideal of fairness or a guarantee of moral rights for authors and creators. The premise is promotion of science and useful arts. At the point where the copyright term is interfering with (rather than promoting) science and useful arts, it is too long. That is, the fundamental question should be “does this system most benefit the public?” not “is this system the fairest to authors?”
I’ve never met a creator who decided what or whether to create based on their descendants' earning money from exclusive rights to their work 50+ years into the future. Maybe such creators exist, but I would guess those to be vanishingly few.
Is that relevant?
To me copyright is there to encourage the creation of new works. I doubt any publisher takes into account book sales more than 5 years out when deciding whether to publish a new book.
I have artist friends. Current copyright acts as more of an inhibitor than enabler of their creativity.
You’re right that copyright is there to encourage creation of new works, and the stated mechanism for doing this is by granting the creator a limited-time monopoly, so they have a chance to make money.
Why do you doubt that publishers aren’t considering more than 5 years, and to turn your question back on you - why exactly is that relevant? There certainly can be a difference between why they decide to publish a book, and whether they should have the exclusive right to make money from a book after 5 years, can there not? Since you’re making a broad generalization, think about all book types, text books, reference books, novels, literature, non-fiction, etc. Aren’t some of those slower to publish and slower to go out of date? Think about walking through Barnes & Noble and tell me you believe that everything in the store in less than 5 years old.
And how does copyright inhibit your artist friends? Copyright doesn’t enable creativity, it just protects it, right? Are you sure your artist friends would even get paid for their work without copyright laws in place? If you are sure, then why?
I'm sure some think it is. I think dictating power based on war ability makes way more sense than everyone having a say simply by virtue of breathing.
Egalitarianism is not consistent with nature. But these things go in cycles, the flaws and contradictions will accumulate and the system will collapse eventually, like they all do.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. In what world is it better to instead give all the say to one person? Especially a person selected solely by their prowess for violence (or in leading others to violence)?
If that one person is wise, virtuous, and really prioritizes the people's best interest, and is willing and capable of delegating and seeking advice from people who understand various domains better than them, and is a good enough judge to choose good people for such delegation and advice, then it could be at least much more efficient than a democracy or republic. Decisions could be made much faster. And such a leader could very well be better at making decisions that are better in the long term, even if they aren't in the short term.
However, how do you find and appoint such a leader? And even if you somehow get such a leader, how do you ensure their successor is just as good? Selecting a leader based on military prowess definitely won't get you such a leader though.
First, that's a big if. Second, it's the old pipe-dream that there are decisions that are on "best interest" for everybody, that can just be based on "domain knowledge", and not competing interests to be heard and balanced.
>Decisions could be made much faster.
That persons decisions. Not the ones people want. Basically you're described an infantilized population and a parent/nanny that knows what's best for them.
Productivity requires decentralized decision-making. The more centralized the power structure is, the lower the overall productivity of the subject population.
Even in a war-economy, the majority of the civilian populace has to provide all the complicated logistics, food, services, entertainment, ect to keep the war effort going. Being a wage slave to a warlord isn't a magic fix to "egalitarianism".
We can already live outside of egalitarianism. I can guarentee you Bill Gates, Stephen Hawkings and Jeff Bezos (and the lowest of society too) have no need for my input on their life, and don't know I exist.
But not because it will be replaced with something "better". Democracy just means everybody has a say on decisions affecting them and the society they are in.
If your replacement is closer to "only informed people should have a say", that is even older then democracy, and is much worse in practice.
(i) no functionaries: run all the administrative jobs not in an office by Margaret and John, but in some cluster of computers;
(ii) no political nominations: instead of having elections between Side A vs Side B (vs Side C in non-US countries), all the decision-making positions are up to vote by name and all the candidates are sorted out randomly from the totality of the populace (no candidate can have more than 2 mandates);
(iii) negative vote: all ballots have a special box "No One" invalidating all the candidates (if the majority votes "No One") or reducing the duration of the mandate;
(iv) the duration of the mandate correlated with voter turnout (if 30% of the populace vote, you don't get 100% of the 4-year mandate, you get 1.2 years of mandate);
(v) the vote no longer a fact (you voted for X one time), but a process (you are maintaining your vote for X today also); when a majority of people retract their vote for a certain decision-maker they automatically lose their position of power.
The current flavour of democracy is already not democratic as practiced in most countries (perhaps Switzerland is an exception).
In the US it's career politicians with little accountability, billionaires and huge coporations with huge influence, paying politicians, media owned by said millionaires or fed BS by the government, a baroque system of chosing President, a failed educational system that doesn't teach kids to be active citizens, fossilized two party system supported by all kinds of powers and structures that the voters aren't allowed to change, and so on. Plus a charade of voting once every five years. If that's democracy, then yes, it should change: to real democracy.
The options you describe would be some of the solutions to that.
Of course those "wise persons in power who know better than us what's good for us" will prevent anything like that.
The original system wasn't two party. In fact, the first Chief Executive (President of the United States) on leaving Office, specifically warned the populace against anything remotely resembling the formation of political parties.
The populace quickly ignored that advice, and carved up the country between Federalists and Anti-Federalists who either vied to achieve the Supreme Seat of Power to enact their Will, or hold that Seat so no one would be able to avail themselves of it.
Our current situation is that (in theory) the elected politicians listen to the general "mood" of the population, and then listen to the experts how to implement the needed changes. I can't think of a better system, we just need to figure out how to make it resistant to abuse.
So, what laws and constructs of civilized life are not an unnatural made up constructs? You seem to be suggesting there is some natural law that excludes things like intellectual property. Which natural laws, specifically, are you talking about?
If I have an idea, or a digital copy of something, you can also use that idea, or also get a digital copy, without depriving me of it. The only reason you can't use my idea or own a digital copy is because society decided that it would punish you for doing so – and that's unnatural in the sense that it doesn't follow from any inherent feature of reality.
On the other hand, you and I can't both have the same object even if we wanted; it has nothing to do with ability or circumstance.
edit: I should clarify that you and I can share something in the sense that we can freely give it back and forth, but if we have one shovel, we can't both be shovelling at the same time (and can't share it at all if we live far apart). And if we're talking about food, well, we can't both take the same bite of bread.
On the other hand, the exact same spatial arrangement can be in two places at once (e.g. the state of bits on a disk, or the idea of a shovel, i.e. the pattern of a shovel as exemplified by two distinct shovels).
All of that's obvious. I think what OP was trying to suggest is:
Despite the obvious difference between physical things and ideas, we often treat them similarly (specifically, we treat ideas like physical objects). And perhaps that would seem a bit strange if we weren't so used to it.
I will just note that characterization is a very American one, and that different cultures have different characterizations.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US constitution states:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
The whole constitutional purpose of IP law is to spur creative activity. The interests of the creator are only a means to this end. This has, unfortunately, been perverted by regulatory capture.
I'm skeptical that "encouraging creators by offering protections" is much more than a rationalization. (And I'm not sure whether it's historically accurate, although that's beside the point.) It doesn't seem like the concept of intellectual property and its protection under the law have been effective at encouraging people to create things; they seem to be more effective at encouraging rent seeking. If we want to enable and encourage people to create things, we should pay them to create – not pay them to share something after they've already created it.
For example, we can pay someone to perform the labor to create something we want (contracts), we can finance their endeavours or subsidize their living expenses if we like their work (the patron model), and so on. In fact, we already do these things, but their effectiveness is limited because our current laws favor other business models.
And there's a wonderful reciprocity: if I pay someone to create something, not only do I get what I want, but everyone else gets to benefit from it too. And the things that other people pay to have created I also get to enjoy (and there are a lot more "other people" than there are "me").
[This is the visualization of a goal (or at least an alternative way of going about things) and an argument for its possibility. Unfortunately I can't claim to know its feasibility, how to get there from here, or even which tactics would be effective, but I hope to have good answers some day.]
The idea that patronage isn’t dominant because… it can’t compete with copyright? is a not-even-wrong take.
And there’s an astounding burst of human creativity in the last 300 years. There are several factors you can attribute that to but the correlation with ip laws means you’re not going to have evidence that they inhibit rather than incentivize progress in the useful arts and sciences.
If there’s any empty rationalization in play, it’s yours.
I didn't say that I thought incentives don't matter. (I was trying to say that I thought IP law isn't an especially good way to incentivize creativity, and that there might be better ways.) So I might be misunderstanding what you mean by this.
> The idea that patronage isn't dominant because... it can't compete with copyright? is a not-even-wrong take.
Could you explain why it's not-even-wrong? I can definitely accept that I'm wrong, but I don't see why it's so misguided that it can't even be discussed, affirmed, or denied.
Today, I can (usually) make more money as a software developer writing proprietary software than I can writing libre software. If software couldn't be copyrighted, it doesn't follow as a matter of course that demand for software would plummet. If the demand remains, in this alternate world I ought to still be able to make a living writing (libre) software.
In this alternate world, I would necessarily be paid for the labor I perform (writing code) rather than making money by selling licenses or copies. So, if the only difference between our world today and this alternate world is the existence of software copyright, and in our world today I'm incentivized to sell licenses or copies but in the alternate world I'd be paid for my labor per se, it seems fair to say that the reason I'm incentivized to sell licenses or copies – and the reason why e.g. patronage isn't more dominant – must be "because we recognize and protect copyright the way we do".
That was my line of reasoning.
At some point you have to move away from physical requirements. The barter system simply doesn't scale.
Since intelectual property rights do not reflect a democratic process and were rather restricted because they threatened the power of the estate, their merrit is questionable.
ok but they way that we treat them the same are both constructs, we don't treat them the same in that if A has the idea you can't have it (in the same way that if A takes the bite of bread you cannot have that bite of bread), we treat them the same that if A has the idea they have a right to profit from it by selling you the idea in the form of a book etc. just as if A has the bread they have a right to profit from it by selling you a bite. And you don't have the right to take the bread from A just because you can.
As noted while it is physically impossible for an object to exist in two places at the same time it is the social construct of ownership that we transfer from physical objects to non-physical objects.
Calling out all property ownership as arbitrary doesn't mean IP suddenly deserves more protection. If anything, it gives more permission to be skeptical about its value to society. An IP law that prevents digital libraries isn't an outcome we desire, so... case closed, let's change the law.
You're arguing about whether natural rights exist, but regardless of whether or not there is such a thing as a natural right -- intellectual property is not a natural right. And getting rid of the entire category of natural rights just makes IP even more obviously not a natural right. It's not something that people are universally entitled to regardless of the social impact.
> In the natural world ownership is defended purely by force or guile
There is a third view which is that human law is a continuum ranging from things we are genetically predisposed to expect as members of a social species to constructs which are mostly cultural.
For example, almost every human civilization has some prohibition on killing and stealing from other members of the community. These are more foundational than laws about how to dress or speak. Even communities of non-human primates recognize stealing as a transgression and may collectively punish a thief. So the idea of personal property has deep roots and is not exclusively human.
"Property" which includes constructs like probhibitions on copying what someone else has done without paying them tribute is an abstraction of personal property, which is much closer to an innate human concept.
What if you’ve hoarded all the food or all the water, and I need it to survive? Would that be compelling?
I’m with the other guy. These distinctions are arbitrary. They may be useful for a society that attempts to maximize “happiness@ (also arbitrary), but it remains that they are not universally obvious.
Tons of thing compel someone to get the thing another has - them being hungry, just fancying it, mere greed, etc. All of those are natural feelings. In nature the stronger getting what they wont is the norm. There are no property rights.
>On the other hand, you and I can't both have the same object even if we wanted; it has nothing to do with ability or circumstance.
So? Physics is not the basis of law in a society. Just a hard limit of what can be done.
But one can e.g. just kill you by hitting you with a rock, and physics is 100% fine with that, as is biology. Physics doesn't care either way. It's just a bunch of equations that describe how matter interacts, not a legal or moral code, and it doesn't get into the baseline state of animal behavior in nature...
We still have laws against it though.
No more than nothing compels you to take exclusive ownership of something that comes from the land!
Example: my friends and I have a massively western-masculine internal culture. At parties people would ask if we were "ok" because a minute earlier we'd have been shouting at each other how smooth brained and stupid each other was. Of course we'd be fine, that's how we talk to each other. We'd get frustrated if someone tried to talk through implication - one time I asked my friend to put his seatbelt on and he said "wtf just tell me to put my fucking seat belt on don't be all soft about it."
But if we turned that culture on someone else we'd be the most horrible of bullies. Not everyone wants to be "talked to straight" like that, and that's fine.
I'd get mad if someone let me walk around with a booger on my face. "do unto me" is to say to me "lol saving that for later?", But to someone else a much more polite method is probably desirable.
"Do unto me" might mean literally not talking to or approaching someone. It might mean feeling spurned or like someone thinks you're disgusting if a hug or handshake is avoided.
Do unto me is far too simple a rule. We need more communication involved.
Sounds to me like you just have "teenage boy" culture.
It's really like the semantics of "walk this way".
The one constant as you move through human history objectively is that might makes right... the best you can hope for is a philosopher king who is willing to put his iron gauntlet in a velvet glove and then use that hand to guide society into a better place... and apply pressure when necessary, as opposed to crushing.
Depending on the definition of having, which goes begs the question.
The parent was asking which laws are not constructs, and your example I don't think works as an answer to that question. In what sense do you "have" that physical object? For example, what does it mean to say "I have a phone"? "Having" in that sense is a construct, not a natural thing. You might be holding the phone, you might put it down, I might hold it while you are holding it, I might pick it up when you put it down, I might look at it while you aren't, etc. But there's nothing in any of those real natural world descriptions that correspond to having, until you start to include our social constructs around possession.
I don’t think we can have a conversation about free distribution of IP without considering the original creator.
The creator depends on getting remunerated for each copy of their work. How are they to live?
the unnatural, made up construct is that your property is recognised and respected by law, so that you don't have to physically defend it and potentially lose it to someone or some group stronger, perhaps more violent, than yourself
if you only recognise physical ownership, you only own objects as long as you can physically protect them yourself and you explicitly deny any further rights not to have them robbed, as that is also an "unnatural, made up construct" - you were not robbed, there is a just different physical ownership going on now
We can simply say IP is a concept that we need to bust. And that's fine. No need to invoke weird "reasoning" like that.
I don't see how that continues without IP.
You can't spend hundreds of millions making GTA6 if the first person you sell it to can give away copies.
To a large extent we also see that today (because let's be honest, current copyright law is not enforced very consistently) and there are still big-budget movies and games being released.
I pay for Tidal and buy 99% of my games despite having access to safe private trackers. On the other hand I pirate 100% of my TV and movies. Make of that what you will but for me it's always a service issue (or lack thereof).
Why would anyone pay for HBO when Netflix could just put up The Last of Us without paying a cent.
Why would AMC theaters pay Disney for Avengers 5 when they can just pay some Disney employee to send them a copy for free?
In that timeline there's a comment chain:
>> So this dev lost his job because he couldn't work during covid after getting Internet banned for pirating some movie. Doesn't that seem excessive?
> Okay, yes, maybe a little. But let me ask you this: How could Disney-XBox Studios have afforded the $2.3T Iron Man vs. Master Chief sequel if they weren't able to protect their investment? I just don't see how that movie gets made without strong IP law.
The Benedict Cumberbatch from their side could probably transport you over, if you want. They're pretty accepting of immigrants, as long as you're willing to get The Implant.
People should get paid to create things, and get paid what the work is worth.
Right now, people get paid a small fraction of what it's worth, while the bigger fraction goes to execs who have had no hand in creating anything of value. And those execs get paid for selling something that their workers have made, not for making it.
Big-budget movies should get made because people democratically decided that we want to collectively spend resources on making such a movie, not because unelected company execs say so who have exclusive control over a huge amount of capital and who can use IP laws to extol more capital from innocent people who just wanna watch a decent movie.
This is literally how it works today though. No one is intentionally paying employees more than they have to, and if they pay less than they have to, they lose employees.
Basically this is just an anticapitalist rant. Not useful even if one agrees with the premise.
If it did, then by definition, companies wouldn't be making profit for the shareholders.
This is a very questionable statement.
For example it was moral and ethical (and you were considered a good person regardless of whether you did it) to own slaves when that was the prevalent morality of a societies.
So, there are actions that are unethical based on made up human constructs of morality. Nature and physics doesn't care either way.
Which is the parent's point: what laws and ethical norms aren't "unnatural" and aren't made up? All are. Doesn't mean they are not useful and good for being that.
There are tons of old articles, books, and treteases on the matter, describing it as perfectly moral and ethical, and how its beneficial to the slaves, who lack agency, are animal like, and are offered "useful work" from their masters who know better, how they are beastly and need the whip to get sense into them, and so on.
That's of course, on top of the fact that slave owners were among the most respected good-standing members of society, and only controversial figures considered them imoral and unethical for owning slave. In fact abolitionists were considered bad people, not unlike today's terrorists and activists.
Theses idea of the morality of being a slave owner, and the superiority and natural right of the owners vs the slaves, is universal in societies that held slaves (as was in societies were royals and lords were above folks reduced to peasants).
Regarding the South, for example:
"What were Southern pastors, preachers, and religious leaders telling their flock? Southern clergy defended the morality of slavery through an elaborate scriptural defense built on the infallibility of the Bible, which they held up as the universal and objective standard for moral issues.
(...)
Reverend Furman of South Carolina insisted that the right to hold slaves was clearly sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures. A fellow reverend from Virginia agreed that on no other subject “are [the Bible’s] instructions more explicit, or their salutary tendency and influence more thoroughly tested and corroborated by experience than on the subject of slavery.” The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, asserted that slavery “has received the sanction of Jehova.” As a South Carolina Presbyterian concluded: “If the scriptures do not justify slavery, I know not what they do justify.”
As Pastor Dunwody of South Carolina summed up the case: “Thus, God, as he is infinitely wise, just and holy, never could authorize the practice of a moral evil. But god has authorized the practice of slavery, not only by the bare permission of his Providence, but the express provision of his word. Therefore, slavery is not a moral evil.” Since the Bible was the source for moral authority, the case was closed. “Man may err,” said the southern theologian James Thornwell, “but God can never lie.”
The Southern Presbyterian of S.C observed that there was a “religious character to the present struggle. Anti-slavery is essentially infidel. It wars upon the Bible, on the Church of Christ, on the truth of God, on the souls of men.”
During the 1850’s, pro-slavery arguments from the pulpit became especially strident. A preacher in Richmond exalted slavery as “the most blessed and beautiful form of social government known; the only one that solves the problem, how rich and poor may dwell together; a beneficent patriarchate.” The Central Presbyterian affirmed that slavery was “a relation essential to the existence of civilized society.” By 1860, Southern preachers felt comfortable advising their parishioners that “both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of time.”
Same for politicians:
William Harris, Mississippi’s commissioner to Georgia, explained that Lincoln’s election had made the North more defiant than ever. As Harris saw things, “Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.” Lincoln and his followers, he stated, aimed to “overturn and strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races.” For Harris, the choice was clear. Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.”
More to the point, he noted, abolition meant “the turning loose upon society, without the salutary restraints to which they are now accustomed, more than four millions of a very poor and ignorant population, to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.”
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/why-non-slavehol....
(Am agreeing point that, unfortunately, slave holding was considered morally good once upon a time… a biological fact, even!)
IP allows authors to require values of content to be preserved, recognized, and financially rewarded(in one-time or recurring payments).
In the absence of IP, printing companies can take manuscripts and contents to profit off of copies free-for-all style, bankrupting manuscript writers.
However, it was NOT designed to protect interest of multinational megacorporates, causing individual contributors to be ignored and paid for presence in its making than input in the product; such use of IP is basically a polar opposite of its intent.
We should stop allowing corporates to take ownership of IPs.
J.K. Rowling enjoying her life is fine, that is intellectual property as intended. “(C)Disney” or “(C)2023 Electronic Arts. All Rights Reserved.” is not. Those latter cases is how and where IP laws are not working as intended.
Was Amazon being a patent troll patenting single-click-to-purchase? Was Apple a troll in patenting Swipe to Unlock? They were using those patents in their products.
On the other hand is the Tolkien Estate patent trolls? They're not producing anything new.)
If I have a dozen patents, and some company wants to buy them from me, is that any different to me selling my company? Surely I can sell my assets?
The root issue are not "patent trolls". Being sued by Amazon is no less disruptive than by Trolls r US.
The root issue is the nature of the patents being issued.
The root of copyright issues are (mostly) not about actual copyright, but the length of copyright.
Which isn't to say that established players don't also use them to create moats around technology of interest, or that the nature of certain patents doesn't lend them to abuse. They could, for example, require that the thing which makes the patent 'novel' also be 'patentable subject matter' for example, rather than letting one patent some novel software running on a non-novel computer and meet the standard one piece at a time.
Also I wasn't aware that Tolkien or his estate had any patents. Copyrights, surely, but patents? That's surprise me.
The other issues are getting worse over time. Lack of first sale doctrine. DRM preventing fair use. That Aereo thing where you're not allowed to rent a preconfigured antenna and recorder from someone else.
It seems like a good balance between private monopoly and public interest for the shirts of artistic works copyright protects.
Just on that example. I think Amazon were fine to get a monopoly (in USA) on commercial implementation of one-click. But realistically it's worth a couple of years at most of monopoly for something which arises naturally out of the progress of the web, which Amazon rode the wave of (and contributed to). Locking that up for 20 years doesn't serve society; it's clearly anti-democratic [ie against the best interests of society as a whole] to have that extended term for business methods/software.
In this case it's trivial to work around, but that's not true of all 'small idea' patents.
This is if course my personal opinion, unrelated to my employment.
But who benefits from that other than Amazon when, as you say, it arose naturally. Does anyone think one-click purchase is something that would never have existed if not for Amazon?
Later it was expanded to keep poor countries and people from affording medicine.
All enforced by threat of economic sanctions with the full backing of the US armed forces.
Reading on the history of copyright would be a good start before perpetuating misconceptions.
In reality (c)opywrong and patent law does the opposite. It promotes the collection of money and power to the 1% to the detriment of the progress of science and useful arts.
Without copyright, and especially century long Mickey Mouse copyright, it's easier to open your own smaller amusement park that competes with Disneyland, this will employ a lot of people outside LA or Orlando area. Plus I will still buy my games and movies from reputable sources that are fair to content creators. If some poor college students can't afford that, maybe it's good they can get a break.
Is anything humans do natural? The only thing that can make something unnatural, so far as we understand it, is human intervention. Insofar as we conceive of unnaturalness as a recognizable quality of phenomena, it is more acute when the humans responsible are more sophisticated in their methods. We can easily observe a very large difference between the primitiveness of human society when it created the ownership of things and the much more advanced culture that devised what we now call intellectual property. From this construction of what is natural and what is not, we clearly find that intellectual property is much less "natural", though there is still the necessity of accepting that "natural" can be a meaningful idea at all.
Off the top of my mind, with a solely European view the Venetians moved glass production to Murano in the 13th century at least partially to make a monopoly on luxury glass. World History was awhile ago but other restrictions on technology transfer existed by at least 800 CE and probably in a limited sense well before 1000 BCE.
Patent was invented to break the guilds. A guild member could reveal a technology publicly, and get a 10 year right to use it. This was to make progress go faster, as guilds kept technology secret.
If someone says something in public then I have the right to say it. A way to get around this is by making every viewing of copyrighted material a private contract. e.g. "You can only own a license for personal use of this movie if pay and agree not to share it." But, if somebody does break that contract and shares the movie publicly, going only by natural rights everyone who watched it would be able to share. Since book publishers didn't like this they lobbied for our current "unnatural" copyright laws.
Why people don't like this now generally falls into three camps with some overlap 1) People who want free books, movies and software. 2) People who want all books, movies and software to be libre. 3) People who don't want the government to create a protected class of license holders, for various reasons (anticommunism, traditionalism etc.)
Imagine a world where every human has access to all ideas, papers, books, thoughts. That’ll empower every human being who has access to it.
We need to find other ways to compensate authors and creators.
Not so sure about the monarchy thing, nominally yes, but we're certainly moving to renting everything content-related, and even back to political and corporate feudalism in many aspects, we might as well be peasants whose feudal lords own everything...
with the concept of 1%ers and how imbalanced the wealth distribution is, it doesn't really seem like it's much different than the days of feudal lords. it just seems like we've been tricked into thinking there was a middle class to keep the revolting to a minimum.
Less and less people can even affort to own a home. The has been very little reduction in the average work week and the retirement age is going up in most countries. Do you think e.g. the people currently protesting in France are doing so because they are satisfied with their lives?
Its over 100 years old but still very relevant today. Understanding how things have not changed in that time was powerful in helping me form opinions on what should change.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philant...
Dont be shitty to people and listen to their voice are thing that any group of children playing may come up with them selves.
Those same children will copy each other and build on ideas each other have.
Thi child who demands no one can play a game or any derivative because they came up with it first, well, they are just not very nice.
I guess you must believe you have some special ideas that you didnt get from anyone else at all, not based on any of you experiences and conversations with others that we all should pay you to use or refine (or even just repeat). And that you think it right to force these kinds of delusions on your children to stop them growing up stupid and naive?
Not my experience at all. There's always a leader, and there's always a bully, and - if you're lucky - they are not the same kid. If you're unlucky, the whole group is a shitshow of gruesome sadism and "playing" that can lead to serious injury and death.
I mean, that's obviously anecdotal, but if children were so rational to invent things like human rights, why would we need caretakers and teachers?
When you experienced bullies etc. did you not have someone you could talk to that would agree the person was being shitty?
the idea that you can own an idea is not something that has an obvious link to basic issues that arise from existance of people, humam rights and democracy are.
Just because some people are shitty doesnt mean we should lower the bar.
There are some reasons for IP but they should not derive from owning an idea.
And I think that's an important development to keep in mind when arguing against something like intellectual property, because these debates also frequently shift to battles over words instead of realities.
We have to analyse each law on its own merit.
Property is an unnatural, made up construct.
> that will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today.
Maybe, by just asserting untestable claims about future opinions isn’t an argument.
> If we are going to allow it and penalize people who are doing natural human things like sharing with friends, there has to be a specific benefit to society in every instance.
That’s a valid preference. I disagree, I think that a system of property law which provides net benefit in aggregate is adequate, requiring each individual exercise of property rights to be a net benefit in specific is too much overhead.
> For example, pay taxes on copyrights and patents, increasing every year to reflect disturbance caused to society.
I’d rather have both have short, free terms with copyright extendable by a tax, unless you are going to have a more general property tax than just on patents. But note that taxing property isn’t a sign that it is particularly “made up”, real property and some items of tangible personal property also have property taxes.
Why allow extension at all?
The initial term serves as a societal "thank you for that cool idea". I'm not sure I agree that financial success should mean society continues to award you exclusive rights to the idea.
Applying modern intellectual property law to "base" inventions illustrates how ridiculous it is. Should we be paying a tithe to the descendants of the person that built the first wheel? Would humanity have been better off if it had prevented anyone other than that individual from building wheels without their express permission? The answer is clearly no. That individual benefited personally from their invention and from the improvements to efficiency in the rest of their society. Restricting that would only have served to impede further innovation, prosperity, and quality of life.
This way you can set the base copyright duration shorther than you could otherwise without people complaining that some works take a while to become profitable.
That said, I agree that it isn't neccesarily the best idea is it predominantly benefits the already well off who can better afford to gamble on the copyright extension fees.
Personally I think zero copyright is probably the best since society benefits from sharing and remixes from day one. Look at how quickly memes propagate and consider if copyright was actually enforced there. Now consider if the could have the same creative mobility for the kinds of works where copyright is enforced.
But I also don't see zero copyright as attainable within my lifetime as it would upend so many business models. Shorter copyrights (with or without extensions) are much more realistically attainable as for most copyright holders it might change the equation a bit but won't require them to immediately overthink their funding.
If everyone freely creates copies of what I produce, because they can, I can’t go buy things that can’t be easily replicated, like food or shelter.
If IP is free for everyone, what do we do with all the people who need to live solely by producing IP?
Additionally, we must keep in mind in those debates that piracy causing loss of revenue has never been proven and is an urban legend.
There’s also a moral component to all this.
Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.
No that's not, that's an urban legend, feel free to point me to some aggregated research studies proving this, the copyright lobbies never managed to prove that during multiple decades.
Repeating something over and over again on TV by paid lobbyist doesn't make it true, you have to prove it.
> Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.
That's debatable at best.
That’s just how the math works out. Same as any other form of theft.
Then in economics, free is different from any other price (even 1 cent), they have different behaviour and cannot be used interchangeably as demonstrated again and again during research. So no, your example is wrong, those people wouldn't have bought the song anyway and the total revenue from those people would be zero.
As a result, your argumentation is flawed. The 1000 "pirated" copies were never copies that you had. Even in a world where you could magically prevent all sharing of information you would not have that many more copies sold.
Mislabeling (lying) is not a good way to start an argument.
In fact, a lot of masterpieces we have from that period would have been illegal under current IP law because they were the result of a lot of iteration on the same concepts by different artists.
Not that I support current copyright law, but I do see that it brings some good. That good just doesn't outweigh the bad.
Ownership of land is an unnatural, made up construct. In contrast to intellectual creations, land is limited. Therefore, granting ownership of land to a person is literally robbing other people of this land.
So is a "right to life" in a world where nature is red in tooth and claw, but it is an extremely useful unnatural, made-up construct.
All laws are ideas had by people and backed by collective (or in some regimes, concentrated) force.
This ruling is not about the emergency library at all. It's a ruling that controlled digital lending (one physical copy backing each digital copy lent out) is illegal.
I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries.
I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.
Did you mean 2020? Or did they spike before the pandemic really started?
I also occasionally let him have a little bit of Libby or scratch time (which I deem "educational") before going to school or before bed. (Everything is contingent on behavior.)
Aside from minecraft/pokemon stuff, he typically reads a mix of kids graphic novels and books. Including Tristan Strong, Artimis Fowl, Wings of Fire, Dogman. He's also read Harry Potter, some Terry Pratchett, and Tolkien. He first read the Lord of the Rings in the summer between first and second grade, which blew my mind (it was middle or high school or me). So I don't really worry about stuff like the ratio of graphic novels to textual books.
Those books are licensed to the libraries by the publishers. The introduction of the opinion here explains how it works:
> This dispute concerns the way libraries lend ebooks. Public and academic libraries in the United States spend billions of dollars each year obtaining print books and ebooks for their patrons to borrow for free. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶ 113. Libraries usually buy their print books from publishers or wholesalers. Id. ¶ 114. Copies of ebooks, however, are typically not bought but licensed to libraries from publishers through distributors called “aggregators.” Id. ¶ 117. The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53..., page 3 (emphasis added).
If I rightly own a copy of a book, I don’t think any court within the bounds of absurdity would say I can’t make a digital copy for myself because that’s how I prefer to consume it. Being allowed to lend one finite form but not another equivalent one is definitely something law or license might specify, but that doesn’t mean it makes any kind of sense.
"myself" being the operative word here.
you can make 100 copies for yourself. what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).
the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession, which replication would circumvent.
I’m pretty sure I can do that.
> the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession
I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
Any individual in IA’s position could do this without fear of legal scrutiny. An organization doing it is under scrutiny not because there’s actual, meaningful copyright violation happening but because they systemized a thing no reasonable person would object to individuals doing.
Not legally.
> I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
This is the part that is not true. For example, you are free to transcribe a book onto a parchement and read it that way, and store the parchment separately from the book for archival purposes, and keep the parchement even if the original book gets destroyed.
However, this is a limited exception to copyright. You are not in fact allowed, at any point before or after the original copy is destroyed, to lend or re-sell the parchment you created. That parchment will forever be an unauthorized copy, but one that you are allowed to use in certain limited ways.
The only wrinkle is that, at least in the EU, when you acquire an authorized digital copy of a work, you are allowed to lend or sell that copy as long as you don't retain access to it during the lending/after the sale. This is allowed even though technically you are technically creating a new copy of the digital work and destroying your own afterwards, but this is an exception specific to digital realms, it can't be extended to digital copies you make of a phyisical work.
Inspired by the fact that my emulation of Link's Awakening to play on a screen I could see is technically legal since we had a cartridge stuffed away in a drawer. But for 10-15 years that cartridge lived in a limbo land of 'we used to have that, it might still be around somewhere...'
Basically, the only thing you are legally allowed to sell is the exact copy you bought of a physical representation of a work, assuming it was created by an authorized entity. You do not legally own an abstract copy of the idealized work, you own a physical object which happens to represent a copy of that work.
Note that this is in fact very much how most people would think of copyright. If I buy a book and someone steals it from me, or it is there in my house and it burns down, I don't have some right to now obtain another physical representation of that novel free of charge, or to obtain a copy made by a friend with a xerox. My sole right was to that one physical copy I bought, and that no longer exists.
>Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
>So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect libraries to do.
>To counter this, publishers (and their supporters, which unfortunately include some authors) argue that (1) this interferes with the market for licensed ebooks, and (2) that there is a real difference in lending out the digital scans: that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do.
Whether a copy of a work is fair use turns on, amongst other things, the effect of the copy on the potential market for the original. The article acknowledges this.
Controlled Digital Lending competes directly with the licensing scheme publishers have for library ebooks. The fair use argument was always doomed to fail.
The article then completely ignores the copyright argument and tries to equate CDL with libraries loaning out their physical copies. This is completely absurd, since libraries do not distribute duplicates of their physical books and so do not even enter the realm of copyright.
If libraries were systematically distributing duplicates of their existing books they would be sued for copyright infringement.
There may be a question of definition here. Do you mean that they have to lend it, but they cannot give it away?
They intend to say "libraries do not distribute duplicates of purchased books; they distribute the originals".
Unfortunately the word "copy" could also mean "the books purchased by the library". Of course the library distributes purchased books. They just don't scan the books, print fascimiles of those books on new paper, and then distribute those prints they made themselves.
I'm not convinced fair use is the strongest argument in IA's case. But the idea that lending ebook copies can't be fair use simply because it competes with publishers' ebook licensing schemes seems like a misreading of how fair use is typically applied.
Of course other fair use considerations factor in, but the market impact for a specific format isn't a death blow against reproductions of a work, generally speaking.
It's not impossible for a case to win when competing against a licensing scheme, but it is very, very, very hard.
I don't see the argument that this is "distribution" any more than regular (obnoxious) ebook lending is.
The courts have gone back and forth on this issue, and I would expect this ruling to be appealed by either side if they had lost.
Nothing. Which is why losing was inevitable.
Then truly they would be lending only a copy, which was never legal to begin with.
I thought the IA was in a bad place before, but they got very shown up in court.
Wow, so they're arguing that the destruction of the sold good is implicit in the sale, and that preventing that is therefore illegal.
Broadly speaking, physical books last much longer than ebooks have been proven to. With preservation measures, you can get 100s of years out of a single book copy, but even without most books will last for decades unless something catastrophic happens or someone destroys them on purpose. I have several books from the 1800s that weren't cared for at all (picked up at an estate sale) and they're perfectly serviceable and would be fine if I rebound them.
So I have books from the 1860s that are still usable. Given how the digital world has developed, the odds of someone's Kindle or ePub file being viable in 2180 is exceptionally low. In the same way that playing old video games can be a hassle, I'd be shocked if we're still using the same files and formats in 160 years. (Outside of us weirdo archivists of course).
So, I guess you just don’t own anything you buy anymore? Like what if I want to lend a tool to someone, and the tool manufacturer wants to rent their tools out? Is that also illegal?
What if the tool contains software?
What if reasonable use of the tool requires accessing a print manual? A pdf manual?
Edit: Reading the ruling, IA should have argued they are simply format shifting a single copy that they own. I wonder if they did make this argument, and then the judge conveniently ignored it (then lied in the summary ruling, when they say IA made no other arguments in their defense), or if IA’s lawyers screwed up.
That's how you digitally send a copy of a book.
You're saying something similar to "you wouldn't download a car".
It's applying without considering it.
The digital book isn't being kept at the old location because there is no digital book in the physical book.
It's the only way to transfer a single copy of a book without destroying the physical copy.
Judges should consider stuff like this and it's a disappointing ruling.
But go on...
The technicality that they keep a copy of the book while it’s being lent isn’t really at issue here at all. It’s not because there are two copies, it’s because there are three or more copies, given to two or more parties at the same time. It has become “distribution” in the eyes of copyright law, beyond the lending analogy.
I don't know why companies keep trying this. MP3.com, Aereo, etc. The precedent is clear.
In the case of a physical object needing to temporarily go digital, it needs to be sent digitally and the records kept, and of course the physical copy has to be kept.
In the case of the GPL there's no physical copy and thus there's no need to consider how to move from one form to the other.
To require that a physical object never be used digitally is bad for society.
Isn't "fair use" restricted to (a) short portions of a work, (b) used for specific purposes, such as education or criticism?
There are practical differences between the two, which mean that the law probably should treat them differently. I expect a lot of HN have difficulty dealing with that because they think "but they both contain the same information".
It reminds me of people trying to encode books into prime numbers or the digits or pi or whatnot to "get around" copyright. Fundamentally missing the point.
Nor does IA’s promise not to lend simultaneously its
lawfully acquired print copies and its unauthorized reproductions
help its case. As an initial matter, IA has not kept its promise.
Although the Open Library’s print copies of the Works in Suit are
non-circulating, IA concedes that it has no way of verifying
whether Partner Libraries remove their physical copies from
circulation after partnering with IA. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶¶ 495-496. To
the contrary, IA knows that some Partner Libraries do not remove
the physical books from their shelves, and even if a Partner
Library puts a physical book into a non-circulating reference
collection, it could be read in the library while the ebook
equivalent is checked out. Id. ¶¶ 494, 497. IA also does not
inform Partner Libraries when an ebook in its collection is
checked out, and Partner Libraries do not tell IA when their
physical copies are circulating. Id. ¶ 498. IA admits it has
never taken action against a Partner Library that did not
suppress circulation properly. Id. ¶ 499.
But even if all those things weren’t true, or important, it’s profound that there’s enough collective incentive to go after IA, instead of say corporations violating GPL, or the hedgies who created “temporary” artificial supply of stocks (which shares a similar “overprovisioning” aspect, except they’re fraudulent at massive scale).
When IP laws existed to make sure authors could be compensated people broadly supported them. The perception has changed (for many reasons), to where people broadly see IP laws as an enabler for corporate greed more than being about fair compensation for authors. (See Disney not paying owed royalties, for example.)
We can either have "good copyright" that the public sees as reasonable, or we can have rampant piracy and the consequences thereof. The villains of the piece are those who deliberately perpetuate an unsustainable system out of greed (and I am not talking about authors and publishers trying to get paid for the work they've done).
It was always from the very beginning a way to protect profits, that was the primary intent of copyright law, to give the creator of a work the exclusive right to make the money from the work before others are allowed to take the content and sell it for their own profit. Yes the length has become crazy long, and yes the law limits free (as in beer) access to information, but that hasn’t changed the reason for it’s being at all. It’s not really a “concession” either, more like it was intentionally balanced to provide enough time for people to make profits (which is what economically encourages creative work), while being short enough to allow works to reach the public over time.
1. IA actually buying a physical copy (or as many copies as they plan on simultaneously making available to borrowers) of the book. 2. After scanning the physical copy, destroying it, and documenting same.
Then as long as they guarantee that they only loan out as many copies as they physically had (before destroying them) there's no question of simultaneous usage.
I like the IA, but I’m happy this was the screw up. It should greatly weaken the precedent this ruling creates.
Most importantly here, information falls under "means of production", so under communism it should be free.
Freedom of information under capitalism is (as everything) a discussion about money.
I admire your optimism, regarding the copyrights future. Fingers crossed.
My point being: as technology marches on the ageing concept of "owning" entirely fungible digital material becomes less and less valid. It is already at a stage meaninglessness is flirting with it in a new way daily and that will continue.
Really, we need to let it go.
I would start a webtorrent+ipfs+i2p site in Iceland just to get around this insane perpetual monopoly on difficult-to-find, old shit that doesn't have a market but publishers keep locked away.
And you don’t need to do anything at all; all of these books have been freely available on IRC for years.
I found this chart interesting, and unexpectedly complicated: https://www.belmont.edu/legal/pdf/Public-Domain-Chart.pdf
Based on that I think a heuristic of 100 years is broadly correct.
Human knowledge remains entirely unaffected by this ruling.
Libgen?
And with only narrow exceptions that probably don't apply here, this act of circumvention violates 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1)(A)[1] unless the copyright owner has authorized the process (as they do with licensed playback devices and software).
Redbox tried this theory several years ago when they were trying to launch their film streaming service, and failed for the same reasons.
That’s not really true. One issue described explicitly in the decision is that the lending is mostly uncontrolled, and worse there’s evidence of it the defendant was aware of. The second issue is that the defendant isn’t using the first sale doctrine, their defense is fair use. Presumably the whole reason they decided to argue fair use is because they knew they weren’t adhering to the lending analogy, because they were aware they were effectively distributing copies, not just lending them.
That's not what I read in the linked article, specifically:
Regarding "IA’s promise not to lend simultaneously": "IA has not kept its promise. Although the Open Library’s print copies of the Works in Suit are non-circulating, IA concedes that it has no way of verifying whether Partner Libraries remove their physical copies from circulation after partnering with IA…. To the contrary, IA knows that some Partner Libraries do not remove the physical books from their shelves"
As I understand it, this case exists because the IA was not keeping its promise anymore and made an error of judgement by breaking the 1:1 ratio without any legal argumentation or even a logical reason for it. It was said at the time already, but the obviousness, whether something as important as the wayback machine's owner should compete with the pirate bay for market share on illegal ebooks, and the use of (my/our) donated money on the ensuing legal nonsense, is a different discussion...
If these underlying facts and circumstances were different, such as if someone tries this concept again but keeps their promise and implements it correctly, the same ruling cannot be passed because it's not the same situation. It would have to be tried again and it might (or might not) swing the other way, at least that is my general understanding of legal systems around the world.
Perhaps it would also be different in another country whence ExampleBooks Ltd could operate legally, that will depend in part on whether the copyright alliance pact (I forgot the name) has provisions letting signatories (afaik that's every nation you might want to live in) make exceptions for things like this.
Any idea if this means IA has to shut down lending by when? Tomorrow? Next month?
Any chances for appeal here? Or any chance they relocate the books division to another country or something?
It's just so sad if something so valuable is forced to go "poof". A real loss.
Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA.
The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
> The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords
The opinion (p46) defers this matter,
> At this point, IA’s statutory remittance argument is premature. IA may renew the argument in connection with the formation of an appropriate judgment.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
Try Library Genesis: https://libgen.is/
Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.
I cannot picture why blockchain seems like a value ad here, there's way easier ways to synchronize collections of data, no global consensus necessary
It's not the books and PDFs that are being updated, it's the collection that needs to be updated.
A blockchain is far easier to manage and far more censorship resistant.
It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...
And if you're not accepting payments there's especially little reason for you to need to care.
Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned.
What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic.
But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
> It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Do keep in mind that pruned nodes are a thing.
I guess I'm going to have A LOT more interlibrary loans in my future.
https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/16394247772647219...
The Internet Archive very well may be the only way to know a lot of important things from the past -- things that libraries used to keep track of but can't in the internet age.
I understand not allowing certain things to be archived, but the tweets of a public person, especially one who works as a news-maker, should certainly be in the allowed list.
E: And just to be clear, this was before said writer set their tweets to private.
---
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://twitter....
Your opponent doesn’t play by these rules.
What's most tragic about it to me is that that vast majority of works affected are "zombie" copyright works that have no actual commercial value. Someone, somewhere holds the copyright, but no one has sold a copy in years or decades. For the sake of protecting the tiny sliver of commercially valuable works, access to all of this other knowledge will be lost.
Has there been any kind of movement towards a law that would automatically put zombie works into the public domain?
It really doesn't seem unreasonable that if a book, film, recording, or video game hasn't been generally available for sale over the past 5 or 10 years it becomes public domain. Use it or lose it, in other words.
Although it might really only apply to past works. Because while physical books go out of print, e-books will probably be available forever, no?
Most of Europe was going to do this at some point but the photographer's unions pushed back in very strong terms so they were often watered down.
Most of Europe was going to do this at some point but the photographer's unions pushed back in very strong terms so they were often watered down.
I would argue the artist still deserves to retain value, regardless of the size of it unless they give it up. If it expires, sure it's public domain.
Given the very large proportion of orphaned works, a very large proportion of living authors don't think their existing corpus has any residual value to them.
A writer/artist/whatever can make some money off a work for two decades and then their work goes to the society that enabled its creation.
-- Signed, Not an Artist.
(Most artists are paid an absolute pittance for their work. Most work at least one other job. Almost none make even a basic income. I feel artists should have the benefit of the income from their work for their natural life, unless they waive their rights. That said, companies have sorely abused and influenced copyright law to the point that the advantage is highly asymmetric in their favour and that certainly needs to be addressed).
Also, fuck you for assuming I've never made any art. I'd be fine if anything I've drawn, painted, or written became public domain after twenty years. If I wanted to sell it that's plenty of time. Works entering public domain doesn't preclude me from selling the physical artifact even after its public domain. It doesn't preclude me from making new art to sell. A musician's work becoming public domain doesn't preclude them performing it for pay.
It would be ridiculous if twenty years from now some poor bastard got sued into destitution because they downloaded some dumb thing I wrote twenty years ago.
Pretty sure the plumber is getting (very) decently paid for their work. Pretty sure the people who planned and installed the sewage system were well remunerated.
Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
> Also, fuck you for assuming I've never made any art.
And thank you for speaking up on behalf of all artists and kindly telling us all that we should expect 20 years worth of almost nothing out of efforts, instead of a lifetime.
> It would be ridiculous if twenty years from now some poor bastard got sued into destitution because they downloaded some dumb thing I wrote twenty years ago.
So licence it CC-0. Or release it to the Public Domain. Knock yourself out.
These are generally not considered desirable jobs so why are you so sure they are paid their due? After all you are using the result of their labour every day, so why are you unwilling to pay more.
> Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
Medical costs don't affect artists more than others and in some countries we have come up with other ways to pay for them collectively.
> And thank you for speaking up on behalf of all artists and kindly telling us all that we should expect 20 years worth of almost nothing out of efforts, instead of a lifetime.
And you can speak for all artsts then? Of course the idea that only copyright holders should have a say about copyright policy is ridiculous in the first place - it has always been a deal between creators and everyone else. If one "side" (and really, these aren't separate sides but mostly overlapping groups) feels that they are getting less out of the deal then the other side can't just say "but I want to be paid forever".
> So licence it CC-0. Or release it to the Public Domain. Knock yourself out.
Or argue for copyright reform. We don't owe it to you to support your choice to make a living off of art - you could always work as a plumber if you thing they are very decently paid.
So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous. Copyrights lasting as long as patents gives an artist plenty of time to monetize their work. It then becomes public domain to serve the public that gave them that monopoly in the first place.
Billions of dollars changed hands every year due to patent licensing. If two decades wasn't enough time to monetize something that wouldn't happen.
The length of copyright protections in the US are ludicrous. It's especially egregious as the company that's done the most to extend copyrights, Disney, made their fortune absolutely pillaging public domain fairy tales. Thousands of pop songs have been riffing Johann Pachelbel for nearly a century.
There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
1. Why should the plumber be paid-per-flush? A toilet is infrastructure, a permenant part of a house. You may as well argue that we should pay a carpenter, a landlord, or a bank to use our front doors.
2. I actually don't have a flushing toilet. The compost toilet I have was not installed by a plumber.
> As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous.
When a plumber installs a toilet, they get paid. When a musician releases a song they might hope to get enough money for a beer, if they're lucky. Nobody requires art. Try and get a house plan through planning without a toilet. So plumbers and other trades have a certain expectation of being able to make a living. Artists do not, and the very, very, very that are lucky enough to just make a minnimum wage are doing better that 99% of their peers.
I do art too. Yeah, I'm never going to get money for it, and I do it for my own entertainment and my friends. If society values my art, and wants me to release it out to people, you better believe you'll be paying for it. Plumbers don't install toilets as recreation. They do so to get paid.
Artists have the option, at any time, of releasing their works to the public domain. If they felt strongly that they should profit from their works for only 20 years, they have the absolute power to make that happen.
> There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
Here, at least we agree.
As an author myself, I think the proper copyright term is ~15 years from the copyright inception. (Disclosure: I give my stuff away for free online--people buy paper copies if the want them, so I'm not a publisher's idea of a model author.)
A relative handful of publishers/authors will lose out (e.g. Dune, Van Gogh), but the public domain will be well-served. 15 years seems like a good balance point.
Hard disagree. We have chosen to allow the artist to retain a monopoly for a limited time because we though it would encoruage the cration of more art. The only valid argument for copyright is one that shows it benefits society as a whole.
<https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/>
Specifically:
"We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers.... We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books."
Checking a listing for a specific book ... there's still the option to log in and borrow it as I write this.
One huge thing that was drilled into my skull working for SlingTV: a work comprises the actual data and the medium to which it is affixed. When 11 million people used our DVRs to record the super bowl, we had to store 11 million copies on disc. Of the same exact footage. That we ourselves originally broadcast to them. Our lawyers told us not even to try messing with this. Don't try to share copies they said, we'll get sued off of our faces.
So I'm not surprised that a judge ruled this way when looking at the facts. From a media person's perspective, digitally copying the work that was in print is making a second copy. Whether or not you think this is dumb, it's the reality under which we work. I've learned to be very careful about things like this.
The reason you were allowed to store 11 million copies is because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled[1] in 1984 that you were permitted to make copies of TV shows to watch later on your VCR. And this was reputedly because some of the supreme court judges had VCRs — which had been spreading lightning fast at the time — and understood the concept and wanted to find or create a legal argument to permit such copying.
Just imagine if VCR adoption had been slower, and that the judges had not yet tried out that newfangled invention for home recording, and they had ruled that personal copies weren't allowed. Then today, you'd have been making 11 million illegal copies. It's amusing to think about whether making a single copy available to 11 million users would have been much less legal risk in that scenario.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
If you provide a recording service, you had better be as close as you possibly can to that fact matrix. Any hint that it's you, and not your users, who are doing the copying, would attract the wolves.
Also, this focus on who is doing the copying has been looked at enough in different jurisdictions around the world that it's probably not worth the risk testing it. Germany (Save.TV, Shift.TV), Japan (Rokuraku II), Australia (Optus TV Now). Don't quote me on these, this is off the cuff.
IA can and should lobby for copyright law to change. But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
There's an app for that.
Yes. And they can lend those books to people due to the first-sale doctrine, which allows the legal owners of a work to lease, lend or sell it without the copyright owner's permission.
the judge said the conversion to digital was not transformative, so I don't see why it should constitute another work versus the original one
The first sale doctrine (which libraries depend on) says you're allowed to to sell, rent out or give away your own physical property, even if that property happens to be an embodiment of a copyrighted work. It doesn't say anything about it being legal to make another copy of a work, and then distribute it while you keep the original one for yourself.
Copyrighted works only show snippets, and publisher-enabled limited previews.
It does when there is disagreement over what constitutes the greater good.
Is this facetious? What constitutes the greater good is the entire point of government. Many things you think are obvious are lines another would die to prevent--this is the basis of civics.
1) an elected legislature that's supposed to consider the greater good?
2) a generally non-elected judiciary that is supposed to consider the greater good to override the legislature?
3) a hopefully-benevolent dictator to consider the greater good?
Obviously any of these methods can fail; the first of them is the easiest to "edit," as it were. Things like term limits would likely improve it, though.
Instead, few elections are competitive and the representation happens through the lobbying process.
In short, the accountability story we're taught isn't true and money talks more than votes. It's this bait and switch that has the unintended consequence of fueling populism and the disbelief that representatives represent us, and that institutions work.
Here's a dumb idea. Create and advocate for a congressional proportional representation interstate compact in the same vein as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[1]. Then advocate for pooled campaign financing as a function of proportional representation[2].
The nice thing about interstate compacts is that they can eventually capture a majority given election variability over time. They divide and conquer the problem into actionable tasks that effectively aggregate.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
2. purposefully being vague. what would softmax(T>>1) look like, for instance?
I implore you to do your homework, but I will tell you the compact would only serve to reduce the voice of the people (that is to say, reduce democracy) rather than increase them.
The United States of America is exactly what it says on the tin: A Union of States. Each State is equal to all the others, united somewhat loosely as a Federal Republic.
With regards to the consequences of the Compact, it would destroy the democratic right of the people of each State to decide, for themselves, who will represent their State in the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The President of the United States represents the States in the Union and is elected by the States, the States in turn determine who they elect as President by respectively asking for their people to vote who their State should vote for.
You might ask who in the Executive Branch of government represents the peoples of each State directly, that role falls upon the Governor of each respective State.
The Compact would reduce the voice of the people and the sovereignties of States by removing their right to decide, for themselves, who to elect for President of the United States. People from one State would be able to overrule the people of another State, and vice versa. You're in California and voted for Bob? Tough shit, someone in North Dakota voted for Alex and your vote quite literally does not matter.
Citing and supporting the Compact indicates you have no understanding of who, and more accurately what, the President of the United States represents. It indicates you have no understanding what powers and rights each State and their respective peoples hold. If you are in a larger State, it indicates you have no care for what your fellow Americans and Statesmen think; if you are in a smaller State, it indicates you are fine with forfeiting your right to vote in deference to the nationwide majority.
If you sincerely think the Compact would improve democracy in the United States of America, at best you are misguided and were misled, and at worst you are disingenuous with ulterior motives.
> The United States of America is exactly what it says on the tin: A Union of States. Each State is equal to all the others, united somewhat loosely as a Federal Republic.
This is simply counter-exampled with the proportional representation of the US House. If states were equal then population would play no part in representation.
> With regards to the consequences of the Compact, it would destroy the democratic right of the people of each State to decide, for themselves, who will represent their State in the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The President of the United States represents the States in the Union and is elected by the States, the States in turn determine who they elect as President by respectively asking for their people to vote who their State should vote for.
Again untrue. This doesn't reflect reality. People don't behave like that or believe that. Most people are in fact in favor of abolishing the electoral college[1].
> You might ask who in the Executive Branch of government represents the peoples of each State directly, that role falls upon the Governor of each respective State.
I'm not asking that. We're discussing Federal elections and representation.
> The Compact would reduce the voice of the people and the sovereignties[sic] of States by removing their right to decide, for themselves, who to elect for President of the United States. People from one State would be able to overrule the people of another State, and vice versa. You're in California and voted for Bob? Tough shit, someone in North Dakota voted for Alex and your vote quite literally does not matter.
This literally describes how Electoral College operates. It's a well known point of discussion when critiquing the electoral college. Surely, you must be familiar with that line of reasoning.
> Citing and supporting the Compact indicates you have no understanding of who, and more accurately what, the President of the United States represents. It indicates you have no understanding what powers and rights each State and their respective peoples hold. If you are in a larger State, it indicates you have no care for what your fellow Americans and Statesmen think; if you are in a smaller State, it indicates you are fine with forfeiting your right to vote in deference to the nationwide majority.
This confuses a personal subjective experience with the objective truth of reality. You've extrapolated a genuine question and comment into a malevolent and sinister plot. I truly urge you to find the best in people.
> If you sincerely think the Compact would improve democracy in the United States of America, at best you are misguided and were misled, and at worst you are disingenuous with ulterior motives.
Questioning people's character and motives distracts from productive discussion.
Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine meeting someone who had this take. Can you point me in the direction of Constitutional scholars who share the same opinions you do?
I urge you to familiarize yourself with The Federalist Papers : No. 68[2]. It covers the motivations for the construction of the electoral college all which are not reflected in your assessment of it. If you wish to continue belaboring this point, please just quote from No68 where it agrees with you.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/08/05/majority-of...
2. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-61-70#s-lg-box...
This is a compromise because not all States have the same population (obviously). The Senate, where all States have equal representation, decides matters which are considered de facto of higher importance such as government appointments and diplomatic matters, among many others. All bills must also pass both the House and the Senate, meaning a bill must pass the test of equal representation voting; larger States cannot simply force their way through, especially if smaller States come together.
>Again untrue. This doesn't reflect reality. People don't behave like that or believe that. Most people are in fact in favor of abolishing the electoral college[1].
Abolishing the Electoral College (which in my humble opinion is rooted in ignorance and party politics more than anything) has nothing to do with the fact that the President of the United States represents the States and is elected by the States. The Governors are who represent the peoples of the respective States in the Executive branch of government.
Congress will act as a failsafe in the event the Electoral College deadlocks, and in such an event the House will vote for President-elect along State lines with the Representatives of each State voting in unison with fellow State Congressmen as a bloc, just like the Electoral College, with each State bloc getting 1 vote. The Senate will likewise vote per-Senator on who will become Vice President-elect.
It is very clear that the intent is the Presidency (and Vice Presidency) will be decided by the States, with or without the Electoral College by an equal representation vote. The Presidency is voted in at the pleasure of the States, derived from the pleasure of the people of each State respectively.
>I'm not asking that. We're discussing Federal elections and representation.
The President of the United States does not represent the people, at least not directly. In that context, you are in fact asking that because you, by citing and supporting the Compact, are arguing the President of the United States should represent the people directly rather than the United States.
>This literally describes how Electoral College operates. It's a well known point of discussion when critiquing the electoral college. Surely, you must be familiar with that line of reasoning.
The Electoral College (or Congress in the event of failsafe) votes, either officially or de facto, according to the will of the people of the respective States that the Electors (or Congressmen) hail from. The Electoral College (or Congress) quite literally represents the direct will of the people in each State.
The Compact instead proposes to not represent the direct will of the people in each State, instead deferring to whatever is the majority vote of the nation as a whole.
The very nature of the Compact means that if the nationwide majority votes for Bob, then any States that voted for Alex or Charlie or Dave effectively have their votes uncounted; this is because the Electors of States whose people voted for Alex or Charlie or Dave will instead vote for Bob in absolute defiance of that State's peoples' votes for the others.
The Compact effectively legalizes unfaithful Electors answering to the will of States they do not represent.
This is an attack on the sovereignties and democracies of the States and their peoples thereof and should never be accepted, let alone tolerated.
>This confuses a personal subjective experience with the objective truth of reality. You've extrapolated a genuine question and comment into a malevolent and sinister plot. I truly urge you to find the best in people.
>Questioning people's character and motives distracts from productive discussion.
Explain yourself how the Compact would improve democracy, then. What the Compact proposes is the exact opposite: What part of deliberately defying the will of the people is supportive of democracy?
Stop focusing in on exactly how individual electors would supposedly defy things, because the point of the compact is to make electors irrelevant, and the overall outcome follows people's will perfectly fine.
Consider this: If states traded pairs of electors with each other your logic would call that defying the will of the people, even though it would change nothing about the outcome. Because now they're not voting directly based on what their state said. Your logic is wrong.
Consider another example of Federal matters being decided by votes by the States: Constitutional amendments. Amendments require ratification from 2/3rds of all the States to become part of the Constitution, not 2/3rds of the nationwide popular vote.
The Compact argues for the people of one State dictating the decision of the people of another State, in this case the question of who shall become President of the United States of America. Destroying State rights like that is not how you improve democracy.
First and foremost, the Electoral College (and Congress, whose numbers are the basis for the College's numbers) are determined by a popular vote within the respective States. The ballots in a presidential election are asking the voters "Which candidate should your State vote for?".
This means California determines by popular vote who to vote for President, likewise Wyoming. The State tallies their votes, and the State then decides according to the results who to vote for President. If the voters in California voted for Bob, California will vote for Bob in the Electoral College; if the voters in Wyoming voted for Dave, Wyoming will vote for Dave in the Electoral College.
We should also note that Nebraska and Maine both allot their Electors proportionally according to vote results, unlike all other States where the winner of the State gets all Electors.
I reiterate for emphasis: The basis for the Electoral College (and Congress) is a popular vote within the respective States.
As regards the "disproportionate voter power" itself, the Electoral College's roster of 538 Electors is derived from the following numbers in Congress:
* 435 House Representatives.
* 100 Senators.
* Equivalents of 2 "Senators" and 1 "House Representative" for the District of Columbia.
All States are guaranteed a minimum of 1 House Representative, with more allotted according to population as determined by the Census. All States are guaranteed 2 Senators. The District of Columbia has no representation in Congress (D.C. is not a State!) but is represented in the Electoral College with representation equivalent to the smallest State in the Union.
The "disproportion" comes from all States being guaranteed at least 1 House Representative and 2 Senators (this is where "all States have at least 3 Electors" comes from), and this is necessary in order to make sure that all States are represented no matter how small they are.
The ability of smaller States banding together to override a larger State is the system working as intended, it is a safeguard against a tyranny of the masses. The United State is a Union of States, not a Union of Peoples.
This indicates most of it is all politically motivated, enabled by a lack of understanding for the political system among most Americans. It's a gross violation of Chesterton's Fence, crying for the Electoral College (the "fence") to be abolished ("torn down") because who needs such a seemingly convoluted and meaningless system, amirite?
As for you specifically, you obviously still aren't understanding how American democracy is structured, no. We are a representative democracy and a federal republic. The people vote along State lines to determine delegations whom we respectively send to the Federal political table. The United States operates on Statewide Popular Votes, not nationwide popular votes, because we are a Union of individual, otherwise independent States.
That's the original reason, but it doesn't have any real benefit. Everyone knows why this fence was built. You're not specially enlightened among a bunch of fools.
But it causes people's votes for president to have different strengths, which is bad. And nudging the presidential vote up or down by 5% doesn't do jack shit against the tyranny of the masses.
It's a complication with no upsides and mild downsides.
So would my theoretical where states trade electors. So that's not enough to show that democracy has been damaged.
The process as a whole would still be democratic. The result as a whole would be based on everyone's vote with even more equality than usual.
Looking at individual electors to make an objection is not going to give you the right answer.
You are absolutely right that the States, particularly the smaller and weaker States, would have zero incentive to agree to surrender their sovereignties in deference to the other States.
The United States of America is a Union of States, and the first step to further democracy in this country is respecting the sacred fact that each State and the people within them each have the right to decide their own path. Violating their sovereignties is destructive for democracy.
Except that they already have. Each of Vermont(3), Delaware(3), Hawaii(4), Rhode Island(4), New Mexico(5), Connecticut(7), and Oregon(8) has already ratified legislation agreeing to the compact. That's seven counter examples.
I'll point out that there are in fact enough states pending ratification that will obsolete the EC should they be confirmed. In a twist of irony, a sacred duty to represent states could be foiled by state legislatures themselves.
As I recall, this is precisely how British Columbia got Sunday shopping. Stores and shopping malls broke the law repeatedly. There were fines, but Sunday shopping was popular. Eventually, public pressure led governments to legalize Sunday opening.
I didn't agree with it then and I don't fully agree with it now, but it can work.
Probably not the best example, because it's not like a sandwich is the only lunch option (the lazy one for sure), but I take your point. Migraine and no painkillers, period and no pads, sex and no condom, alcoholic and no alcohol (with risk of lethal DTs)? Too bad...
Why even do this to someone if you understood their meaning and more or less agree?
> “Didn’t realize you were low on bread and forgot to get it Saturday oh well kids are not getting a sandwich in their lunches for Monday morning school.”
It is possible to make bread. And to eat other things. And to buy school lunches. And to borrow or trade food with neighbours.
Is the low wages of retail workers less bad on the other days of the week?
It's a stupid idea and a dumb law that it only makes sense if your worker protection laws are too weak.
Provide your own answer here: why did the system which exists to exploit humans for profit do away with a free day instead of "just" passing worker protection laws? (Why did you frame it as "prevent people from overworking" instead of "prevent people from being overworked"?)
> "It's a stupid idea and a dumb law that it only makes sense if your worker protection laws are too weak."
Humans exist for more than just buying things. You may not like "A Sabbath for God" but "A day for something in life other than shopping" is an important idea. When September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks happened - great big terrorist attacks on American soil for pretty much the first time - President George Bush told Americans to "go shopping" in response. When many American teenagers grew up, they hung out at a shopping mall.
Are you not lamenting the increasing feeling that you can't go out in public without being charged to be somewhere these days? Or the gradual turning of all walks of life into advertising and subscription services? Is any pushback on it "stupid and dumb" to you?
I'm sorry I used the wrong words.
> Humans exist for more than just buying things
Yea, duh
> "A day for something in life other than shopping" is an important idea
That's fine. Why does it have to be the _same_ day for everyone? That's the stupid idea. Pass a law that says everyone must be given a full day off every week, I'm with you. Pass a law saying that day _must_ be Sunday, and I'm walking away.
Hell, pass a law that says everyone must be given three full days off every week, I'm with you. Pass a law that says you have to pay someone 3x for every hour they work beyond 30 hours, I'm with you. Pass a law that says everyone must work 9am-3pm and I'm walking away.
> Are you not lamenting the increasing feeling that you can't go out in public without being charged to be somewhere these days?
Irrelevant to the conversation, but generally, no.
> Or the gradual turning of all walks of life into advertising and subscription services?
Irrelevant to the conversation, but yea, it's a hellscape.
> Is any pushback on it "stupid and dumb" to you?
Nope.
i am actually curious how they do that in israel where the jewish law not to work on sabbath is taken much more seriously.
As those people should have same exact rights to spend leisure time with their families and friends.
And… just protection for retail workers? Is there a reason it wouldn’t apply to all workers below a certain pay range (or maybe it did, and the “no shopping” rule is just a shorthand?)
and actually, in germany for example, the rule is not that shops must be closed. you can open your shop if you can run it yourself, without any employees help.
depending on the country, saturdays can be school days, but generally nowadays, the rule extended to saturday as well, actually, with the exception of retail. it used to be that saturdays were half work days. and of national holidays are equal to sundays.
Remember when Arkansas rolled back some child labour laws? Hopefully you do, it was last week[1]. The reason why not "just do something good for workers instead" is because companies want cheaper employees with fewer options to leave, not better protections for workers.
> "Why is it Sunday? Why not Saturday?"
Great, well done, you've bikeshedded it from "mandatory day off" to "no mandatory day off" because you can't see a difference between them. Religion bad, Atheism good, therefore roll back labour protections?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/08/politics/sarah-huckabee-s...
In the United States, blue laws have historically been used to oppress religious minorities like Jews and Sabbatarian Christians.
I didn't say religion bad. I said that Sunday was chosen because of it's alignment with many Christian religions, and this is true: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law
There are many other religions that do _not_ have Sunday as a day of rest; other abrahamic religions choose Friday (Islam) or Saturday (Judaism, 7th day Adventist). Non-abrahamic religions and atheists feature further diversity.
Consider:
> California twice passed Sunday closing laws, in 1858 and in 1861. The first was found unconstitutional just five months after it was enacted. It was used to convict and imprison a Jewish clothing merchant who closed his business on Saturday, and opened it on Sunday.
( https://historycollection.com/the-random-history-of-blue-law... )
One could simply mandate that businesses offer employees one or more consistent day of rest instead of having the state pick religious winners and losers.
Gas stations were also allowed to be open although they rarely had convenience stores attached to them back then.
Is it the responsibility of the government to protect the profit opportunities of some specific people who choose to be a certain religion?
If it’s not the sabbath, then I’m intrigued and want to learn more.
Does cohesion of those families matter less?
You didn't split out essential services, and it seems dead-obvious to me that shutting those down would cause more harm than good even when you value all families exactly the same. There's no way they're saying the families of essential service providers are less important.
And it seems pretty clear they're grouping those other things in with essential services, which you could disagree with, but is a very different thing from saying those families are less important.
I am genuinely curious how a person reconciles two seemingly opposing views:
"It gives everyone a guaranteed weekly timeslot to spend time together."
where everyone is everyone except:
"except restaurants, attractions, hospitality and essential services".
I could easily give in on essential services, because a lot will ride on how broadly they are defined, but if the goal is 'family cohesion' building for everyone then as few groups should be excluded as possible ( which also means that businesses that people, who usually have even less leisure time than most of us -- restaurants, attractions, hospitality -- can recharge ).
I will be honest. For me it the line drawing always tends to be the most interesting piece, because it tends to indicate what the individual really values. In this case, and this is not a shot, because it is very human thing to do, they value 'their family cohesion' and 'their ability to participate in various leisure activities' over those who have to serve them, while they bond with their loved ones.
For the record, the line listed by parent is not unreasonable, but can you give me an argument as to why it is not amazingly selfish way of looking at society ( Sunday for me, but not for thee ).
Sure, that's easy enough. Even if some people can't participate, it's a big benefit to have most people share a day, and everyone that's taking those sunday work slots should be getting paid significantly extra and also probably on rotation. And the other poster might be in one of those businesses.
If someone in a restaurant/attraction/hospitality business has less leisure time, you could improve that by valuing Sunday higher. Let them trade two Sundays in a month for 3-4 non-Sundays.
And I btw, do not count public transport as essential service. People have plenty of time to walk, and emergency can include ambulances for medical problems.
Scotland - Largely Presbyterian ie rather more Catholic than us southern softies wot do Church of Eng. Your Catholic is rather more concerned about Sabbath behaviour than your Protestant except when they don't. Mind you we have some laughable nonsense available regardless of denomination - for example otters were once classed as fish hereabouts for Fish Friday. lol! It is quite hard to get more than 50 miles away from the sea in Britain. We also have quite a lot of rivers/streams/brooks/burns/cultured waterways - canals. Those ribbons of water contain quite a lot of fish. Yes, the UK might be quite as mad as you imagine it - we seem to require mammals to be classified as fish to ensure we make a God happy (one day in seven).
I recall shopping on Sunday becoming a thing here around the late 80s/early 90s but hours were not too conservative here in the UK compared to the rest of europe. We never had formal lunchtime closing for example, which is bloody annoying. I lived in W Germany for a few years back in 70s-90s and it was tricky buying stuff around 1200-1400 depending on where you were and the time. Nowadays I note that Italy, Spain, Portugal int al still have some pretty patchy midday work practices. That's fine but caveat emptor!
Back then, nothing was open on a Sunday.
In some parts of Scotland (the Western Isles for example) doing any work, hanging your washing out, cutting your grass etc. on a Sunday, to be violating the Sabbath. No laws. Just peer pressure from your neighbours. As you'd expect this is stronger in smaller villages than larger towns.
Your final para describes rather more of little Britain than just bits of Scotland.
I actually do agree with it. Same reason as jury nullification. If enough people (jury members in this case) believe that the law / particular application is unjust then fuck it. In nullification the government must give in. I do not see why it should be any different in general. The key here should be what constitutes "enough"
Mob rule.
Slavish obedience.
The jury is not supposed to be robots. They're there because there's supposed to be someone with judgment.
IA is learning the difference, unfortunately.
If I told someone smoking is bad forr their health, would you follow with "I know a person that smoked till 98" as reasonable advice? This is the same argument.
And in this case, the actions of IA may well end them for all of us. That's not such a good outcome for breaking the law, is it?
And we're seeing the IA possibly going to end because they wanted to break the law, and not completely for some moral cause, but because breaking it helps them. There was plenty of reasonable calling out Brewster's ignorant and self-serving choices on this issue for some time. He didn't need to do this, and he put the entire operation at unnecessary risk, as his critics claimed would happen.
This is what lawbreaking generally does.
That's how most laws get abolished.
Which Supreme Courts have been friendly to fair use and opposed copyright expansionist arguments?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_v._VidAngel#:~:text=J...
I'm sure someone will reply to tell us how it's not really that similar but I thought there were some parallels
- The infringer paying the monetary damages and profits.
- The law offering a range from $200 to $150,000 for each infringed work.
- The infringer paying for all lawyers' fees and court costs.
Is it more likely for the case to be resolved outside the court? I am worried about their future.
I value Internet Archive as much as Wikipedia. And with LLMs set to replace Wikipedia, I think IA will have longer societal and historical value.
They host a lot of material that is not copyrighted and expired copyrights. Also this ruling does not apply to software.
Statutory damages are the most significant risk to IA's finances, both in this case but also wrt other potential plaintiffs who might be waiting in the wings. Exemption almost certainly figured into IA's risk assessment when designing and deploying their loan program. The argument for exemption is, naturally, stronger than for Fair Use.
Are you just choosing to ignore those comments?
It's a question of proportion, and I'd go further say that it's quite disingenuous to pretend that this contradiction, in this website, isn't heavily tilted in favour of predatory corporations and against public good services (i.e. libertarian).
This of course makes sense. Innumerably more people here used Uber than IA, and what's more, many were literal employees of Uber, AirBnB, etc. and its competitors. It would be silly to expect anything else. But it's still amusing.
This advice is reasonable in most cases, but applying it as a rule is devastating for society.
It certainly worked out well for Uber
Exactly, that's only for companies like uber and airbnb who add real value to society, not some losers trying to make books accessible.
I really don’t see the angle that Uber was doing something fundamentally new, except to the extent that they dramatically lowered the price and a lot more people used the service.
>Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
>So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect libraries to do.
>To counter this, publishers (and their supporters, which unfortunately include some authors) argue that (1) this interferes with the market for licensed ebooks, and (2) that there is a real difference in lending out the digital scans: that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do.
;-)
Same for broadcast radio vs. record companies.
And DVRs vs. streaming video companies. Oh wait...
The entire US civil rights struggle would disagree with you.
It makes me wonder if there are any adults at the helm at IA and I worry about its future.
IA is an amazing resource... I don't understand why they chose this hill to fight on.
The first doc on this case was filed June 1, 2020.
NEL closed down almost immediately on June 16, 2020.
IA was definitely and stupidly playing with fire here. As others have said, publishers weren't happy with IA's one hardcopy, one digital loan rule, but lived with it because of the potential bad press. However, I'm willing to bet the NEL pushed them over the edge to go to war. Incredibly reckless and now we've taken a step backwards against IP abuse, IMO.
I 100% guarantee that if a dead tree library xeroxed their books during a national emergency, nobody would be making comments like this. Somehow, because computers are involved, magical thinking gets a pass.
Edit: reading other sources, it seems like the crux of the idea is they would only lend out books where they had the same number of physical copies. I can see the reasoning for that, but it seems hard for fair use to get you there.
My assumption is that publishers probably weren't happy about the original model but it was legally murky enough that they didn't pursue it for risk of losing and setting the wrong (from their perspective) precedent, but the emergency library made for an extremely easy case against IA.
> IA also argues that it made fair use of the Publishers’ copyrights during the National Emergency Library. The analysis above applies even more forcefully to the NEL, during which IA amplified its unauthorized lending of ebook versions of the Works in Suit by lifting the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. IA’s defense of fair use with respect to the NEL therefore also fails.
The scanned books are not so much fun to read, it is definitely less ergonomic than a Kindle. I would expect those using the program likely needed it.
The most checked out book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, had ~850 check outs. I think it's safe to assume they didn't come close to the amount of physical books locked in libraries.
Not that it's very important, the pandemic policy is barely mentioned in this ruling.
I think what IA was doing, making sure they only lend out as many copies as they physically own, was clearly within the spirit of that doctrine. But in the digital era, lending anything over the web necessarily means making a copy of it somewhere along the way, which laws haven't adequately adapted to yet.
The argument that this is no different from lending temporarily to a friend seems to be much more reasonable. Especially since no money is changing hands.
In practice this means publishers can revoke access licenses for all sorts of arbitrary reasons, alter the content of ebooks already purchased, or plenty of other shady practices, with little recourse available to the reader.
Plus it means they can force libraries to keep paying repeated, marked-up licensing fees for the privilege of lending out ebooks. Much better deal for the publishers than the physical library lending model!
I don't blame IA for trying to find a way to liberate library lending from that racket.
That right there is the true root of the problem.
I own the physical book. Why does the publisher have any further rights to tell me what I do with it?
You could sell or lend virtual copy if the platforms supported that. You are allowed to make a copy for backup purposes, and no one will ever know if you use that or even lend it. But if you make business of it, then they will notice and sue you.
It makes me so sad -- it reminds me of Aereo, when the Supreme Court ruled against it in 2014 that it wasn't allowed to stream public broadcast TV over the internet, despite having a separate radio receiver for each viewer.
I can understand why Congress hasn't changed law to allow digital 1-for-1 reuse of previous physical/analog sources -- because there will be too much lobbying against it from corporations.
But it really seems like the Supreme Court had a chance to set new precedent in an area that hadn't been foreseen in law so really was undefined. And they chose corporations over consumers back in 2014, just like a federal judge did again now.
I can only imagine how much better if the Supreme Court had sided with consumers here. Congress could have overturned it through law, of course, but only in the face of massive voter dissatisfaction, and so I'm not sure they would have.
Part of this points out that they weren’t even doing that; there was no process to ensure that the “partnered” library wasn’t simultaneously lending out their copy.
I think the problem is that the produce the end user gets are delivered as a business case through a funnel, and people don't realize that the relationship is fundamentally adversarial. What just boggles my mind is how people just accept it without any sort of rebellion or self interest.
In the late 2000s Spotify arrived, it was much easier than piracy, and not as expensive as the iTunes Store, although still DRMed.
At the same time, Apple introduced the iPhone and people gradually stopped using computers so much and started using smartphones more. And on smartphones you couldn’t install whatever software you wanted.
Many younger people today in the west have no experience of piracy at all. They live on their phones in a fully corporatized environment.
Obviously, the courts have no control over that, but copyright protection definitely lasts way too long. Five years, might be kind too short, at least for some kinds of works, but I think the longer the copyright lasts, the more harm it causes to society and the less benefit it has in protecting the interests of the creator and incentivizing more creation.
> there is a “thriving ebook licensing market for libraries” in which the Publishers earn a fee whenever a library obtains one of their licensed ebooks from an aggregator like OverDrive…. This market generates at least tens of millions of dollars a year for the Publishers…. And IA supplants the Publishers’ place in this market
I'm confused by this argument. If the market is thriving, then IA clearly isn't supplanting it.
> IA argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet. But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers….
In other words, the court values a company, which already has plenty of money, making more money, more than "patrons who live far from physical libraries" having access to books.
Let me put it this way, everyone should start working on decentralized archiving tools and retention of information locally about topics they are particularly interested in. I don’t say that out of the blue.
Copying an entire work, with no changes, and then distributing the copy is pretty archetypal copyright infringement.
IA's lawyers had to have known this was a long shot, right?
Every law that accidentally helps people not oligarchs can be stopped by activists judges either in state or federal courts(including Supreme Court).
Because judges in the end serve corporations/oligarchs first and ideology second. The Federalist Society?
This stems from the fact that politicians that choose them(and if they are elected by public they can be bought directly) were also bought.
(1) Show politicians on the left how copyright term extensions have largely amounted to a transfer of wealth from the public to large corporations, and
(2) Show politicians on the right how rolling back to an earlier version of copyright would reduce the interference of the government in the lives of its citizens and return to a vision for IP that better adheres to that presented by the Constitution and defended by its framers, while leading to a more vibrant and competitive market for new works.
Meanwhile, both groups should be assured that a release of many classic works into the public domain would be popular among the vast majority of their constituents.
Who's in?
It's even more obvious that politicians on the right no longer care about limited government. They are currently trying to ban books.
Suing publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley.
Judge: John G. Koeltl.
Don't care about the judge, but there should be a massive campaign to boycott these four publishers to oblivion. What's the most harmful thing that we can do to them?
http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
Excerpt: “[W]e will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers.
We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”
It can’t imagine a more practical or metaphysical violation of copyright than to literally copy the pages of a book and then distribute copies of this book to however many people you feel like.
I guess you could violate the rights more by taking the author’s name off of it.
This mad ideology is destructive and blind. No one has a right to the product of another’s labor. A dysfunctional system doesn’t change the ethics here.
IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid, when more people were trying to use their services due to being stuck inside.
Also of note is that the is only the district court. We'll have to see if the EFF appeals to the circuit next.
That's the excuse the publishers are pushing, but ultimately they disagree with, and have successfully argued in court it seems, against the entire principle.
Ultimately, controlled digital lending should be as lawful as format shifting an album: this is format shifting from a physical book to an ebook.
> Also of note is that the is only the district court
Phew?
I don't really care about the publishers, but I still wouldn't expect to seriously get away with arguing that I wasn't distributing copyrighted material if I started offering movies online for free in unlimited numbers... because it was just controlled lending since the movie files were set up to probably become unreadable in 3 weeks.
I'm sure they have competent lawyers that would've predicted an outcome like this, which makes the decision to do it even more baffling. Especially for an organization that ought to be conservative by design, considering they want to be a very long-term archive.
Which is why it's really dumb that the IA pushed it blatantly violating copyright laws.
Or is most or all of what it has already available in the pirate libraries?
So this is sad news.
It's disheartening to see that the court sided with big publishers, who are already raking in considerable profits, instead of considering the broader implications of IA's mission to democratize access to knowledge. In a world where information is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, IA is one of the few bastions of hope for more equitable access to books and resources.
I worry about the chilling effect this decision could have on other projects aiming to push the envelope in terms of digital content distribution. Are we just going to hand over our collective knowledge to the highest bidder?
I get the need to protect copyright holders, but this ruling feels like a step back for the open access movement and the democratization of knowledge. We need more innovative solutions to bridge the digital divide, not less.
Everyone would do better to lobby Congress to change the law to allow for limited digital lending kind of like what IA did (notwithstanding the "emergency" lending).
It's not a verbatim copy; the argument specifically involved converting content from one format (physical book) to another (ebook).
> Everyone would do better to lobby Congress
Good luck outspending the big publishers. How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney's capacity to bribe Congresscritters?
Personal-use format shifting has sometimes been found to be fair use; but this is not that.
> How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney’s capacity to bribe Congresscritters?
Don’t have to bribe if you have enough people convincingly committed to vote on the issue.
Why so cynical? Who's more captured: Congress or the IP Bar?
If everyone commenting and reading about this on HN called their members of Congress within a few hours on Monday afternoon, there would be serious buzz on Capitol Hill. Several hundred to a few thousand people all calling in about a similar issue to members of both parties is noticed.
Remember the "SOPA" thing Big Content tried to ram through a decade ago? It failed because dozens upon dozens of members were spooked.
You know why lobbyists are listened to? They're not "bribing" members of Congress; they are simply presenting an unrebutted story.
EDIT: forgot to address the "transformative" thing.
Format shifting is not transformative, any more than bootlegging a movie in the theater or taking a photo of a copyrighted piece hanging in a gallery are. The meaning of the work is almost certainly identical whether it's on a physical page or on a screen.
Let's just hope IA can afford to pay any judgment entered against it. If the court finds IA had no reasonable grounds to believe this was fair use, then IA has to rebut a presumption of wilful infringement. If they fail, the statutory damages could be substantial. Assume Kahle has calculated the max cost of alleged infringement of 33,000 titles and is not putting the entire archive at risk over a book scanning project.
Is there something specific about IA or is this ruling making the concept of epub borrowing a copyright infringement (in the US)?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/librarie...
I wish them to stay providing service, but maybe a quick checkup about "why is this stored here" or "isn't any other site more capable or well equipped to store and defend the right to access this content" would help giving it more of a defense against copyright holders
I've been an advocate for years for a model where people own physical media, and have access to the media they own in any way they see fit.
The way this ruling is structured, it paves the way to make even ripping your own CDs to your MP3 player illegal. As common as it is, this right has never actually been tested in court.
This judge seems to think that the first sale doctrine isn't even applicable.
The Google book scanning case had previously indicated that giving full copies of scanned books to the owners clearly fell under fair use in part because of the first sale doctrine. This ruling seems to ignore that.
I do truly hope you're right though.
Edit: found another article that describes it much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300195
Nothing was stopping IA from both reading the physical copy purchased (or potentially lending it out, physically), as well as lending out the copy that was created as a result of digitization.
Losing this was inevitable.
In fact, the analogies to libraries were flawed from the start. Libraries purchase a book and lend out the very book that was purchased. Clearly that’s not what’s happening with the internet archive.
I’m other words: a library lends out book b. The internet archive buys book c, puts it through Digitize(), which returns book cprime and lends out cprime. However fair use would only permit lending out c, not cprime.
https://www.loc.gov/item/90898138/
And I was surprised to find the Wikipedia section on Judicial Review was pretty reasonable:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_S...
At any rate, the future is here. You're free to stick your head in the sand if you wish, but most of us think it's a lot of work to do all that digging, and frankly a little silly.
Again, you're free to stick your head in the sand and pretend otherwise, but that just seems like a lot of work to me.
- That's kind of the natural state of things for most artistic endeavors. Many artists have a day job that pays the bills.
- Fortunately, we've got some practical alternative funding models now that anybody who wants to quit their day job can use. Patreon and Kickstarter both provide a superior funding model for a post-digital-scarcity world. Either money up front before the art is created, or an ongoing subscription for art creation.
- Humans are short-sighted, and we don't, as a species, generally like change. We're not really prepared to make changes like implementing UBI because of weird emotional investments in the status quo. However, we will eventually adapt, even if it requires some people kicking and screaming until they're dragged into the present and realize how nice it is.
- Also, post-digital-scarcity doesn't mean you can't exchange money for bits. I spend a lot of money at Bandcamp in return for DRM-free bits that I could totally have torrented, but don't because Bandcamp is easy to use and I can support the artist
I never had enough money to get the books I wanted, sometimes getting to a library wasn't that easy. IA (and other platforms) helped me a lot. So, seeing this section is really depressing.
I love the IA. I use it weekly if not daily. My bet is that they'll push back on this and other rulings and will ultimately lobby for saner laws.
This isn't exactly the same thing, but it's close. Of course this was always going to be ruled against.
Edit: it really only benefits large companies who have managed to exploit it.
the purpose and character of your use
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
the effect of the use upon the potential market.
They got sued, and the settlement didn’t allow them to offer the full books except for-purchase with a particular revenue sharing arrangement.
But the court noted that Google was right on the edge of fair use. Google notably prevented the previews from being usable as a replacement for an original purchase by only displaying 1/8 of a page snippets, blacklisting 1 snippet per page, blacklisting every tenth page completely, and blacklisting works where a single snippet could be all you wanted such as dictionaries and recipe books.
Say I downloaded z-library and wrote a search system that only showed me snippets (for searching). How likely do you think courts would find in my favour?
> The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit previewed as much in HathiTrust and Google Books, cases that “test[ed] the boundaries of fair use.” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 206. The defendant in HathiTrust scanned whole copies of millions of books, including those protected by valid copyrights, to create a database on which the general public could search for particular terms across the scanned works. 755 F.3d at 91. The creation of this “full-text searchable database [was] a quintessentially transformative use,” the court held, because “the result of a word search is different in purpose, character, expression, meaning, and message from the page (and the book) from which it is drawn.” Id. at 97. Importantly, the database did not “allow users to view any portion of the books they [were] searching” and therefore, unlike IA’s Website, “d[id] not add into circulation any new, human-readable copies of any books” or “merely repackage or republish the originals.” Id.
> Google Books similarly found transformative use in Google’s scanning of copyrighted books to create a database that included a “snippet view” search function that allowed readers to view a few lines of text containing searched-for terms. 804 F.3d at 208. The snippet view showed the searcher “just enough context surrounding the searched term” to help the searcher evaluate whether the book fell within the scope of the searcher’s interest “without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright interests.” Id. at 208, 216. But the Court of Appeals cautioned that “[i]f Plaintiffs’ claim were based on Google’s converting their books into a digitized form and making that digitized version accessible to the public,” precisely what the Publishers allege in this case, the “claim [for copyright infringement] would be strong.” Id. at 225. If HathiTrust and Google Books demarcated the boundaries of fair use, this case shows what conduct remains squarely beyond fair use.
And I know it's not the judge's place to say that.
If they drop copyright to 15 years and IA stops lending books younger than that, I'd be 100% OK with that outcome, as well. But copyright terms are in the "lifetimes" range, so lending books out that are still under copyright serves the greater good.
But since the odds of the US switching to the metric system are about 1000x greater than the odds of us decreasing copyright terms, I'm not holding my breath.
As if a stronger black margin.
Famously it only went against segregation because "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." (Attorney General James P. McGranery)
https://redsails.org/concessions/
Fortunately this means more of an impetus for piracy in the meantime, and alternative systems in the near future.
Thankfully that's the best outcome. Unless you mean you support eminent domain.
I'd pay hell to the country that even plans on using it against me, and I'll follow and protect others who this happens to as well. Anyone who decides they can steal my resources will have to fight for it.
You do not own me.
You are free to demand that publishers provide you unlimited access to their servers so you can download your books perpetually. Publishers need not give in to alternative access methods to their material.
If you want to own books, have it actually in your possession, which is not the internet.
There is also no copyright on bank notes that prohibits you from selling copies of them online. It's also not the bank's fault that you feel copyright law is unjust, it's got nothing to do with each other.
It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels when in reality they were doing just fine flying (somewhat) under the radar.
I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Because of donations, the scrutiny is 1000x more for non-profits vs regular companies.
Considering their software archive is one of the easiest source of warez today, I'd say they have a thing for painting targets on themselves.
Why? It’s not like this really makes a difference to the other 100 different things they’re doing.
Arrr!
https://www.alltechbuzz.net/best-internet-archive-wayback-ma...
https://www.guru99.com/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine...
https://startupstash.com/internet-archive-alternatives/
https://www.topbestalternatives.com/internet-archive/
https://alternativeto.net/software/internet-archive/
https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/best-archive-is-alternatives...
i realize the last link is "alternatives to 'archive.is' " and not "alternatives to 'archive.org'/the wayback machine", but it's still pertinent/in the same ideological arena (obviously).
As MLK Jr said* "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Apparently Dr. King adapted that line from Unitarian minister Theodore Parker:https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/#:~....
i've archived this* page (this ycombinator page) at: https://archive.vn/AZNoN
Capitalism 1
Expansion and the preservation of human knowledge 0
I never thought about it that way. I avoided getty and other stock media publishers out of principle. In their deranged quest to subjugate google, they made image search worse for me. I think it's about time I started applying this logic to other publishers as well. Copyright is completely out of control. There has to be accountability, even if it's insignificant and only on a personal level.
For any authors reading this: I intend to continue paying for books and will gladly do so but only if it's to you directly. Either self-publish or put a donation link on your site. If I'm interested in your book, I will search for your personal website prior to taking any action.
It's sad that it has to come down to this.
Changing format was illegal of course under current law but publishers looked the other way.
By allowimg multiple this was the only outcome.
Without risk taking we wouldn't have any IA so this is all part of what they are. It's hard to know when to hold em.