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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds.

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.

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Yes, IA has followed a similar tragic arc as Google Books, another martyr to the dream of a truly 21st century library.

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.

Seriously.

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?

But then they would make such works paying public domain (the type of public domain that you have to pay royalties to the state) rather than FFA public domain.

Not in the public domain, no, but some countries such as the Nordics have mandatory schemes for orphan works where a collection society is able to authorise their use and has legal protection to do so, and will pay out said royalties should someone come forward to claim ownership at a later date.

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.

Just shortening copyright would mostly mitigate this issue. If it was 10 years after creation then the most you have to wait is a decade. It may be nice to also have a specific exception for "abandoned" works but at least 10 years would be a solid fallback with no need to do difficult research like finding the authors and if they have died or proving that a work qualifies as abandoned.

What happened to Google Books?

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.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

But does the artist deserve to retain the value of their work seventy years after their death?

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.

If artists deserve money every time you read a book then your plumber should get paid every time you take a shit. Copyrights have been abused to the point of absurdity. They should last no longer than patents.

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.

> 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).

Why doesn't the plumber deserve a payment every time you shit then? Effective sewage systems prevent devastating diseases like cholera and typhus. Surely that's a higher social utility than a trashy Harlequin novel or any of the works of Kevin Federline?

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.

> Why doesn't the plumber deserve a payment every time you shit then?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The artist does deserve to retain value for some time, but the question is how long should that be such that all interests are balanced?

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.

> The artist does deserve to retain value for some time

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.

Zombie works are free to share if there truly is no rightsholder pressing claims.

But there is always a risk that the rights holder rises up from the grave and sues you. With proper abandoned work exceptions you would be safe as long as the rights holders are not currently distributing.

> I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds.

Try Library Genesis: https://libgen.is/

Even better: https://annas-archive.org/

This is the one use case where the blockchain/web3 is useful.

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.)

Why do u need a blockchain? Why not just torrents for sharing.

Exactly, torrents are already decentralized.

Torrents cannot be updated. Furthermore, torrents are subject to the sites that advertise them getting banned. You will constantly be on the hunt for new trackers.

Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.

Why would I need to update my books and pdfs? How difficult is it to follow a publishers RSS feed and download new editions and new uploads?

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

What happens when the RSS feed domain is taken down? What happens when the torrent runs out of seeders?

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.

why not a blockchain? It's much less likely to go down with network issues because people are financially motivated to run the network.

They don't seem motivated to do so now, while torrents, Russian hostings and warez seem up for years. How come?

I don't see any major blockchains going down right now?

I personally don't think it's necessary, but the Blockchain creates an effectively irreversible collectivization of the work: Removal would also undo whatever other work was committed.

It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...

It's super easy to remove a block or a part of a block if you don't care about it.

And if you're not accepting payments there's especially little reason for you to need to care.

IPFS has some theoretical merits, such as not relying on discrete trackers (which is a point of failure), and at present we have a bunch of mirrors that speeds it up. However, BitTorrent has a better track record regarding resilience against interference (from copyright mafia) or other bad actors. IPFS has so far not openly supported this usage.

Trackerless torrents via DHT have been a thing for decades.

Torrents can't be updated.

That's not neccesarily a bad thing. Once you release something you shouldn't be able to gaslight people by silently updating it - instead, release a new verson with a new torrent.

Blockchains don't really do this well though. A blockchain is useful when you need a publicly accessible, canonical shared record of a consensus, obfuscated or otherwise. They're not for storing arbitrary data. If you want to store arbitrary data, and you want peer to peer decentralized kind of features and you want identities obfuscated, currently you're looking at BitTorrent over Tor. I don't know if i2p or Tor or anyone else is working on any sort of swarm like file sharing internally over those networks, but it needs to be done and these shadow libraries need to begin using it.

Blockchains can absolutely be used for storing arbitrary data (see Filecoin.)

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.

Filecoin doesn't store data on the blockchain. Filecoin is a blockchain payment network for a monetized IPFS storage network. The two were developed in concert, IPFS was built for filecoin.

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.

Thanks for the background on Filecoin.

> 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.

Result will be rampant piracy and theft of creator works (which posters seem to be a proponent of here)

This was going to be my next question with basic assumption that the entire gathered information will either vanish, get moved to torrents or splintered across various believers of the cause.

I hope they would come up with a way to publish the information for backing up or give it over to libgen.

LibGen's selection of these kinds of books is nowhere near that of the Internet Archive.

I guess I'm going to have A LOT more interlibrary loans in my future.

IA have posted a response, though it doesn't address what will / may happen regards book lending:

<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.

I assume this will be appealed, as what decision like this isn't appealed.

“We will appeal.”

https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/16394247772647219...

I said it before on this very forum. Wikipedia does not really need your donations these days. IA just might.

IA and Signal are two nonprofits I donate to and recommend everyone donate to regardless of their political or religious convictions (or lack thereof).

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 would add FSF and/or EFF. FSF is more uncompromising with respect to their original principles of defending digital freedom, whereas EFF sort of shifts with time (gradually giving up grounds).

Looks like EFF is providing the lawyers for this case. THEY need your dollars too.

Unfortunately IA lost all credibility in my eyes, when they decided that one journalist in particular gets to decide that none of their (awful) tweets should be archived[1].

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....

Presumably you too can get your tweets excluded from the wayback machine. They're your intellectual property, you control what other's do with it.

are you assuming they decided this or did they state it somewhere?

What has IA done wrong? You don't provide any references.

The demand for ideological purity and that the revolution be perfect is the reason that progressive causes lose so goddamn always.

Your opponent doesn’t play by these rules.

Thanks. I just donated to support them, and encourage everyone to do the same.

If the IA loses all appeals and the lending library is totally destroyed, is there a firewall between that and the entity that is archiving the internet, or does the whole thing live and die together?

Some people fear that there will be fines that bankrupt the IA, but there's nothing inherent in this ruling that would impact the rest of the archive.

From the article the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books. No idea what kind of effect that will have on the rest of it though.

> the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books

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...

There's a good chance IA will be exempted from statutory damages. See 17 USC § 504(c)(2),

> 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...

seems to me that once something is out of print for a lengthy period of time, publishers shouldn't be able to make the fair use argument that electronic copies interfere with the commercial market for the book.

I guess they should move the site to Russia - better chance of staying alive.

Better chance of staying alive and complete if they can remain in the US but additionally we build seperate archives in the EU, Russian and as many geographically and politically distant regions as we can.

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