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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement.

Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we said would happen is happening. It's like you found a landmine in your front yard and your buddy said "That landmine shouldn't be there so I'm gonna go step on it" and you told him not to and then had to watch him throw himself onto it while declaring it would be morally wrong for it to blow his stupid ass up.

Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.

View on HN

They're not in court for the emergency library. They're in court for the 1-1 CDL lending they did.

I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line. Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I think this would have happened eventually, so pointing to the emergency library does nothing but tell everyone that you were right all along.

They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not challenged in a court of law?

> Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library?

I mean, they did so right after IA did it, specifically citing IA doing it as why. Maybe they would have come after it eventually anyway but the Emergency Library specifically marked IA as an organisation that couldn't be trusted; even if they would have come after CDL, IA didn't have to hand them a slam-dunk case.

In all their comms about this IA is desperate to reframe it as nothing to do with Emergency Library, probably because they know how it undermines their case completely.

Edit: EA -> Emergency Library

What is the EA?

Flubbed their emergency lending library acronym in my head into -> EA. Edited to clarify.

E-A Books... It's on the Page!

DLC:

  Table of Contents     |  $10.99  |  Buy Now!
  Authors Note          |  $15.99  |  Buy Now!
  Ability to Bookmark   |  $20.99  |  Buy Now!
  Gold Book Cover Skin  |  $5.99   |  Buy Now!
  Neon Book Cover Skin  |  $3.99   |  Buy Now!
  Camo Book Cover Skin  |  $3.99   |  Buy Now!
  Red Book Cover Skin   |  $3.99   |  Buy Now!

What, no battle pass?!

Thanks for the chuckle!

Too used to dunking on Effective Altruists?

"I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line."

I appreciate that.

However, as a long-time, regular, sustaining financial benefactor of IA, I was annoyed that they strayed into this set of activities in the first place and then dismayed when they pushed the envelope on it during C19 quarantines.

I, and others, predicted this trouble and even if there is not direct causation why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place ?

I mean, their mission statement is "universal access to all knowledge". They had to push these boundaries because it's their purpose. The boundaries themselves are dumb and arbitrary (see e.g. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...). Maybe the publishers are deserving of more criticism than the Archive here?

Just because something is in your organization's mission statement does not require you to make imprudent and likely suicidal decisions in pursuit of it. That is not a means to accomplish your cause but rather a means to harm it.

But in our time it seems like there is no such thing as a prudent leader of any organization who understands just how high you can fly without pulling an Icarus and flying into the sun. Even those who know better fear the fanatics enough that they cannot tell them no since those who recommend moving with caution are branded as enemies of the cause and marginalized by the fanatics. And then people wonder why everything seems to end in disaster. The Internet Archive is far from the only institution to make this particular category of error.

I mean if I poke an angry drunk and he beats the tar out of me, the angry drunk certainly deserves criticism but all of my friends will be "WTF why did you go and poke him?"

Publishers acting as angry dunks, checks out.

I mean, in a way poking an angry drunk makes more sense given that the angry drunk might get arrested for battery.

In my estimation, there is zero chance that any positive change that IA might want out of the publishing company will come from the emergency lending program, and there's a non-zero chance that the IA will get shutdown because of it.

Sounds like it's time for a team of burly armed men to subdue the angry drunk by force.

Have the risky stuff done by another legal entity perhaps?

Creating proxy entities to protect oneself is only available to people who hold a lot of capital.

The IA easily could have done it.

Perhaps they're attempting to relate to the world that everyone has to live in, rather than the reality of capital.

In the same boat. Haven't stopped donating as a result, which is a sentiment I've seen repeated elsewhere. It was still upsetting to see the organization I support put so much of why I donate to them at risk for something with so little upside.

> why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place

I find that doing worthwhile things and tickling the dragon go hand in hand most of the time.

The “emergency library” was a gift on a silver platter for the publishers. It was a reckless and stupid action that made the worst case scenario that the publishers wouldn’t have been taken seriously about a reality.

Obviously the 1-1 lending was an issue to the publishers, but higher risk from a litigation perspective.

And it is strictly speaking not a thing that IA should be doing in the first place. They should have set up a completely different legal entity for this and kept them visibly separated on all fronts, especially online.

They really should have tried to work with the publishers to introduce maybe a reduced rate rental interface if a work wasn't available from their "digital library" as a loaned book. More work, but if they have loan mechanics worked out, then rental is just a payment above that.

Or, if Amazon had/has a rental system in place, just affiliate link through to amazon when unavailable for rent/purchase there... that could fund IA without the minefield at all

They were only sued after they launched the Emergency Library. Also, Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general isn't yet ruled on. IA's actions with the NEL not only prompted the lawsuit in the first place but have almost certainly poisoned the well with regards to the final ruling on CDL.

>They were only sued after they launched the Emergency Library

There is plenty of evidence they were planning this far before the Emergency Library. Like the 2019 press push, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...

> Also, Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general isn't yet ruled on

Completely untrue. The entire judgment is about the CDL with the NEL only being mentioned as also being illegal as the CDL already was

Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general isn't yet ruled on.

That’s not the case. The decision is clearly written, and clearly about CDL.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...

Ok, that appears correct. Still, the NEL prompted the suits in the first place and, among other things, proved that when the IA says it cares about the legal rights of publishers and authors it is lying. That's tremendously influential. If CDL had more years to become a regular thing that a significant fraction of people use, it would've had a much better chance in court.

> If CDL had more years to become a regular thing that a significant fraction of people use, it would've had a much better chance in court.

Not as implemented by IA. They admit they had zero controls in place for the 'pool' libraries so they likely had books in circulation in both print and digital at the same time. The also had a side for-profit company selling used print books linked from the digital CDL. This case never had a chance.

Yeah, I agree with that. I’m not sure it would really have changed the opinion of the court though.

Personally I’d much rather the money being spent on this was spent on a campaign to change copyright law to allow things like CDL rather than implausibly shoehorning what they want to do into the crevices of the current law. It’s an uphill battle, but one that I think might be more likely to succeed in the very long term.

The lawsuit was filed three months after NEL was launched. Controlled Digital Lending has been around for years and is used by public libraries. Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.

There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. It’s a small part of the lawsuit, but it’s clear it pushed them to go to war against IA.

> Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.

Publishers spent millions of dollars developing digital lending platforms with fewer features and worse ROI than CDL, and then bullied libraries into adopting them.

This is a reasonable summary of their pre-IA activities:

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

> There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit.

As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL. Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case.

> As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL.

That's not in dispute.

> Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case

That fact that they brought the case does have a lot to do with NEL. Timeline-wise, it's clear NEL triggered the case. The HN crowd breeds a binary "yes/no" mentality, but real world businesses decisions, especially legal ones, take many things into account.

> Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library?

Yes, it's even mentioned a few times in the judgement. Publishers didn't like the CDL, but were mostly ignoring it. The NEL forced their hand, even if the lawsuit was not about that directly.

> They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not challenged in a court of law?

If the IA really set up the CDL to have a plausible challenge they would not have shot themselves in the foot with complete lack of implementation controls, and clearly setting up a profit motive. Everyone should be furious at the IA for poisoning the CDL well.

I highly recommend reading the judgement, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...

Frankly, this isn't out of character for the IA. They want to be treated as a global system of record, but then started hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt. They've somewhat rectified this now, but their blog post about brazenly doing this is still up. It's good insight to how they think about themselves. They want protection but none of the regulation that will come with it. The proof of their character has been in the pudding the whole time.

I don't mind their desire to slurp up all the things... my bigger/biggest issue is probably the reproduction/distribution by making what they slurp generally available (when they bypass said robots.txt as an example).

For expired works, or works that are no longer published, I'm pretty morally flexible here and lean towards making it available.

> hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt

Why would an organization with the goal of being a digital "library" care about robots.txt?

Would you expect public and private libraries to discard arbitrary books of a publisher from their collection because the author put a file called libraries.txt on their website?

If your public library found your journal laying on the floor would you expect them to put it on their shelf, even if you had a message inside the cover that said "not for reproduction"? Would they eschew blame if you'd shared this journal with friends?

The answer is no. You wouldn't. Some people put things on the internet but don't want them slurped up by some mindless machine, and some people post both public content and content which they don't want handled by a machine. It's a fair ask that the IA respect long-trodden patterns of the web.

The is no mindles machine, only computers automating work for humans. If you don't want things on the public web then noone is forcing you to put them there. Once you put things online accessible to anyone then things will get archived and shared. Deal with it.

Ignoring robots.txt is the only way to be a "system of record". Otherwise you don't record what actual humans see.

Siblings of this comment piling on to point out the timing: yes, yes. I don't suppose proximate or triggering causes can coexist alongside ultimate or long-term causes by any chance? Like hey did the last straw break your camel's back or was it all the previous straws? Couldn't possibly be both, so let's argue about it.

The "straw that broke the camels back" analogy is perfect and I should have included.

It's my stance that while yes the NEL was the final straw that prompted the case, that straw would have been something eventually.

What's the point of arguing over what caused the final straw, their mission statement(free access to knowledge) is incompatible with the publishers(limit access to knowledge for profit). This was going to happen eventually, the only bad thing about the IAs decision to create the NEL is how much it's dominating these discussions instead of the actual issues.

> They're not in court for the emergency library.

They are in court for the "emergency library". The emergency library is a key part of the case. It's just inevitable that the lawsuit would also hinge on if 1 - 1 CDL is legally permissible and the case will inevitably have to rule on that.

And yes, timing wise, and from the letters the publishes sent to the IA, they are explicitly about the "emergency library".

The emergency library is definitely not what the case is about. You can read the decision and it’s hardly mentioned.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...

It might be the case that it prompted publishers to file earlier, but I have a very hard time believing they’d have just let 1:1 digital-for-physical lending slide for ever if it hadn’t happened.

I read the opinion. The emergency library appears once, only insofar as CDL being found not fair use entails that emergency lending was also not fair use.

It’s an entirely severable part of the decision. The publishers legally had a case against CDL without it.

I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions.

Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.

Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a workaround for the burdensome licensing fees and absurd lending limits that publishers expect libraries to pay. Libraries being, y'know, super well-funded by that VC honey and all.

And it's not like publishers get less litigious over time. Whether the NEL prompted this or not is irrelevant; it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it, and it wasn't going to become "more legal" if everyone just kept doing the same thing but more quietly.

Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.

It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk.

They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.

Ah, I see, there seems to be a misunderstanding of what the Archive is about. They have been doing a lot more than just "archiving the internet" for a long time. Their blog posts from 2013 (https://blog.archive.org/2013/) for example include writeups about magazines they had digitized, tv news they had recorded, and music. Montana State Library was uploading to the Archive in 2010 (https://blog.archive.org/2010/12/30/how-montana-state-librar...) in addition to the Archive's own digitization efforts (https://blog.archive.org/2010/12/10/internet-archive-needs-y...). Book digitization goes back to at least 2005 (https://blog.archive.org/2005/11/08/bookscanning-launch-and-...).

According to Wikipedia, you'd have to go back to 1999 to find an Internet Archive that was solely the Wayback Machine.

I'd bet that most people who care about this issue are primarily worried about losing the Wayback Machine. If that goes away, a lot of internet history will be lost forever. All those copyrighted works that IA was lending out won't disappear in the same fashion -- they will still be available from other sources.

IMO the Wayback Machine has always been the primary product, and most valuable part, of the Internet Archive. If IA wanted to do other things they should have done them via a separate legal entity to protect the Wayback Machine.

You'd be betting wrong. Even a casual skim of the Archive's blog will show that the Wayback Machine isn't their primary focus, and hasn't been for ~20 years. It may be their most important aspect to you, but the Archive is comprised of a large network of people working together to make all kinds of information available on the internet that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. To those people, those repositories are far, far more valuable than the Wayback Machine (and I promise they care a lot about this issue -- possibly more than HN does, given the timbre this topic has received here).

There is nowhere else that you can browse for example a Byte Magazine from 1984 (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-12/). This is what the Archive is about, from their perspective -- along with music, video (including broadcast video), and a whole lot of other projects: https://archive.org/projects/

What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine accounts for about half of archive.org's pageviews.

You think most other people mainly care about the thing you mainly care about. Happens all the time.

it looks like the wayback machine accounts for more than half of archive.org's page views [1], making that poster's hypothesis correct

[1] https://analytics1.archive.org/stats/pageviews.php

Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for itself what it's job is, and they've determined that this is in fact part of their core mission.

Your perception that their purpose is solely to archive the Internet is at odds with their actual demonstrated activities for many years (the home page says: "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more"), as well as their public mission statement: "Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."

I've talked to the founder of the IA who told me he doesn't believe the lawsuit puts the IA at risk of having to shut down.

> Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for itself what it's job is

And commenters on HN can point out that they've made a huge, and obvious, mistake that risks their entire mission.

They can, but that doesn't mean they are right. Controlled Digital Lending is not an "obvious" mistake, and contrary to what people on HN keep saying, the emergency library program is not what this case is about. It also does it seem to be the situation that their entire mission is at risk.

I think people are getting confused by the name - it's an archive _on_ the Internet, not just an archive _of_ the Internet.

They're an archive on the internet, not an archive of the internet. I disagree with your gradualist approach, because while you complain about scope creep private capital subjects itself to no such restraints. The IA is an institution, not a tool.

> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.

That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted.

Here's from the trial court's summary judgment opinion against IA:

> Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA's reproduction of the Works in Suit.

Then there's the citation so many saw coming to a case called ReDigi, about a system for reselling authorized digital music downloads by ensuring there was only ever one digital copy. They lost, too.

There's another case out there, Aereo, about a company offering a warehouse full of TV tuners subscribers could stream from on a one-to-one basis. For technical legal reasons, that involved different aspects of the copyright law. But the case didn't go well for Aereo, either. Or for any of its competitors pursuing essentially the same business model.

I listened in on the opening arguments. Judge Koeltl asked repeatedly for examples of prior cases analogous to the current one. ReDigi came up then, as did HathiTrust, but neither are exactly analogous to Controlled Digital Lending. The most similar case might be Author's Guild v. Google Inc., which was well covered by The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...), but even that case presents some differences in terms of commercialization. Hachette et. al. are arguing that the Internet Archive is a commercial entity because lending books increases the Archive's popularity online (that is a nearly verbatim quote from the publishers' arguments).

There is a whitepaper on Controlled Digital Lending that should be required reading for anyone wading in to this discussion: https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/

> exactly analogous

This isn't a combo I think I've seen or read from other lawyers. Does it mean "identical"? Again, that's not what's required to make a point "settled"...or an outcome predictable.

The trial court opinion distinguishes Authors Guild, Google Books, Sony, and TV Eyes very explicitly in its opinion, starting on page 19. It's hindsight now, so worth fewer points, but I'm not the only one who thought distinctions based on "not giving out full copies" and "providing equipment" were coming.

The trial court did not say the Internet Archive isn't a nonprofit, a charity, or tax-exempt organization. The question under fair use analysis isn't whether the infringer is commercial or not, but whether the use is. It also comes up under other factors, such as effect on market.

The first and only mandatory piece of reading for discussing this case right now is the trial court opinion. Summary judgment was only possible procedurally because the two sides of the lawsuit agreed on the facts, only differing on how law applies to them.

Judgements are no longer binding as soon as the market has changed (radically), no?

Also, it seems like IA's purpose is different.

> Judgements are no longer binding as soon as the market has changed (radically), no?

No. That is not how law works in the United States.

If you'd like to learn more, try "Common Law" and "Stare Decisis" on Wikipedia.

"""or premised upon, certain factual scenarios, and not applied to the subsequent case because of the absence or material difference in the latter's facts"""..?

> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.

A lot of IA supporters wish they would have gone about discovering this in a way that protected the actual internet archive. Maybe I don't understand the actual risks to the IA, but it feels like a reckless move.

This could be tricky. As I understand it (not a lawyer, etc.), whether an organization believes it is operating within the confines of the law can impact the outcome of a legal dispute. The important distinction here is that these are competing interpretations of Fair Use; there's no case law (as far as I'm aware) that settles this one way or the other.

So, for the Archive to go, "well, let's set up a shell corporation and do this thing through some structure that might shield us from harm" would require that they believed they were doing something illegal. See for example para. 3 in https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-national-eme...

I don't think anyone is suggesting the archive create a shell corporation. If archive leadership desperately wanted to get sued by publishers, they could have resigned from working at the archive and formed a different organization.

it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it

CDL being legalized is dependent on the concept that it respects copyright and is only a digital version of rights and practices that already exist. The NEL proved that as far as the IA is concerned, CDL is nothing of the sort and is in actuality just a method of keeping rightsholders from suing them and what they'd really rather be doing is copying every work in existence and giving it away to everybody. They proved they don't want to be a library. They have destroyed their credibility. Other than the operator of Z-Library there is no worse entity to be litigating this.

Not wanting to be a library isn't illegal. The actions of IA don't have any bearing on the legality of CDL. You've made it clear that you don't like what they did with NEL and that's reasonable enough, I think extrapolation from there is unwarranted.

They shouldn't have any bearing. In the real world lawyers and judges are flawed human beings whose decisions are influenced by emotion and impression. If being hungry can drop a judge's parole granting rate from 65% to zero, an organization showing they'd really rather be totally flouting the law can certainly influence the outcome of a case.

then again maybe that wasn't what was happening with those poor undernourished judges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328

> Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.

that's a nice idea, but it's hard to see how we as a society have a say.

Totally agree with the first part.

> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.

One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will not sell them "real" licenses, but only "quota licenses" that allow a total of n borrows and m concurrent borrows. Once the total number of borrows is exceeded, the license expires. n can be very low.

This was not always the case. 10 years ago, most licenses were unrestricted licenses that allowed an unlimited number of total borrows, but only limited the number of m concurrent borrows at a time - just like it would be if the library bought m real books.

The argument is that real books wear out - digital books don't. However, my local librarian vehemently disagrees with this statement, as many books survive more than 100 borrows, something the new e-book licenses will never manage.

Additionally, those "quota" licenses are still way more expensive than an equal amount of m real, physical books. It's insanity. My local library could, by their own account, not survive if the number of digital lends permanently increased significantly (like it did in 2020).

So if controlled digital lending had a chance for the mainstream, the publishers killed it many years ago, when many of them decided to just not sell libraries unrestricted licenses anymore, but only "quota" licenses. :/

(Disclaimer: Not the US, Europe)

Some of the information on how libraries in the US deal with digital books:

NPR : Planet Money : The Indicator - The surprising economics of digital lending - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1118289764

That's from August of 2022 and the lawsuit against the internet archive was just starting to gain steam.

And more recently (November 2022):

NPR : Planet Money - The E-Book Wars https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385

This was not always the case because libraries weren't seen as a threat. Renting a digital book from a library was significantly harder than buying one from Amazon. The "Libby" app was a major motivator, at least in the US, because it made checking out digital books about as easy as just using the Kindle store. Usage went way up, and publishers panicked.

Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains. Authors want to make money, and they make money by selling books. If a library can digitally loan the book an unlimited number of times in parallel, it's a bad deal for the author.

The "this book automatically explodes after 2 years or 10 rentals" system is a stupid compromise, but any solution is gonna be some sort of system to send money from libraries to companies based on how many people read the book.

Honestly, in these days of the google play store taking its cut from Amazon, using Libby is actually easier than using the kindle app to buy books. Every time I hit that "you can't buy books from inapp" button I remember that I can use Libby instead and go there instead of the browser to buy my book, tbh.

>Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains.

Except that in this case, their role as the middle man is effectively pointless, since their normal role (printing physical books) is literally not happening here, and they are contributing nothing to the author except litigation.

Publishers manage a whole lot of tasks, notably the editing (up to and often including picking the book's title) and the design. Most important, though, is managing the marketing and sales. They get books into stores, they get interviews for the author, they get the book reviewed on websites, etc. For e-books, they're primarily a marketing firm. Whether that's worth the author giving half of their revenue to the publisher is another issue.

That's a pretty good analogy, but not quite.

This has been a hostage/terrorist situation from the beginning. The Internet Archive has been holding the Wayback Machine hostage, essentially saying "let us break copyright, or this critical piece of internet history goes down as well".

Not only that, but the logic of the whole thing was weak anyway and I'd argue it didn't achieve any of its goals.

There are plenty of places to torrent books online. If people are desperate for a book and savvy enough to know about the Internet Archive, chances are they would have found an available copy online anyway. It's also not as though downloading an illegal copy from IA put the user at any less legal risk than downloading from elsewhere (other than giving publishers a bigger target to go after, which is exactly what happened).

It's a shame, because IA felt like a true public good on the Internet, and now it looks like it's going away. Sigh.

> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground.

Fuck it. It should never get off the ground, really. We, as a society, don't need controlled lending for something that can be copied for free.

What we need is a fair mechanism to keep authors whole while keeping digital copies available for all, free of charge. And the system slowly changes by itself, discovering multiple such mechanisms. Like, for example, making physical books collectibles; or paying for early access (not for the access per se).

Agreed. Patron-based funding if not necessarily Patreon is the best way of paying for the creation of intellectual works.

I appreciate your passion!

Unsolicited advice: IME I've found being angry because I was right serves no one, least of all myself. I would recommend you soften your language. Harshness, even if warranted, turns people off, especially those who could learn most from what you have to say.

I actually wondered initially, even if CDL was legal, how are they going to enforce the actual Controlled part? What's the standard for that?

Is simply not having a download button sufficient? Do you need to prevent people from right-clicking and choose "Save Image"? Or do you need to run the book through a video stream encrypted with Widevine L3 so screenshots don't work? Or heck, why not Widevine L1 which requires hardware not found on Windows because L3 will always be exploitable?

Adobe Digital Editions DRM and watermarking appear to be popular. It's definitely breakable (e.g. with Calibre and DeDRM, this is even required if you use an obscure E-Reader which does not support it), but secure enough that the publishers are happy.

good sir, the pandemic magically nullified the idea of basic human rights.

My issue is with the headline: "If we lose the internet archive, we're screwed." But no one is saying we're in danger of losing the entire Internet Archive.

They do many many things - most of which are not in any way affected by this lawsuit. The judge even specified that the Internet Archive can still scan and publish copies of books in the public domain.

If the publishers seek statutory damages then yes, the entire archive is in critical danger.

I'll admit I didn't consider statutory damages. But the judge addresses that in his opinion. The Internet Archive argues that as a nonprofit, statutory damages shouldn't apply. Tbe judge says it's just the wrong phase of the trial for that argument altogether.

You can say there's some potential there for a worst-case scenario - but even then, we don't "lose" the Internet Archive unless they also lose on that specific point, are fined heavy statutory damages, can't pay them off or raise the money, and then cease to exist. Sure that's a bad what-if scenario. But I think it's just too early to have it in headlines.

> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground.

sure, it may have worked, but fuck me if that's what we get. controlled digital lending means we throw away[1] the great advantage brought by digital technology.

controlled digital lending is a very stupid thing to do. I saw megaupload. it showed us all that we can all share it all; we just don't seem to want to, or rather, the American government pursued them into extinction.

[1] looking at this even more closely, it's not that this 'digital advantage' is wasted, it is merely captured by authoritative powers who only understand markets, trade, and exclusive properties (exclusive due to being physical/material in nature unlike digital assets). e.g. Microsoft's billionaire business is made from capturing this digital boon as I called it.

Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail. Similar to Netflix original dvd model, but for books. An annual membership fee of like $20/yr to help maintain storage infrastructure. Then ship those books to/from people in reusable boxes for bigger/unwieldy books or padded envelopes if that's sufficient for less expensive paperback.

Small per-lend fee to cover the shipping cost, with a return window or followup fee per N days... days determined based on the size/pages in the book/volume.

With efforts to work with various local libraries to handle some of the distribution closer to the people.

Everything old is new again. That's literally how for-profit subscription libraries (which often used to also ship books to people too far away to visit the physical library) used to work in the 18th and 19th century prior to widespread public libraries. The existence of these libraries even influenced the style of novels at the time. Because each volume was treated as a separate rental, novels became longer and longer so that they could be split across multiple volumes (most typically 3).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscription_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel

I don't see how the shipping costs could ever be low enough for that to make sense. Even after my organization's massive UPS discounts, shipping a paperback one state over still costs $4.30. Would you rather spend five bucks to rent a used book or fifteen to buy a new one?

USPS offers media and library rates, which goes as low as $2.20 for any zone. That'd still be $4.40 round trip though.

> Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail.

but this changes everything. My whole point (which you seem to have ignored) is that when dealing with physical goods, then the systems (traditions, institutions) already in place work fine.

But why would I do that when I can give the PDF version to everybody due to ZERO distribution costs? (not marginal costs, even less. zero costs once the PDFs are made).

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