Hacker News Reader

Maybe they shouldn't have done something that moronic? If people wanted free books they could always pirate them, openly infringing by hosting copyrighted books for a few people to slightly more easily read them for free... How could they possibly think that was a good idea?

View on HN

The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).

Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.

Yes I love the idea and I want it to be legal. Perhaps it is even worth someone testing the law here intentionally to get the courts to rule.

The Internet Archive's mission, imo, should be to protect and steward their archives and ability to continue to maintain them above all though. Putting that at risk for a morally righteous additional cause is not worth it. This was a leadership failure

what if they did it with all of netflix's movies instead of books? would you feel differently? (I am sure netflix would).

Or maybe if they distributed newest version of software with certain parts removed. Maybe even non saas-software made by startups...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com