Our fight is far from over | Hacker News Reader

Our fight is far from over

blog.archive.org

192 pointsapp4soft64 comments

This is a bizarre post. It says nothing about what the papers filed actually mean.

The papers are a proposed permanent injunction that both the publishers and IA have (mostly) agreed on, although the IA wants the injunction to only apply to books that are in print and licensed by the publishers as ebooks. The publishers want it to apply to all books.

I don't know why IA decided to post about it in such a cryptic way, unless maybe it was a condition of the ruling, and they're doing the absolute minimum to satisfy that condition.

I assume they made this small post for those already familiar with the case, and they'll have new larger write-ups on it as the appeal draws nearer. It reads like an update for those already subscribed to their newsletter on the issue.

I almost never see conditions attached to rulings. No judge would want to be pulled up on some freedom of speech issue. It's just IA being IA...

The specific development this post references is a proposed injunction [1] that Internet Archive and the publishers agreed on and sent to the judge. With certain exceptions (such as accessibility and fair use), IA would have to remove from its lending program any books that are commercially available from the publishers. IA wants "commercially available in electronic text format" and the publishers want "commercially available in any format", they've asked the judge to settle that point. IA reserves the right to appeal the judgement.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17211300/214/1/hachette...

Either way is a win I think. It becomes effectively legal to distribute digital copies of out of print books, which up to now you had to go find a physical copy of if you wanted to read it.

I agree. While the injunction has no binding force outside the parties to the suit, I think any other defendants in the future can point to this as persuasive.

I'm building an online magazine archive for orphaned media and this is a great ruling for me to use in case I find my entity in legal hot water.

Post on Mastodon:[0]

> We submitted a letter to the court today in the ongoing lawsuit against our library. We’re fighting for the rights of libraries to use their print collections in the digital age

[0] https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11087231829363...

This is about the "National Emergency Library" they launched during the peak of the COVID pandemic? I think they had good intentions, but the legality around it was definitely questionable from the start.

No, this is about controlled digital lending as a whole. The ruling issued struck down all CDL, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say that it was also illegal as CDL was illegal.

Yes, in part. But it's also about their online lending program wholesale.

> legality around it was definitely questionable from the start.

Can I cite old argument that "If someone invents book libraries now, they will be completely illegal."?

Furthermore:

I am seeing in the CNA (Channel News Asia) titles a:

> Music labels sue Internet Archive over digitized record collection

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-lifestyle/music-labels-s...

One note:

> The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and "face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed"

«Authorized streaming services» are businesses, not preservation entities (libraries). They do not inherently provide a warranty.

The worst part of this is the CDL scheme used DRM, making it strictly inferior to piracy and therefore essentially useless to me and many others. IA has stuck their neck on the chopping block for the dumbest reason. They should have stuck to legally hosting whatever they can legally host without DRM and left the rest to other organizations that can thumb their noses at American courts.

They had print books that were not otherwise available as ebooks. This has been immensely useful for my research. I have a feeling that I have a whole lot more interlibrary loans in my future.

> They had print books that were not otherwise available as ebooks.

Including pirate sources? I know they had a lot of ebooks that had no official and legitimate ebook, I encountered many of those, but in every case I was able to find the same scanned book somewhere else without the DRM. Probably the same scan I'm guessing, stripped of DRM or maybe uploaded elsewhere by the same person who scanned it for IA.

Yes, including pirate sources. There's a lot of academic work from circa 1970-1990 that publishers don't care to make available as ebooks and are too obscure for pirates to have any interest in digitizing.

IMHO they were very dumb to do the emergency lending nonsense to begin with.

A good example of letting ideology walk you past the cliff. Even if they’re successful against the injunction the damage has been done.

Given how tenuous online lending is already, it was naive to push the boundary further.

I feel a similar ideological gap is slowly growing in the treatment of data surrounding generative AI.

I was utterly flabbergasted by this move. If some unrelated entity had done some bold move in the digital lending space, that would be one thing, but IA is a single point of failure for large amounts of internet history. Frankly, it was completely idiotic to risk all that on an untested lending experiment.

If I’m being honest, none of you would have made the archive happen. Presumably, you would have been troubled by the copyright implications. The kind of person who does that would probably also do this. There is no perfect stopping point. Everyone fantasizes that they would have sold GME at the top, run a business to the point it was at its best and no farther, and pushed a law to bend only as far as it can.

The evidence is in the action. The archives are available yet none of you even host a mirror of this supposed treasure. Of course you are flabbergasted: you would have been flabbergasted anyway. What use is the surprise of the peanut gallery?

I agree. I don't understand why the IA seem to be continuously poking the limits of what's acceptable or not, when their core mission is already complicated enough copyright-law-wise.

They are one big lawsuit away from being possibly forced to shut the _entire_ archiving operation down, and yet they continuously prod all the entities that are likely to serve them such a lawsuit. I cannot but have this picture of a small dog barking at a pack of huge dogs. And then they'll cry and make a fuss and claim they are the victims when they are inevitably sued.

Exempli gratia: https://archive.org/search?query=office+2019

Why. Just why they risk everything by being yet-another file sharing site that is full of pirated software?

Personally I find it more naive to think that tiptoeing around book publishers in fear hoping that they can slowly make small progress is the smarter move. They're not going to make serious progress in the fight against unfair online lending terms by appeasing publishers.

I’m not sure how you can have this opinion given the result. The internet archive would have clearly been better off “tiptoeing” around

Not only do they still have an appeal, but the problem goes beyond the Internet Archive itself. Lobbying politicians, coordinating with other libraries, inspiring more civil disobedience, all of which can more productively happen now that we've seen what publisher's limits are as well as how we've seen that publisher profits _grew_ over the period that the National Emergency Library was available.

The appeal would be for the implementation of the restriction both parties have already agreed to. It’s a clear regression from pre Covid. They’ve lost either way.

Again, considering only the IA's own CDL program is a narrow view of the larger issue. This doesn't necessarily end with a single lawsuit.

Agree, but the real naivety is that they did it (afaict) under the same corporate entity as the critical online Internet Archive. This means a loss on this lending issue may jeopardize the entire IA, which would be a much greater loss.

They should absolutely be pushing the edges, but cleave it off so as not to put the whole enterprise at risk.

I hope it doesn't come to that.

If they spun it off separately they'd be handing a pretty big target for publishers to lean on during trial: "They *knew* what they were doing was wrong, they even tried to separate it from their non-profit to protect themselves from the consequences!"

Probably it's more that we just disagree on the relative importance of digital lending; I think that digital lending is one core part of the overall ability to access archived works, and thus is core to the Internet Archive's mission and function rather than a simple extension of it. That makes it worthy of putting their full weight behind it.

>> they'd be handing a pretty big target for publishers to lean on during trial: "They knew what they were doing was wrong, they even tried to separate it from their non-profit to protect themselves from the consequences!"

Maybe, if they did it foolishly and obviously. But it could easily be done so as to undermine the same argument, and even if not, the counter-argument is that "we did it that way because "we knew we would be swimming with a bunch of excessively litigious asshat corporations." Not hard to convince a jury of that.

Moreover, as important as digital lending is, losing BOTH digital lending AND The Internet Archive will be a serious disaster with very long-lasting consequences. This latest decision just made ti more likely, and the current SCOTUS, which may well be where this ends up, is likely to produce that result.

We need an archive copy of The Internet Archive (both the data set and the organization).

The emergency lending has almost no relevance in this case, which is about controlled digital lending as a whole

The initial ruling cited emergency lending to justify banning all digital lending and the case was only brought up due to it as well.

It has the utmost relevance. It’s no coincidence the initial suit happened mere months after the emergency lending began.

>initial ruling cited emergency lending to justify banning all digital lending and the case was only brought up due to it as well.

The ruling's only mention of the emergency lending was that it was illegal as CDL was illegal.

There's also a fair amount of reason to suspect the publishers were preparing for the lawsuit far before the emergency lending. They were publishing stories about it and forming a petition against it in 2019, following years of criticizing it.

What is it there to lose? Worst case we're back to kindle which is the same as doing nothing.

Worst case is they’re ordered to shut the entire archive down. It will be like the burning of the Library of Alexandria only the arsonists are the IP lobby and the reason it happened is ego.

Chris Freeland is a menace to our library. The case was open and shut.

I'm pretty distant from this, but I'm fairly sure Chris Freeland just wrote this blog post: and my spider sense suggests he probably actually just posted it after it had been collectively written by many many many lawyers.

Heh. The EFF is the legal support.

I like what the internet archive is doing, but I'm saddened that many just use it as a hack to get around paywalls. I don't think that's in alignment with the internet archive's mission.

I think it's important for society in the long-term to keep journalism a rewarding profession.

Maybe as a compromise the internet archive could only allow access to archived journalism content after, say, a year's time. We'd be sure things got archived, and journalists would still get paid.

The archive's mission is "Universal Access to All Knowledge", how do you figure that keeping a copy of news articles is not in line with that mission?

Do you know you can walk into any library and read the daily paper?

If a news outfit doesn't like what the archive is doing they can issue takedown requests and the archive will comply. Could be that journalists appreciate having the archive available to them more than viewing it as a threat to their livelihood.

It's archive.is that's more used to bypass those. Not really archive.org as it's not as effective for that.

archive.is has no connection to the Internet Archive, the IA I believe does not allow the easy bypass of things like the NYT paywall.

This drifting away for the original topic... or maybe it isn't that much if the pessimists are right in the end that IA will shut down after this lawsuit and we need other ressources when searching for something that has disappeared from the net.

Is it publicly known who is behind archive.is? Last time I checked about a year ago I could not find a name. But between the lines I could read they are affected by sanctions against Russia. Not individually but by the lack of international banking. So I concluded they are operating from Russia in one way or another.

There was an article here about it a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598

> but I'm saddened that many just use it as a hack to get around paywalls.

I have yet to run into a single piece from any mainstream news outlet that deserves my money. I have happily paid for the Financial Times, for example, because they have significantly higher bars set for journalistic integrity. Reuters is another one.

Pardon me if I don't cry that NYT, WaPo, Marketwatch, WSJ, Bloomberg, and all other OpEd-disguised-as-journalism vendors don't get my $0.001 worth of clicks.

Error getting a database connection. This link was posted 7 minutes ago. Hmnn... sounds like their fight is definitely ongoing

http://archive.today/2023.08.12-020044/https://blog.archive....

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