Authors and copyright scholars back Internet Archive in landmark legal battle

torrentfreak.com

68 points·gslin··7 comments

I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been an amicus brief from O'Reilly, who really do get that the market for books is an ecosystem in which libraries are an essential component.

Do they have enough money to hire good lawyers, compared to big publishers? That's what matters.

https://archive.org/donate

As a nonfiction author I would rather have my pdf books (with a donation link in them) up on sites like archive.org than not have the these sites exist.

They are priceless in their function as research and knowledge tools.

If archive.org fulfills dmca takedown requests then I don't see what the problem is.

Is this related to when IA blatantly violated copyright and thought the pandemic made it okay?

As I understand it, this case relates to their practice of lending digital copies to one patron at a time. Nothing about that violates copyright law in the physical world, so why should it be any different in the digital world?

IA is wasting their donors money fighting a case they know they will lose because they had to have known from the beginning that their book system was completely unsupported by law or precedent.

I would stop donating until leadership changes, they are risking the ire of courts and prosecutors if they continue. Their archive could be seized or ordered to stop entirely.

For an org to legitimately consider this means it's leadership is controlled by unreasonable people that no longer are upholding their mission. They have been told by their legal that this won't work, and are pursuing it anyways.

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