The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
lunduke.locals.com
lunduke.locals.com
IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
I'm not saying that speciously. If it's fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, there's no need for the public to go to shadow libraries; because they've then become de facto legal and the libraries might as well distribute the material directly (or aid with access and provide resources for the shadow libraries.) If it's not fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, when they do it they've called their own distribution of copyrighted materials into question by implying that they do the same thing as shadow libraries.
DRM is an overlay over copyright which gives copyright owners some security that they'll be able to hold on to most of the distribution of what they own. It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all.
If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. The giant multinational companies that own the vast majority of copyrights are begging you to stake the entire IA on such a sucker bet.
> That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all.
> If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it.
I agree with you. There is no (legal) excuse for the National Emergency Library, digital lending DRM is just a pretense, and they shouldn't have gambled the Archive on it. The battle will be won by shadow libraries, who by their extra-legal nature are better equipped to fight copyright directly.
That is indeed a crime: "promotion and incentivisation of crime", one of the major ways of starting an organised crime in fact. Do you want IA to be declared a criminal organisation?
Libraries are repositories of information, including "forbidden" information.
Well sure there is, because it also works the other way around. You can have copyright without DRM, and enforce it not via some weak and easily bypassed technological fig leaf but with the full force of the government. A patron who makes a permanent copy even though they've claimed and agreed to have destroyed their temporary one would be liable for copyright infringement. There is no reason the law couldn't still prohibit that while allowing temporary lending.
Copyright holders would have no more or less trouble enforcing this than they do any other infringing copying that happens in private, like when the user downloads the same book from a shadow library in a foreign country. The difference is that the local library has paid the copyright holder for an official copy, implying that they haven't done anything wrong, and neither have any patrons who don't illicitly retain a copy. Why should people doing nothing wrong have any liability?
If you haven't read this, now's the time to: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit...
> IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
Very unlikely that would happen and libraries would inevitably pay the ultimate price in the long run in a period where they're under attack and most at risk of extinction from all fronts (politicians, governments, publishers, copyright cartel, list goes on all hate libraries and this would be a huge win for those groups as a sign to cripple them even more).
If you want that to change, you'll need to get congress to do something about it (lol).
Not all digital books are DRM protected. I recently listened to Cory Doctorow’s audiobook The Bezzel and at the end he tells you that you have the right to loan or sell your copy of the audiobook.
With a physical book, that's much easier; I simply don't have the book anymore. I could technically photocopy the entire myself and have the book as backup, but that's a pretty time-consuming process that most people aren't going to bother with.
The "solution" to this could be some kind of DRM, but of course that has its own can of horrible and problematic worms, not the least of which the fact that central signing servers suck.
I had an idea years ago of trying to have some kind of blockchain-based DRM but I never really figured out how to even get started with it so I never did anything with it. Still, I think it could be worth someone giving it a go.
That's the case regardless of any DRM or even what the source material is. You can OCR a physical book or type the contents into your computer once from any source you can read with your eyes and then make infinite copies thereafter.
The thing that prevents this is that making unlimited permanent copies is copyright infringement, the same as it ever was. Making the unlimited copies is now cheaper than it was a century ago, but that has nothing to do with where or how the infringer gets the first copy.
Never mind breaking DRM, there are services that will OCR a book for around $15. For most books it would cost less to OCR than to buy a single physical copy, from which an infringer could make an unlimited number. Putting this out as some kind of significant distinction between physical and digital copies is just looking for an excuse for a money grab against the new technology.
Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it.
Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back.
It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.
This is the same reason DRM doesn't prevent everything from being on The Pirate Bay. It's not that breaking it is always trivial, it's that you only need one person to do it once. It doesn't matter if it costs one cent or a thousand dollars because neither of those is enough to be a deterrent.
edit: the "right" we have to copy them from device to device I think is just granted by the official interpretation of current law by Library of Congress lawyers. It would be entirely consistent to say that when I sell you an ebook, you get to download it to one machine once, and that copying it to a different machine is a violation.
I have to say I've never seen anti-library sentiment from politicians or governments.
I would also take issue with the "absolutely" of your assertion about OCR. For some things, yes, for crazy fonted works, no, but the devil's in the details
Libraries are able to loan under the first sale doctrine, that is to say that the copyright holder exhausts their right to control the distribution of a copy after the first sale. However, they retain a monopoly on the production of copies.
For example, CDs are digital. To play a CD that you own, the player is going to create a copy of the song in memory in order to decode it into an analog signal that can be played on speakers. Then it's going to discard that temporary copy, leaving the CD as the only permanent one. It seems pretty obvious that either that sort of temporary copy doesn't count or that it should be fair use.
But then how is it any different if the temporary copy is on your tablet instead of your CD player?
Many people misunderstand and think it is just about the temporary unlimited lending. It was motivated by that, but went further.
The law[1] makes it clear public libraries are permitted to make one digital copy and distribute it (lend it) once at a time on separate occasions. Subsection (g) outlines that distributing that one copy multiple times simultaneously forfeits the protections granted by this law.
The reason IA doesn't rely on § 108 is "When a user requests a copy of an entire work or a substantial part thereof, the library or archives must first make a reasonable effort to determine whether a copy can be obtained at a fair price. If it can, then no copy is allowed to be made." https://www.copyright.gov/policy/section108/discussion-docum...
What you're describing, "public libraries are permitted to make one digital copy and distribute it (lend it) once at a time on separate occasions," is what controlled digital lending refers to, and it would be cool if it was overtly authorized by statute, but it isn't -- the original CDL whitepaper ( https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/ ) relied on fair use instead. The trial court found that it fails that test, so unless IA wins on appeal, it doesn't exist.
Copyright is an artificial constraint on something that is otherwise constrained only by cost of raw inputs and machine labor (even back in the days of setting the lead by hand)... And in that sense, not very constrained at all. The whole thing is an artifice that tries to encourage creation of novel work by couching monopoly on ideas in property law.
This leaves you with a quantum beast that mostly runs on "vibes." To your example: no, illegal, because you made a copy, right there, when you format-shifted. Or yes, because you preserved the total number of instances. Or no, because you moved a tangible format that is easy to preserve singularity on to a hard-to-audit, easy-to-copy format, thus greatly increasing the risk of copyright fiolation. Or yes, because you actually recorded the fact of the position of the ink on the paper in your original copy, and you can't copyright facts ("this is a historical record of what my book looked like"). Or...
Copyright is a ball of string and chewing gum held together by a few explicit laws and many, many centuries of precedent. It's very hard to predict what the end result of a lawsuit in novel territory will be, because it really does come down to "Which faction do the judges think should have more power today?"
Currently the people putting in the bigger volume of “work” are the “we want the money” faction. Those who claim they own every concept that they touch. Because they will get more money if they win they treat it as both a war and a job.
Some legal-decision makers put in a smaller but more personally costly amount of work to fight against them in that war.
And a few in the general public put in work to try to change public opinion so that either the war can end peacefully (the “we own everything we touch” faction dwindles and get phased out) or we can get enough people to join the legal fights so that we can win the war.
Every time we become complacent they gain ground. Every time we make a stand they try to erode it from all sides. It is the active and vigilant effort despite them that makes forward progress possible.
Almost everybody this thread mistakenly believes that the lawsuit is strictly about the unlimited lending that has long since been suspended - it is not.
The lawsuit was provoked by the unlimited lending, but takes a two-pronged approach - it attacks both unlimited and 1-to-1 lending.
Imagine a video rental service where you can go in, and they will play whatever movie you want on a DVD player in the back room. How long can that wire be between the DVD player and the person watching before it starts being copyright infringement?
I imagine it would be when you put a Y on the wire so that two people can watch from two different monitors.
of course this gets to the core of the problem: rights on paper are one thing, but they are easily taken away by a plaintiff with money. if you don't have the money to defend the right, you don't have the right (and in fact stand a good chance of getting the right taken away for everyone else too).
But, even after the Supreme Court said they were operating more like a cable company https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/supreme-court-pu... they were not allowed to actually operate like a cable company. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/in-win-for-broad...
But as IA isn't to my knowledge doing controlled digital lending with broadcast television, is there any plausible argument they would be found to be a cable company?
Like this is a weird “that’s not true, weren’t they actually…” that recites all the same reasons I just said they were found to be infringing?
Aereo was significantly different, because there was no copyrighted material being rented. They were renting out servers, and the servers made per-user recordings. Aereo got super screwed over too, because the supreme court said they were 'basically' a cable company, and then they weren't able to get cable company style mandatory licensing either.
Let me put it this way: You should very much be able to rent a DVD from across the world and control it by wire, and the only limit we need to prevent abuse is how often that DVD can change hands, since micro-renting could cause legitimate problems.
Should your books destroy themselves after you've read them once?
Digital books are different. It's quite possible for there to be one "sale" in the first sale model. That doesn't do a very good job of sharing costs among the people who read the book. Nor does it do a good job of rewarding the people who produce good books that are in much demand.
I'm quite happy with all of the digital "renting" schemes that effectively "destroy" the digital work after I've consumed it. Why? Because I want to pay the least amount and that means spreading the costs as broadly as possible. That's just fairness.
Further, simply because you give out copies of your work for free, does not mean you suddenly lose copyright protection. Costs and copyright are two entirely separate issues, which is why open source licenses can exist. Your attempt to convolve these two facts leads to an incredibly messy interpretation.
Digital books are not different in any meaningful way. You have the right to sell a digital copy. Once sold, the user who purchased it, has a right to use that copy in any way the see fit. Including lending it to others, selling it second hand, or even reading it out loud as part of an event.
The article makes it perfectly clear, this is not driving costs down, so while you may be happy with that outcome, that's clearly not what's actually occurring. So I'm genuinely surprised you've gone to this much effort to advocate for something that demonstrably fails to produce the outcome you're after.
If I were only allowed to change one thing about copyright, what I would change is not the length of copyright terms, but the treatment of digital works. Kill this stupid pretend game that you don't buy anything digital, you merely lease it, and therefore the creator gets to jerk you around to their heart's content because contract law supersedes all. No, make a digital sale a sale, and then we get to have the First Sale Doctrine kick in. And hopefully we get to sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as they repeatedly go to SCOTUS as the printer manufacturers do with some new harebrained attempt to work around First Sale Doctrine and SCOTUS goes "lol, nope, doesn't work."
But truly, fuck the ebook lending practices. It's downright predatory and it just makes me never want to actually buy an ebook (unless it's from one of the few publishers that goes all-in on DRM-free ebooks).
the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act
Either way it seems public libraries were around at least a century before copyright, but by other measure, in some places, much longer.
Before the advent of digital media, the meaning of copyright could be cleanly derived from the words it is compounded from.
Any publisher arguing that to lend a purchased item to another person infringes on their exclusive right to produce copies, would have been laughed right out of the courtroom.
This is so sad. I spend so much time growing up in libraries. Been locked up there accidentally more than once.
I'm of the mind there should be a place he could do that safely and easily, but that place shouldn't be the library.
Libraries are one of the precious few places where one is not charged on entry or otherwise expected to buy something. Even public parks are increasingly hostile to the homeless, but often no real alternatives are offered. And I think that's a shame.
[0] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/cdph/provdrs/health_pr...
Libraries are also used as a free Starbucks to work in.
no, this is obscene degrees of victim-blaming here. the modern copyright regime predates the internet being a major commercial vector for anything by literally decades. the DAT tape wars were 80s, the VHS/Betamax time-shifting wars were 70s. taping off the radio was 60s.
obviously as the noose tightens, more and more activity becomes "criminal", so the "criminal activity" stats probably do go up over time, but that doesn't inherently reflect some change in social mores as much as the legal framework changing out from underneath it. and that was not initiated by anything to do with the internet - this really dates back to the "taping off the radio" days and the blowback from studios who didn't like that, and retrenched in the 80s and particularly the 90s.
Are you talking about legal challenges?
For popularity VHS was the 80's I think: "JVC released the first VHS machines in Japan in late 1976, and in the United States in mid-1977." and took a few years to take off widely.
Interestingly enough, VHS was developed in secret at JVC: "However, despite the lack of funding, Takano and Shiraishi continued to work on the project in secret. By 1973, the two engineers had produced a functional prototype.". The development of blue LEDs has a better story. Does Japanese culture encourage secrative development?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
Remarkably, Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers' Neighborhood) supported the VCR (for time shifting) and the Supreme Court took that into account.
All that’s fine and good, but isn’t going to help them negotiate with publishers, or get better copyright legislation.
I also think liberties have been branding themselves as politically progressive for a long time - since long before the digital age.
This has left them with few friends, as progressivism returns to its roots as an upper middle-class ideology.
And it would be more or less irrelevant that they didn't, because the massive amount of information made voluntarily available for free on the internet vastly outweighs the initial few centuries of libraries' existence by several orders of magnitude.
For ebooks, pirates can provide the public library service.
I find it extremely bizarre the people make posts like this, essentially conceding that controlled digital lending should be legal, but then claiming that they shouldn't win. Why shouldn't they win? They're doing something reasonable, meritorious and not at all clearly prohibited.
You're referring to the emergency library, which only operated during COVID. The claim in that case is that it should be allowed because it's temporary and can only operate during an emergent crisis, thereby limiting the impact on the market for the works.
> & then took donations for doing so
Why should that be relevant unless a donation is required to get a copy? It seems like a bad faith argument to try to ensure that no one offering a free service to the public can solicit donations to continue operating it.
> The original envision, where a book can be checked out digitally (and then is reserved until "returned", and mare available again), is way more defensible.
Isn't the case about both?
While personally I think that this is a powerful goal, how would that work in practice? Who determines what an emergency is? Once an emergency is declared, does everyone get the legal ability to seed torrents of copyright works? Or stream them directly to the public? If the copyright holders get upset about that then they will be motivated to downplay emergencies which puts them in opposition to the common good. What safeguards would need to be in place?
> If the copyright holders get upset about that then they will be motivated to downplay emergencies which puts them in opposition to the common good.
The entire premise is that it's temporary and therefore not likely to negatively impact them. But it's also obvious that media companies have a preexisting perverse incentive to over-hype any form of danger, so a countervailing force in the other direction would be a welcome balancing mechanism.
The problem is that's also the sort of thing corporations abuse to set bad precedents, by constantly nibbling away at the edges with expensive lawyers, and filing suit against defendants with far fewer resources.
This is why "according to corporate PR, what the defendant did was bad and wrong" should always be viewed with heavy skepticism. They're always going to choose a case where they can try to paint the defendant as the villain. And yet, we know who are the ones twirling their mustache.
The library model is one that has a long history and is therefore helpful as a way to accomplish that mission. The “controlled” part of controlled digital lending is only there as a way to try to appease rights-holders (who would otherwise argue in court that there should be no lending, only licensing (or not) under their complete control).
The unfortunate thing that happened is they decided upon themselves to freely and openly distribute copyrighted works at scale which is clearly prohibited and confirmed by precedent. This is the point that they should lose. No library is allowed to reprint books in full and simply hand them out to people who ask.
The "precedent" (pro copyright enforcement) has had unintended consequences to prior precendence (freedom of press...the literal printing press). Ignoring the battlefield of the limits of free speech is not constructive. Talking about past legal cases is not going to help in rolling back the dystopian eventuality.
It's obvious that they should not be allowed to do this perpetually or under normal circumstances. Why should they not be allowed to do it temporarily in an emergency? What existing case specifically addresses this?
It seems like for academic research, storing a large collection of unpopular books is what matters. Making best-sellers available to many local readers is a different function.
It makes no sense to even speak of "leasing" what's actually trivially copyable data. That's working within the conceptual framework of monopolists. There is no "cost", any costs associated with digital distribution can and will be so efficiently distributed among all users they might as well be zero. All the monopolists need to do is get out of our way.
The only solution to this problem is abolishing it all straight up. Just get rid of copyright. It's holding us all back.
For this to happen, libraries might need something like:
1) first sale doctrine for ebooks
2) explicitly legalizing the distribution (and non-infringing use) of digital copying and transcoding technology with substantial non-infringing uses, similarly to the analog domain (see: photocopiers, VCRs, etc.)
The Internet Archive has become the de-facto default location to upload anything rare, important, or valuable, and a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence if it were brought down.
They're basically holding the Internet Archive hostage to try to force this thing through.
That said, IANAL and I don't know what actual legal conclusions were arrived at from the trial or appeals.
This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
> This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
Agree to disagree. Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. The Internet Archive could archive and maintain these works in cold storage (both physical and digital), only to make them public again 100-200 years from now, but that would not be keeping with "Universal Access to All Knowledge." Disk and bandwidth is cheap, and the planet is big.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyri...
(no affiliation, but a fan and a supporter, and believe in defending public goods)
I don't think the IA exists without the kind of person who pushes that button.
But I think it was reckless to engage in uncontrolled ebook lending. Controlled lending (one copy lent for one copy on the shelf) is not a legal right (in the US), but it's got a much better chance of avoiding a lawsuit.
Uncontrolled lending was foolish. It was inviting a lawsuit, and it has far less chance of popular support than the intuitively more reasonable model of controlled lending.
I agree with the sentiment behind the NEL program: it's a lovely gesture. But to invite destruction of the Archive like that was a terrible mistake, in my view.
Regardless of one's opinion on the IA or their mission, they objectively did a stupid when they decided to fuck around with copyright law. Publishers (and judges) have demonstrated repeatedly over the last two and a half decades that from a business perspective this is the equivalent of standing on railroad tracks giving an oncoming train the bird. 10/10 for balls, 2/10 for judgement.
The current copyright system is pretty terrible at keeping track of older content and the few ones that still manage to make it through have questionable rights holders.
The removal of all copyright also means the removal of licenses that mandate free sharing and access. Two-way street, in other words.
Even in a world without copyright protections, the printer story ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt ) would still have occurred, but there would be no way to ensure that it won't happen again with GPL licensed code.
Without copyright, open source code could still be locked up behind paywalls and compiled binaries. It is copyright that ensures that the law is there to force people to release their code.
The hypothetical legislation to ensure the GPL or CC-BY-SA works is copyright.
I wonder how humanity managed for so long without it, if that were the case. Or did we just not produce art or culture until we established copyright as we know it today?
>Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2].
This isn't a "disagreement" with the GP. Piracy is a legal concept, and they were speaking in legal terms. Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US.
>LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away.
Then why should internet archive, which fills a number of niches that aren't just book or document piracy, be killed off?
Sure, but do they? They're a nonprofit, and as such depend on donations. Their donors might or might not be aligned on these two relatively orthogonal issues.
I'm even sympathetic of their desire to challenge the quite absurd status quo of controlled digital lending, with bizarre skeuomorphisms such as simulating "books wearing out" after a couple of lending cycles, while at the same time being more restricted than physical books (even though I don't necessarily agree with their means of challenging it).
But even for me, I think the risk is too big, and I'd feel much more comfortable with a different (maybe related/affiliated, but ultimately separated as legal entities) non-profit organization for each concern.
If you want to challenge an unjust law in a democracy, you can work within the system to change it, or you can engage in civil disobedience, publicly accept the consequences, and put your freedom on the line as a way to bring popular attention to the unjust law. That is the mechanism of civil disobedience against unjust laws. The whole point is that you must risk something in order to go around the system and challenge an unjust law. Everyone in America has at least one law they consider to be unjust, including some laws that I'm sure you believe are very just and would be very upset if others started to violate them in the name of justice.
Birmingham banned Martin Luther King, Jr. from participating in public protests and a Circuit court judge signed off on it. When MLK said he would protest anyway, the whole point of the civil disobedience was that MLK would be arrested for it. He was right that the public was outraged at the enforcement of this unjust legal order and called for change. What the IA did was like if MLK put on a mask to go protest, and when the police tried to arrest him, he said that he wasn't MLK.
I would argue the NEL is an example of fair use when the entire world is locked down [2] [3] [4], but I'm not the one who is defending the case. You're upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process. That isn't a Jedi mind trick, and to call it as such is silly ("The fair use right is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works. In the U.S., fair use right/exception is based on a flexible proportionality test that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work.").
Power concedes nothing without a demand. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Internet_publication
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Policy_arguments_abou...
I am not upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process. I am upset that they literally bet the entire organization on a questionable and novel legal theory, without acknowledging that they were putting the rest of their mission at such risk. You quoted some Wikipedia to me, but fair use is notoriously a minefield. You, me, the IA, and whoever edited that Wikipedia article all probably agree on how we think copyright law and fair use ought to be interpreted. But it seems like I am the only one of us who accepts that Big IP has a lot of influence over copyright law and that most judges don't think like us.
It would be one thing if the IA said, "We know we will be sued for this, and while we believe we will win this case and that the law is on our side, there is a very real possibility that we will not. If we lose, this may bankrupt our organization. However, we have a strong moral imperative to serve the people....." Or if they wanted to do a legal challenge to settle the law, they make one book from the most litigious publisher available for two people, record the entire thing, and send it to the publisher's lawyers. It goes to court
But they didn't. They responded to any criticism that this is risky in our current judicial system by saying that you can only believe it is risky because you don't share our views on what copyright ought to be.
> Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
That is maybe decent advice for dealing with parents or a boss, but not with the legal system. There is no forgiveness in copyright law. You don't escape liability just because you thought you were acting in good faith.
> If the Internet Archive legal entity is forced to dissolve, are legal participants on the other side of the civil suit prepared for the fallout from such an outcome (the "public outrage" you mention)?
As much as I love the core of the IA's mission, there will be no public fallout from this if the IA has to dissolve to pay its debts. I wish there would be, but I seriously doubt this would break through in our current political climate. This is one of the reasons I was so upset, because the IA does not have the political capital to pull off a civil disobedience project. And they didn't even try! Where is Brewster calling on Congress or the President to get a digital library exception added to any one of those bills or executive orders that were being passed around the national emergency?
https://apnews.com/article/libraries-ebooks-publishers-expen... ("Libraries struggle to afford the demand for e-books and seek new state laws in fight with publishers")
Consider the title above in the context of this post. It is libraries against publishers.
Unless you're a billion-dollar corporation who needs to feed your LLM.
Piracy is a PR/Marketing concept. Unless you are talking about commandeering or ransacking ships on the high seas.
However, the idea that IA is going to defeat a copyright industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars is laughable. If you're going to fork between government choosing to end copyright and government choosing to end the IA, the IA is 100% dead.
Characterizing people who don't want the IA to risk all against copyright as copyright-supporters is not fair at all. It's like calling people Assadists who didn't want to invade Syria.
Have you seen the other 97% of the archive?
There seems to be continued confusion on this basic issue of what is at stake in the lawsuit.
> The court fully rejected the Internet Archive’s argument that fair use protected its digital lending program. Notably, it did not limit its analysis to the National Emergency Library. Instead, the court rejected fair use as it applies to controlled digital lending in general. [0]
[0]: https://www.library.upenn.edu/news/hachette-v-internet-archi...
Maybe archive.ph will also surprise us, by being more resilient.
Anyway, it's an alternative, for now.
There are even many comment threads detailing their strategy to avoid legal takedown requests by serving content via an "anti-CDN" (i.e. always serving content from abroad whenever possible, to make legal actions more difficult).
I would argue that their attempt to even try this emergency library thing indicates that the people in charge are a bit too cavalier with what they have, for whatever (likely well-intentioned) reasons they may have.
And while individuals can mirror/datahoard the publicly facing parts of the IA, that's not all they have access too.
Sadly, my doctor also said I can't have the lollipop.
they have a duplicate headquarters in Vancouver now, a similarly grand building to their SF headquarters. Years ago there was a collab with the library of Alexandria in Egypt to host an offsite backup but I don't think it panned out.
At 99 Petabytes, an offline copy would take about 2,000 LTO-9 tapes. I'm not familiar with other vendors, but a single IBM TS4500 tape library offers about 400 PB of near-line storage and I don't think IBM would be making the largest ones in existence.
Also, CERN could host multiple copies on unused blocks of their storage farm.
edit: just found a StorageTek (now Oracle) that can do "57.6 EB of uncompressed data". That's just surreal. HPE sells a much more modest unit that can store 2.5 EB.
There was supposed to be a second archive at the Bibelotheque Alexandrina in Egypt.[1] It worked for a few years. But it seems to be down now.
[1] https://www.bibalex.org/en/Project/Details?DocumentID=283&Ke...
Here's the related discussion: Stop using the Internet Archive as the sole host for preservation projects | 87 points by yours truly | 27 days ago | 27 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
Hachette's owners see an opportunity here to destroy a public good, and they are taking it. Hachette are the bad actors trying to destroy what you find valuable, not the IA.
They're probably just making sure that the next place that wants to pull something funny, doesn't.
Ye old "lets make an example out of them" thing.
They do: Legal precedent.
IA made themselves into an easy, prominent target by doing something everyone else agreed to not do via Gentlemens' Agreements(tm) and precedents set by lesser transgressions, so now they're reaping what they sowed.
The book publishers stand to gain legal precedent that doing what IA did can and will result in legal consequences severe enough to ruin you.
Hachette obviously benefits from teaching would-be unlimited "lenders" a lesson. Even anti-DRM, "buy my books only if you can afford" authors were against this hare-brained lending scheme because the IA didn't even bother to buy a single copy of the books they were "lending".
The blame squarely falls at the IA's feet; being an idealist doesn't give you the rights to delve into illegal behavior, regardless of the righteousness of your cause or the depth of your conviction. If the world is better with an org in it, and it jeopardizes it's own ability to remain a going concern, it's clear to me who is culpable. "Too good to die" doesn't exist.
Just to be clear, it is your position that the IA's Wayback Machine and abandonware archives should also not exist, right?
No, I fully support these missions. Both have defensible fair use protections and do not try to break new legal ground with flimsy justifications. I wish the IA were little more aggressive about not retroactively applying robots.txt rules on archived content.
It's hard to reconcile how overly careful they are with the Wayback Machine compared to the carelessness of unlimited lending. I am livid they risked their priceless archives for book piracy - that's not a great hill to die on.
Indeed. It's maybe worth reflecting on the apparent conflict there. What info are you missing, that could explain the conflict? The IA folks aren't crazy, but they are opinionated and willing to take action where others might not, and the world was in a very crazy state at the time the decision was made. Consider some sympathy for the people leading the project you feel so passionately about.
It can be right or wrong, i don't know. I want organizations to fight the battles that gain us new rights and freedoms. I know that they have a lot to lose here though, and they shouldn't risk it.
Concretely, I was a big individual donor to the IA until this lawsuit. I support their mission, I love their work, I help (technically and financially) other organizations like local museums and non-profits handle their archival work. This is something important to me, and I really want their archives to persist.
I stopped donating to the IA - and won't resume - until this lawsuit is resolved. I don't want to donate to the book publishers, and it looks that's going to be the outcome of their entire funds.
Is it really? The cynical side of me wonders if it just might be intentional. What if this is a nonprofit analogue to VC monetization? Do you dislike an existing law? Create a similar but legal service you know other people will appreciate, use donations to undercut competitors and become the defacto monopoly, ride the network effect to a large crowd that basically relies on you, then rugpull by tying their narrow, legal use to your crusade for a different legal system by infecting their data with illegal material and declaring the whole thing must sink or swim together. Now your users have to pay you to fight your policy crusade or they lose their already legal resource they value much more, and you can use your legal half as a moral shield to get approval from anyone who only had the time to read the headline when the prosecution inevitably shows up at your door. All you need yo hold the almost-grift together is to lie by omission about who instigated it all.
They've stopped doing that. They now ignore robots.txt completely and you have to email them to stop them.
If they'd applied that same level to the books, they might have avoided this mess.
I have plenty of issues with copyright law as it's currently written and wholeheartedly support copyright reform. That's very different from any one party unilaterally suspending copyright "because of COVID"
This way of thinking is the reason why we are losing so many great things. Laws are created by people to support a society we want to live in. When laws no longer sever the society, then the society must rise up and change them. Like with any bug, fixing it early is cheaper than fixing it later.
> it's clear to me who is culpable
"Look what you made me do. If you hadn't acted up I wouldn't have had to destroy you."
I’m not sure it’s exceedingly rare for an author to not make some beer money on top of single dollar advances but it’s not a full-time job for many authors. It mostly works to support the day job or as a hobby.
But many authors might as well self-publish today. I mostly have.
> The vast, VAST majority of money that an author makes is from their advance. It is exceedingly rare for a book to sell even enough to cover that advance, and even rarer for it to have sales strong enough that the author sees meaningful, life changing residuals.
This is how author advances would work in a world without copyright: authors would self-publish their books, and there would be no advances. If the book proved to be popular and successful, all the major distribution platforms would "pirate" it and pay them nothing. No conceivable DRM would save the author's income, because the platforms can afford to pay people to manually key in the work.
Think about it. If there is no copyright, why would anyone pay an advance?
Doesn't this apply to every mass-market creative endeavor - software engineering included? There a whole lot of machinery sitting between {code|book} author and the paying consumers, leveraging efficiency of scale and demanding a pound of flesh in return. Agents, editors, lawyers, proof readers, marketers, book cover artists, sales people, type-setters, and requisite admin support staff all of them necessary to publish and distribute books at scale. If you think authors don't need an entire industry behind them, try sifting through the self-published dreck on Amazon.
> This way of thinking is the reason why we are losing so many great things. Laws are created by people to support a society we want to live in. When laws no longer sever the society, then the society must rise up and change them. Like with any bug, fixing it early is cheaper than fixing it later.
Let me put it bluntly: the IA went about pursuing that change in stupid and impulsive way, and their actions may very well accomplish nothing while causing us to lose more "great things."
"I'm going to pretend the laws I don't like don't exist in order to try to change them," is an activity for people with little other responsibility and little to lose.
In hindsight, if the IA wanted to try something like the "National Emergency Library," they should have set up an independent entity to take the fall and contain the damage if it didn't work out. And since they didn't do that, they should probably have tried really hard to settle and fight another day than go down in a blaze of glory.
Thank you for spelling this correctly!
... Illegal as defined by the highly paid lobbyists of the trillion dollar copyright monopolies? It boggles my mind that such "laws" are even considered legitimate.
> "Too good to die" doesn't exist.
Tell that to Wikipedia and several other organizations which put a stop to stuff like SOPA/PIPA with a single day of blackout. I want to see them try to destroy Wikipedia over copyright nonsense.
You demonize Hachette et al (4 major publishers) as seeking to destroy a public good. In fact, they've already settled with the IA, as of last August 2023, in a manner that caps costs to IA at a survivable level and sets clear mutually-acceptable rules for future activity.
You imply IA would dismiss the appeal if the plaintiffs "could drop enforcement of the judgement". In fact, there were never any assessed damages, the parties have already reached a mutually-acceptable settlement per above, and despite that – in fact, as part of the settlement! – the IA has retained the right to appeal regarding the fair-use principles that are important to them.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive#F...
>On August 11, 2023, the parties reached a negotiated judgment. The agreement prescribes a permanent injunction against the Internet Archive preventing it from distributing the plaintiffs' books, except those for which no e-book is currently available,[3] as well as an undisclosed payment to the plaintiffs.[25][26] The agreement also preserves the right for the Internet Archive to appeal the previous ruling.[25][26]
IA's August 2023 statement on how much will continue despite the injunction & settlement limits: https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/17/what-the-hachette-v-inte...
>Because this case was limited to our book lending program, the injunction does not significantly impact our other library services. The Internet Archive may still digitize books for preservation purposes, and may still provide access to our digital collections in a number of ways, including through interlibrary loan and by making accessible formats available to people with qualified print disabilities. We may continue to display “short portions” of books as is consistent with fair use—for example, Wikipedia references (as shown in the image above). The injunction does not affect lending of out-of-print books. And of course, the Internet Archive will still make millions of public domain texts available to the public without restriction.
Be not confused. Lunduke's blog is a sensationalist tech tabloid. Every article is like that -- elevating mundane disagreements in open source projects to huge proportions, without doing nearly enough research to be called journalism.
How do you know that? The last I saw, the penalty was still undisclosed.
Quite possibly on behalf of some other entities in their same bed that don't like information to be free and preserved.
One response to that is the "The Offline Internet Archive" [0], which includes software to crawl Internet Archive collections and store them to a local server [1].
On the other hand you can already have 24 20TB HDDs for maybe $7000 (with required other hardware), and that's almost 0.5 petabytes. I imagine it would be able to archive all things a single person cares about. Now only if there was a way to interconnect these smaller storage pods to each other..
Counter examples exist: the NASA moon landing tapes were lost, but a copy was found in a horde in Australia. Dr Who episodes, lost by the BBC, have been collected from fans' recordings, etc.
There's some difficulty in connecting those who want the info with those who have it, but if the search gets enough publicity, it can work. This seems like a problem that could be solved with software.
I disagree. Archiving information for future researchers is valuable, but giving access to information to people right now is also very valuable. Most people's access to texts for research is very shallow, unless they are part of a research university. Google Books hosts many works that are out of copyright, but there is a century-long dead zone that is inaccessible.
I write a history of technology blog and the Internet Archive lending service has saved me thousands of dollars and many hours that it would have taken to track down the same research materials on eBay. Realistically, I just wouldn't have bothered, and the material I write would be of lower quality or not get written at all.
(That said I do agree that the emergency library was a strategic and legal mistake.)
It’s about, as the IA calls it, “Controlled Digital Lending” - which the IA was doing before and after the “emergency”, and is still doing now. The idea that, if they have a physical copy of a book, they can lend, one-for-one, a digital copy.
The “National Emergency Library” was basically uncontrolled - they were ‘lending’ digital copies of books they did not have physical copies of. But there are no lawsuits about that - presumably because they stopped and it would be bad publicity fore book companies to pursue them about it now. I do wonder if it’s what precipitated the book companies’ ire - but I also think a lawsuit about “Controlled Digital Lending” was coming sooner or later anyway.
It's just that the lower court's judgement didn't really focus much that issue, because they found the broader/simpler and more-foundational "can you loan a format-shifted ebook 1:1 from your physical book" issue against IA, which then makes an anti-NEL conclusion almost automatic.
So NEL-related arguments haven't yet been the focus of the rulings, despite being part of the original lawsuit.
Thus, also, IA's appeal is mostly about that foundational finding – though section II of the IA appeal brief says that if the appeal succeeds on "ordinary controlled digital lending", the NEL ruling should also be rejudged:
>Il. THIS COURT SHOULD REMAND FOR RECONSIDERATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY LIBRARY Publishers do not deny that the district court’s NEL ruling depends entirely on its analysis of ordinary controlled digital lending. Resp.Br. 61-62. If the Court reverses the latter, then it should also reverse and remand the former. It need not address Publishers’ arguments about the justifications for NEL (Resp.Br. 62), which should be left for the district court in the first instance.
Context?
Edit: found the answer
> per Wikipedia, as of eight months ago (August 2023), the lawsuit parties already reached & had the court approve a negotiated settlement that caps the potential costs to the IA at a survivable level
^from another comment, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203627>, nearly at the very bottom of the thread (perhaps because it looks like a wall of text at first glance? But the most important info is first). Thanks, gojomo!
I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is. Sounds like it will soon again be a good time to donate to the IA: they survive, plaintiffs see there is nothing more to take, then we fund their regular operations and hope for no more "emergency" ideas
It cannot. The IA already basically got the worst possible judgment.
This is also not an existential threat to the IA, and payment has already been agreed upon. The reporting on this is extremely sensationalist.
Why bother appealing then? Seems to just be wasting lawyers fees on both sides.
With the advice of competent counsel, IA clearly estimates its chance of prevailing on that question as worth the continuing costs.
At worst, they lose on that question, and then comply with the August 2023 settlement & pay some undisclosed amount to publishers to cover publishers' legal fees.
At best, they set an important precedent that saves their (and many others libraries!) ability to lend in the digital era for the one-time cost of a physical book, instead of the new time-limited leasing models publishers are imposing for native ebook lending – which could massively increase library costs even though digital delivery could be far cheaper than physical lnding.
Note that even if the odds are long, setting that precedent would be very valuable! The calculation isn't, "are we more than 51% likely to win?", but "even if we've only got a 5% chance of winning, is the win valuable enough to spend for the chance?".
What if Sony had given up when the 'Betamax' case was going against it? It appealed to the Supreme Court, and won a unambiguous ruling that home recording of TV was legitimate fair use.
That's a result the rightsholders, and those who naively adopt rightsholder-like copyright-maximalist reasoning without acknowledging the counterbalancing factors in the law, had alleged was preposterous. "Clearly illegal!" they said. But despite that bluster, the actual highest court decided otherwise.
Without that ruling, VCRs and DVRs would have arrived far slower & on a short-leash fully controlled by incumbent big studios.
Sadly, it will get worse. There will be more lawsuits like this opening up once this is over. They're already in a lawsuit from the music publishing industry which threatens to wipe out the Great 78 project and I'm sure the video game industry are prepping for one of their own as well:
[1] > They already have an unresolved pending lawsuit from the music publishing industry which threatens to wipe out the Great 78 project though this lawsuit, IMO, is much more dubious because so many of recordings digitized were originally published prior to 1928 and should in theory be public works. The publishers claim that because they still sell modern versions of those recordings, they are still actively covered under copyright but as long as the IA is sourcing from media pressed before 1928 I don't think that argument is valid but again this is a country ran by corporations, its entirely possible the IA gets shafted just to keep some corporate donors happy.
[2] > Now that the book publishers lawsuit is nearing finalization (I don't see this making it up to the Supreme Court, and even if it does the current supreme court is probably the most corporate friendly court in history) and there has been almost nothing in the way of meaningful public outcry (no, normal people do not care about random people/bots screaming on twitter from their moms basement) we are going to see more lawsuits from other industries which feel like they have been harmed in some way by the Internet Archive. One which I PROMISE is coming, and I am amazed it hasn't yet, is a lawsuit from the video game publishing industry. Archive.org has, over the last decade or so, become a hub for hosting ROMS for basically every video game platform ever made. The IA, at one time, was very good about quickly removing things like REDUMP romsets but has over the years seemingly embraced hosting them. I cannot fathom why they thought that was a good idea, or necessary. Retro gaming isn't a niche hobby anymore, its a billion dollar business they've put themselves firmly in the crosshairs of. Gaming corporations are some of the most litigious corporations on the face of the earth, and the kicker is these files are not in any danger at all. Literally any commercially released game for a commercially released video game platform has 10000 websites that are hosting those files, and those websites continue to exist because they get enough traffic to be profitable through ad revenue, and they are easy enough to quickly dismantle in the even of a cease and desist and then have spring back up 10 days later under a new name with a slightly different layout. The IA does not have that luxury.
[1] [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bswhdj/if_the...
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
And regardless of what the law is, the Internet Archive an other libraries should be allowed to lend out a digitized copy of a physical book they own while the physical book is not in use (i.e. controlled digital lending). This is especially true for books without an official digital edition. Hachette doesn't want this, because they want to extract as much revenue from libraries as possible through continuing subscription fees for digital catalogs.
Finally, while I agree that the Internet Archive's arguments that the National Emergency Library's unlimited lending should be fair use were always tenuous, I'm still saddened that the arguments failed, and think the precedent their failure sets is much worse for society than the precedent from their success would have been.
First of all, why isn't that supported? Why shouldn't they be allowed to distribute that book digitally at a 1:1 ratio?
Secondly, isn't this part of what their case is arguing for though? Wouldn't this be the case that sets that precedent?
Of particular relevance is subsection (g) which explicitly states distributing the one copy permitted under this law multiple times simultaneously is illegal.
>(1)is aware or has substantial reason to believe that it is engaging in the related or concerted reproduction or distribution of multiple copies or phonorecords of the same material, whether made on one occasion or over a period of time,
TL;DR: If you make more than one copy of a physical copy you have rights to and/or distribute that copy or copies multiple times simultanenously, the protections granted by this law do not apply.
This law only protects public libraries if they make one and only one copy and distribute (lend) that copy out once at a time on separate occasions.
There are clauses in this law permitting up to three copies in other circumstances, but those are not immediately relevant for this conversation.
So I'm a bit confused.
But the interactions of tradition, legal precedents, and different laws in different places are complicated, and subject to interpretation & various shifting balances-of-considerations!
That's why it's silly when armchair opinionators casually judge, "IA clearly did something wrong". There's a lot of room in the law for fair-use copying, even against the rightsholders' strongest wishes, and especially for librarylike activities.
> But feelings don't matter here. Only facts. And the facts are simple. The Archive's actions and statements (and questionable legal defense) have all but ensured a loss in this case.
This is what has surprised me about people's defense of IA. When you look at the facts and ignore the admittedly good work they do elsewhere, it's clear that they not only ran afoul of the law but thumbed their noses at it. But so many people are quick to come to its defense because they love IA so much for the other stuff they do and don't want it to go away.
When laws are bad, people should thumb their nose at them
Good on them for using the platform they have to try and push for real change, at personal risk to themselves and their operations too
When the electrical code says that there should be no voltage in the light sockets, then people should stick their fingers into them - regardless of what numbers the voltmeters show.
Right?
Sure. But use some intelligence and risk management when you're doing it.
This was just outright stupidity, and there's no excuse for it. :( :( :(
You (and Internet Archive) are about to learn what happens when the courts fail to be persuaded regarding the 'badness' of the law in question.
Sometimes those laws wind up changed later, because of their actions
I personally don't agree that this particular thing is worth taking a stand on, but I do applaud Internet Archive for being willing to take a stand for what they believe is important enough. It takes guts
They couldn't find a more effective and less risky way to try to change the law than bashing their face against it, with predictable results?
I mean, it's trivial to find entire MAME romsets for download [1], Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder roms [2], the entire season 1 of Hilda from Netflix [3], huge collections of PS4 games [4], and the list goes on.
Just to be clear, this required nearly zero effort on my part, I just looked up "Internet Archive PS4" on Kagi and found this in about four seconds. You can do this with basically any media and find something.
IA needs to do something about this stuff, because it's a matter of "when", not "if", for these companies taking legal action, and I cannot imagine a future where IA wins. They're a huge target with a lot of public exposure, and data harboring laws only get you so far.
[1] https://archive.org/details/mame-merged [2] https://archive.org/download/street-fighter-30th-anniversary... [3] https://archive.org/details/hilda-season-complete-episodes [4] https://archive.org/download/CG_Sony_PlayStation_4
They might be afraid of the optics of suing a library, but I just think it's a matter of time before they get over that.
If I buy a flash cart for the Switch, and put a pirated copy Mario Wonder on there, that's a loss of a potential sale. You could argue that I wouldn't have purchased it anyway, but you really have no way of knowing that.
1. People who do it for fun
2. Would-be consumers who are priced out or locked out
The first group is, if anything, only encouraged by attempts to stop them, and generally won't pay no matter what. The second group would pay, if it were possible and economical for them to do so.
Focusing on the second group, you can say that every pirated copy is a "lost sale" but the sale that you've "lost" would only happen on terms favorable to the consumer. In other words, supposing you sold a product for $50 in developed countries, you're not going to get the equivalent at any significant volume in developing countries. But if you were to cut the price to the local equivalent of say $10, you'll probably get lots of sales. Refusing to market-adjust your prices, or even more so, refusing to sell in a market altogether, is a great recipe for piracy. Yet estimating that piracy at top-shelf price times number of downloads is grossly unrealistic. The piracy cost you what you should have sold it for; but of course, if you had done that, you wouldn't have seen so much piracy.
There are some exceptions to this, of course. Certain categories of media are extra prone to piracy (adult/restricted content in particular) regardless of price. Piracy also happens because of factors the publisher can control besides price; for example, anti-piracy measures in some PC video games have gotten so onerous that pirates are getting a better quality product; Switch games (in)famously run a lot better on PC than the console they were actually designed for; Blu-rays are so chock full of dated advertisements and anti-piracy warnings that can't be skipped that a torrented MKV is preferable; etc.
I think there is a group 3 that people ignore: people who could absolutely afford the product but pirate it anyway because they don’t want to pay for it. I don’t know the numbers, I don’t even think it’s the majority, but I also don’t think it’s zero either.
The segment you talk about exists, indeed I've seen it in action, but chasing them down has rapidly diminishing returns. Their loyalty to the product is just as shallow as their loyalty to the author, and they'll just scamper to other media they can get easily if cornered. Indeed, that is actually a fairly good argument for some mitigating measures: it's like a lock on your house, it only stops you from being the lowest-hanging fruit, but that often goes a long way.
That's why I was more or less on board with IA doing Controlled Digital Lending. Obviously if someone really wants to break the DRM and distribute the media, they're going to do it, but I think that for most people any amount of effort will be too much, and they'll abide by the rules as a result.
I think the National Emergency Library was a huge mistake, because it basically removed those minimal restrictions, making themselves a giant target. It was certainly well-intentioned but it made a lawsuit almost inevitable.
“One has a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.” —MLKJ
This would have the added benefit that, if the IA went down, the public could reconstruct (some of) the dataset from this swarm.
I spoke to a few archiving organizations about whether they'd find it useful, but there wasn't much interest. Too bad, I think a lot of people would like to donate some disk space right about now.
Are you asking for coordination of which parts are most rare? I though bittorrent already prioritized the least common parts in a swarm.
Not sure what the client support looks like.
Unless you make a system where the clients don't know what they are storing nor who else does too. That would be novel I think.
We absolutely need this kind of resilience, and we need it now. Otherwise this time will retroactively be dubbed the digital dark ages because so very little information actually survived and made it out.
Someone in this thread was estimating about USD 2M investment in hardware, then 1M facilities and a small team of people for initial setup, plus connectivity costs and maintenance - let's say 4M initially and about 1M ongoing costs yearly. A single wealthy individual could fund one of these sites. You don't even have to be "rich" to fund this, being well off would be enough.
If you fit this description and you're feeling altruistic or are looking for a lasting legacy that will benefit humanity far into the future, use a portion of your capital to make this happen.
I wonder what percentage of the population is stuck in stage 4 of Kohlberg's "Stages of Moral Development".
No, that is not what's happening and you are willfully misreading the people who disagree with you. The people who oppose IA's decision are doing this because it was foolish to tie the continued existence of the Archive to a designed-to-fail protest action. I encourage protesting unjust laws, but if you set things up so that your inherently-doomed protest will take a critical piece of infrastructure down with you, people are going to be pissed. Don't take something people rely on and make it collateral damage.
More here in this essay: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bswhdj/if_the...
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
The real risk is what other lawsuits this might bring on. Given the Internet Archive was doing the same thing with 1.4 million other books, they could potentially be liable for billions of dollars if everyone jumped on this.
Because I surely won't donate money just to fund greedy copyright holders, but I'd be happy to fund The Archive.
Is it too late for them to turn back from this craziness and settle out of court for a non-fatal amount?
They have already done so. Part of that settlement allowed them to appeal the result, which is what this is.
You can also download full TV series that are currently still available on Netflix and full movies and lots of other stuff. I'm all for archiving, and I think they'd have a case if this were Abandonware or Lost Media, but I fear that a lot of stuff on there simply isn't and their ambivalence towards flagrant abuses of copyright is going to get them repeatedly sued.
It's annoying, because IA is a wonderful resource and it would be a shame if they get sued out of existence.
The IA wants to preserve digital media. Sometimes it’s a website, sometimes it’s a CD, sometimes it’s a ROM image, and sometimes it’s a scan of paper.
In the end though, I don’t think it’s the archiving part that got them in trouble. It was providing access to that archive.
In fact, I suspect that if they did some kind of controlled lending program of the PS3 games, or the ISO was available to use upon request (e.g. like the US library of congress), that likely wouldn't get them sued either, but as it stands I'm not seeing a fundamental difference between IA and ThePirateBay, sans the lack of viruses and popups from the former.
Does the LoC do something like this?
Again, never done it, only seen stuff in YouTube videos, and not even recently.
And if they really want to push the boundaries of format shifting and copyright, this would be a more productive avenue for it. Some physical libraries have games already, why not a digital one?
My local library has video games to borrow; I've never done it but I have no doubt that the NYPL has done their due diligence to avoid getting sued.
A "format-shift" is kind of untested ground legally and I think a consequence of how IA is doing stuff is going to lead to some really bad legal precedent that might take decades to undo.
They have become a megaupload.com site of shorts with slightly better reputation.
Data harboring laws protect them a bit, they have some level plausible deniability, but I think that only gets them so far; surely they know at least as well as I know how easy it is to get pirated media. The engineers who work on IA aren't morons, and they certainly know how to Google just as well as me, not to mention that they have access to internal databases that I don't.
It's even better than Megaupload; there's no ads on IA. No popups, no banners, AFAIK no tracking, everything has a torrentable version with a guarantee of at least one seed; hell it's still kind of SFW; it wouldn't be an inherent red flag to my employer if they saw Internet Archive in my history on a work computer.
I don’t doubt that they respond to takedown requests, I just think they need to be more proactive about stuff.
"Save itself"?
Despite occasional prior histrionic kayfabe about "IA in existential danger" in the media (& HN threads) – sometimes fanned by the IA's supporters themselves – that's never been the real stakes.
For the serious librarians, publishing businesspeople, and lawyers involved, this has been about legal clarity for a gray area at the intersection of copyright, fair use, & traditional rights of first-sale and library practices. It's not really about damages, nor the IA's (or traditional publishers') existence. Instead: the principles controlling what's allowable going forward.
To that end, per Wikipedia, as of eight months ago (August 2023), the lawsuit parties already reached & had the court approve a negotiated settlement that caps the potential costs to the IA at a survivable level, & sets ground rules for future similar e-book activities that the Hachette et al (4 major publishers) plaintiffs and AAP (publishers' trade group) find acceptable. But further: this mutual settlement permits IA to continue its legal appeal on the principles involved.
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive#F...>:
> On August 11, 2023, the parties reached a negotiated judgment. The agreement prescribes a permanent injunction against the Internet Archive preventing it from distributing the plaintiffs' books, except those for which no e-book is currently available,[3] as well as an undisclosed payment to the plaintiffs.[25][26] The agreement also preserves the right for the Internet Archive to appeal the previous ruling.[25][26]
That is: the publishers were never b-movie villains trying to destroy a public resource; the IA was never reckless anarchists gambling all its other programs for a quixotic legal precedent. They were all adults with a legitimate legal dispute about what's allowed, seeking a clear definitive resolution in the culturally-appropriate manner.
And via the settlement and appeal, the parties are still working out the issues.
This author misdescribes the IA as "a profitable enterprise (bringing in between $20 and $30 million per year) that is on the verge of a potentially devastating legal ruling which could put [it] out of business". But IA is a non-profit, arguing for a mission-critical principle – a principle which is a plausible extrapolation of existing fair-use rights and library/IA practices into a new domain. And it's doing so with explicit permission under the existing settlement, capping financial risks far below any existential risk.
This author further deceptively excerpts IA's central argument as being just "Controlled digital lending is not equivalent to posting an ebook online for anyone to read". Against this, the author writes, essentially, "nuh-uh, that's exactly what they did".
In fact the full necessary context of IA's argument is:
> First, Publishers disregard the key feature of controlled digital lending: the controls that ensure borrowing a book digitally adheres to the same owned-to-loaned ratio inherent in borrowing a book physically. Publishers repeatedly compare IA’s lending to inapposite practices that lack this key feature. Controlled digital lending is not equivalent to posting an ebook online for anyone to read or copy (contra Resp.Br. 27) or to peer-to-peer file-sharing by companies like Napster (contra Resp.Br. 5). Neither practice is based on use of a library’s lawfully acquired physical copy, and neither ensures that only the one person entitled to borrow the book (or recording) can access it at a time. Controlled digital lending is also distinct from the digital resale considered in Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi, Inc., 910 F.3d 649 (2d Cir. 2018). Contra Resp.Br. 35. The former’s purpose is nonprofit library lending, while the latter’s was commercial resale. Controlled digital lending is fair use, even if these other practices are not.
That is: the heart of IA argument is that its "controlled digital lending" practices were technologically limited in purpose and duration to be like libraries' other traditional legal reuses of owned works. (Typically, this meant maintaining the 1:1 physical-copy-to-leant-ebook ratio, but even under the temporary "National Emergency Library" program, it meant no permanent unrestricted copies were created – all rights-managed borrowings could and did expire when the crisis ended and normal book sources reopened.)
This author's manipulative clipping distorts the IA's filing into a strawman not matching the actual arguments advanced.
Wait. Does this mean the IA can't lend books that the publishers currently sell ebooks for?
Just formalizing the automatic exclusion of all these publishers' in-print ebooks is no loss at all, compared to the rulings so far in the lawsuit. It is a bit unclear to me what happens if the IA gets a more-favorable ruling from their appeal - have they still agreed to not perform 1:1 lending of physical-book-derived ebooks for the plaintiffs, even if they win the right to do so?
Its so frustrating that copyright claims provide riches to the middlemen while buyers/consumers and authors/artists get screwed over again and again.
What the Internet Archive did was obviously illegal, no matter how well intentioned, and I'm disappointed in how they've handled the situation. But what those carriers did is arguably much worse in regards to the public good. So why is the IA looking at its potential end while those carriers receive wrist slaps?
Without archive.org, it seems no money at all was made from them. A subscription to access these old books would be a win-win, with a part redistributed to editors. Access could be made from archive.org or why not, directed to a frame in editor websites.
Same for old magazines which are really appreciated by the retrocomputing community.
> We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon
An internet without archival sites is a censored internet. How fitting.
Reminds me of destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
- Preserve bookmarks by capturing a screenshot of the saved page.
- Open-source and fully self-hostable.
- Support for collaborative bookmarking.
P.S. I’m the maintainer of the project.
So, if you make books available for free, with unlimited copies, the publisher never gets their advance back, never funds the next hit, etc, etc, etc.
I'm all for freedom for information, but unless we can come up with a distribution model that ensures authors actually get paid... I've gotta side with the publishers here. They gotta pay the authors somehow.
Can’t wait to hear what happens next!
so this is an opportunity to say "hey, look at what this amazing organization is doing. they're acting as a role model for libraries to digitize their books. let's work together, WITH libraries and WITH government, to better serve the public good that libraries serve. "
same reason you don't want to abolish the police force when a handful of them inappropriately take advantage of their power. work with internet archive to set up some transparency for fund-allocation. have them donate profits to libraries around the world.
Not any longer (since Sept 2023).