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...
That said, IANAL and I don't know what actual legal conclusions were arrived at from the trial or appeals.
They're basically holding the Internet Archive hostage to try to force this thing through.