Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date.
I wish a fraction of the people who are upset about this would actually commit a portion of their time to lobbying and organising for copyright reform. Copyright terms are too damn long, by half a century and then some. This isn't some iron law of nature, this could easily be changed if there were enough of a push for it.
On March 24, 2023, the Internet Archive was found liable for copyright infringement under that section by a federal court, in an order granting a motion for a summary judgment.[0] A summary judgment means that there is no genuine dispute about facts, and the plaintiffs (the people suing the Internet Archive) are entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.[1]
It is your prerogative to feel that you're better qualified to interpret federal law than a federal court is, but it is fairly misleading to say that it is not at all clear what the law is here, when a court decision exists on these exact facts.
Should the law be changed? Yes, in my opinion. Is there much dispute over what the law is? No, not really.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
[1] Other common law jurisdictions use clearer language to describe summary judgments: in the UK and Australia, for example, a summary judgment is granted when a party has "no reasonable prospects of success" and there is no point in going to trial. These exact words aren't used in the US, but they give a reasonable indication of how summary judgments are used in practice.
None of this is legal advice.
You are welcome to argue it as a matter of culture (and I'm inclined to agree and cheer you on) but from a legal perspective, Brewster should be removed and they need to find competent people to put on the board because they really did put the entire organization at risk over an idiotic decision. And the ramifications continue.
Internet Archive's "we own a copy of a book, we scan it and loan out one digital copy" policy was already on shaky ground. When Covid hit and everyone lost their minds, letting homeless people sleep on the stairs of their building apparently wasn't enough so they just turned into The Pirate Bay and loaned out infinite copies of everything.
In discovery for the case, it turned out they weren't even tracking the "we own one copy" part to begin with correctly. None of this should be surprising to anyone who actually attempts to use the site. The whole thing is duct tape and string.
They have a tiny budget and the do amazing things with it, but it really deserves to be treated like a business and not be run like an art project. If they wanna stick your neck out and push for CDL reform, great. Just do it under a different LLC so you don't tank the 50 other important things you've got going on. And it's time for Brewster to move on. In any other non-profit he'd be gone by now.
The world locked down u necessarily precisely because the population has not been getting smarter the past 50 years because copyright has poisoned our information wells.
This is a fight worth having.
It's time to abolish copyright.
It would be like if Mozilla decided to stop taking any google funding overnight because they felt like their values didn't fit with Google's. Sure, it would be well intentioned. But then you also guaranteed that Firefox won't be able to exist for more than a few weeks. Deciding to unilaterally reproduce (by way of unlimited lending without the copies to back said lending) books is the legal equivalent to doing that. It would be a nice thing to have, but it's not something you get by just getting wrecked in an open and shut case in court.
That would be the best thing that could happen to Mozilla becose then the vultures would move on and the project could get back to its mission without the MAJOR conflict of interest fucking up their incentives.
> But then you also guaranteed that Firefox won't be able to exist for more than a few weeks.
Firefox doesn't need Mozilla to continue existing. But even if it died that would at least make space for an alternative that isn't just controlled opposition doing the bare minimum to protect Google from antitrust lawsuits while continuuously disrespecting user choices and preferences.
Literally everyone here has already stated that they agree with you on this. There's no controversy upthread about whether copyright law needs to be reformed, the controversy is over whether it made sense to risk the entire Internet Archive (whose most important contribution to the knowledge of mankind has nothing to do with online lending) or if it should have been fought by an organization that was built to fight it.
Their instinct to help is admirable, but their lack of restraint shows a major lack of judgment and very well could have put their archives of the internet at risk. Not every nonprofit organization can do everything.
Finding representative cases to fight over and create precedent is a common strategy that exposes you to less risk if you lose.
I don't like that the IA risked the actual internet archive with this or that they chose to engage in DRM at all but let's be reall: "competent people" would have sold the IA to the advertisement moloch or another horror of modern civilization long ago. The IA does need a leader that puts principles above financial security.
> it really deserves to be treated like a business
That would be the absolute worst thing that could happen to the IA.
> And it's time for Brewster to move on. In any other non-profit he'd be gone by now.
Consider doing something worthwile of your own instead of trying those who have but aren't perfect enough in your opinion.
IANAL, but:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
What the Internet Archive did (loan many digital copies based on one physical copy) is illegal as the law stands today.
This is about sound recordings rather than books, but one of the more insane features of US copyright law is that the copyright status of sound recordings made before 1972 is governed by state rather than federal law, and many states are thought to have no applicable statute. Some of these states determine copyright status for these works by deferring to federal law, which does not cover them.
Agreed. But the problem here is not the daring action but linking it to a sadly unique resource.
> You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail.
You can however still protest robin hood being sent to jail and you can shame the fat nobles calling for robin hood to be hanged and you can grab the pitchforks and make sure they loose more than they gain. The law is meaningless if it doesn't have the support of the people. Copyright is already routinely ignored by almost everyone when its convenient (outside commercial activity).
Lobbying is all well and good but that's the corporations' turf. Nothing wrong with deciding not to play their game and choose other ways to fight the absurd copyright laws.
No, not “almost certainly.”
I think they pushed the limit of what should be legal, especially since they were digitizing print books and lending those out as ebooks.
The lending out more copies than they bought part is what there are some good arguments against.
Legality aside, why is this acceptable for banks but not books?
Banks can create money out of nothing to enrich themselves, but libraries can't lend out more books than they have to enrich society?
Contemporary copyright law is pernicious and IMO if not drastically reformed soon, will be made moot and obsolete by genAI.
Others are enriched by the made up money the banks lend out, too. The people who buy homes, start businesses, go to college, etc.
But yeah, I think otherwise you have a decent understanding of it.
Yes.
> Why shouldn't they be allowed to do this
They bought a paper book, not the right to lend out an ebook.
Sure, I disagree but whatever. Your license to play in this case shouldn’t extend to lending those MP3s that can easily be copied by as many people as you can “lend” those MP3s to.
> The contents is the thing that deserves protection
Also I disagree with this. The content doesn’t “deserve” to be protected.
This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA. It's not like these publishers are losing any money from books that literally nobody can purchase.
What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions.
And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
Too bad. Once you publish it the first time, the cat is out of the bag. Eventually it's going to go into the public domain whether you like it or not.
> And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
Good question but can definitely be decided. $100 is probably fine. Regulators can decide. Yes. Not good enough. Not good enough.
We have frameworks for mandatory music licensing, we can do more things like that.
I'm genuinely wondering , because to me there's a clear parallel yet in tech circles we almost always see defense of copyleft code (which I totally agree with, I'm extremely pro GPL) and a very heavy bias towards maintainers. I know GPL code is already free but we are talking automatically putting copyrighted/licensed material in the public domain which isn't GPL compatible.
The whole thing that allows copyright in the US is in the Constitution:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The original term was 14 years, with one 14 year renewal allowed.
This was probably a little short, in my opinion. 25+20 seems reasonable; most works have no commercial value after 25 years, and 45 years is already a long time to keep things that have become cultural touchstones locked up. The present legal regime of life of the author plus 70 years is clearly excessive.
> but we are talking automatically putting copyrighted/licensed material in the public domain
This already happens: just after an unreasonably long period of time.
> which isn't GPL compatible.
Code which is in the public domain is freely compatible with code under the GPL.
The whole point is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Stuff kept locked away beyond its useful commercial life is no longer promoting progress (the authors have already gotten paid anything they're going to get). Indeed, most of present works borrow deeply from the public domain but the authors seek to only return the same favor to future authors in a few generations.
How long should Nintendo be able to rent-seek and convince/force the same people to buy the original Super Mario Bros. over and over again? Should that be done in 2030, or 2080? What about operating systems of the 1980s-- should they be locked up to 2090, even though no one will sell them to you?
At some point, there are substantial impediments to legitimate archival and research purposes; to keeping existing important systems working; and to allowing the free exploration and creativity that comes from remixing and building upon past works.
> This was probably a little short
Strongly disagree. And for anything that's distributed digitally it's an eternity.
The goal should be that as an adult you can build on the things you grew up with as a child. Anything longer than that is absurd. Remember that copyright is an infringement on your right to free speech so should need extraordinary evidence for that any additional second of the copyright term actually fulfils its constitutional purpose. You don't need to allow maximum commercial exploitation to encourage more works. In fact I would question if commercial exploitation is something that needs to be made possible at all considering that humans are naturally driven to be creative and we have a giant corpus of creative works to fall back on which can now be copied and distributed easier than ever.
The current terms that won't even let your grandchildren benefit from the work your generation funded are an outright affront to the spirit of the constitution. At this point we would be better off scrapping the whole concept of copyright.
Well the GPL code was never being sold in the first place, so these rules might not apply at all. And it's still available the same way it always has been, so that suggests no need for intervention. Alternatively it would make sense to treat source code differently from books and photos and music and movies.
> lose its license after an arbitrary period of time
Of course GPL code would become public domain after an arbitrary period of time, that's how public domain works. In the year 2024, why shouldn't anyone be able to reuse 1997 linux code or pieces of windows 95 in their own programs?
This is actually exactly why I agree with OP. See also the changes made to Roald Dahl books. Future generations deserve to be able to read the content that their forebears produced as they produced it.
I'm supportive of an author's right to not initially publish something that they at the time are uncomfortable with being made public. There should be protections for that. But once something has entered into the public consciousness in a particular form, I'm not okay with a cultural censorship wave being able to memory hole the original copy and replace it with a sanitized version (or wipe it out entirely). They shouldn't be obliged to print content that they find objectionable, but that content needs to be accessible or we lose our history.
Messy and uncomfortable as it is, future generations have a right to see us as we were and are, not as the second-generation holder of our too-long copyright wishes we had been.
If yes, then how do you regulate who is or is not allowed to transfer ownership of rights to or from whom?
It sounds like the suggestion is that retracting / completely discontinuing a book should only be part of the moral rights, not the economic rights.
I'm not sure how feasible that is, but it's not totally unprecedented. For example, one of the moral rights recognized by many countries is the right not to have your works destroyed. E.g. even if someone else owns the physical object of your painting, they are not allowed to set it on fire, and you could sue them if they did.
It shouldn't be part of any rights. At best the author should be able to demand to not have his name associated with the work.
Why? What do we as a society gain by allowing individuals continued control over parts of our culture include the ability to erase them.
Then they should lose the rights of the originals. The point of copyright is to enrich society not to satisfy any want of the author.
Which is basically how trademarks are. So we even already have a system in place to manage something like this.
A publisher "stopping printing" of a book is completely normal - books are like any other mass-produced good, in that there are fixed and variable costs to production and a factory can't economically crank out more than a certain number of different things at once.
Sp, there are "printings" - ie a production run - and then that inventory is sold to distributors. When the inventory is sold out, it is "out of print." That does not mean it's not available - there's still stock at distributors. And likely on shelves.
When it sells out at distributors, then it is backordered.
It is completely normal for a publisher to wait until they feel there is enough pent-up demand for another printing - increasing the size of the printing to improve per-copy profit (or make it economically viable at all), and then sell it to distributors because the distributors think they can sell the inventory at a high enough rate.
Distributors don't want to keep around books that don't sell very fast, because that means they don't have warehouse space for books that do sell quickly. And if they have books that don't sell and need the warehouse space, the books might get remaindered (sold to a low-budget distributor for sale at well below original price) or destroyed (cover stripped as proof of destruction and the rest destroyed/recycled.)
Things have changed with digital press technology improvements, opening the door to more print-on-demand books - but printing one copy will never be anywhere close to as cheap as printing, say, 1000 copies.
There are also other reasons it might not be for sale, despite the author trying / wanting to sell it.
If you know nothing about how book printing, publishing, distribution, buying, and retail works - you probably shouldn't be forming opinions on how it should be subject to radically different regulation, much less offering them up.
https://pinestatepublicity.substack.com/p/book-distribution-...
Also keep in mind that, for many of the books, the authors are dead.
I disagree that requring the customer to have a continued business relationship to retain the work should count as it being readily available.
> Publishers want
> Distributors want
So? I too want a golden goose protected with force by the government at no cost to me. What does the rest of society gain from this deal?
Makes you wonder: Do they even have data on their business growth factors? I don't but I'd guess that:
1. nobody is printing downloaded books
2. instead, people like me _buy_ printed books after browsing through them online
LibGen/IPFS is heavily biased toward books from the past ~3 decades, especially books that are cracked EPUB's and PDF's.
IA seems to be much more scans of library books from ~1930-1980, many of which are out of print and probably only available to you via interlibrary loan, which you might wait a month for.
IA is a huge boon for academic research when you need to go back to midcentury books. I don't know which 500K the IA is being required to remove, but I'm very worried.
Like this: https://archive.org/details/landau-and-lifshitz-physics-text...
Where LibGen only has the first volume in French and Portuguese only...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084 (4 days ago, 48 comments)
If you are upset about this, commit to seeding as many of these as you can until the IA service is restored.
Very different sets of books. I don't see how this will help. LibGen isn't going away, not that I'm aware of.
IA is mostly full-color scans of old library books.
I've never come across an IA scan on Libgen. Libgen is mostly EPUB's, native PDF's, and the occasional black-and-white high-contrast PDF scan.
Is this some legal angle I’m missing which benefits the plaintiffs in some way?
The product of public domain materials can be copyrighted. For example, if someone were to publish a new book of Tom Sawyer whose text is in the public domain, that book can be copyrighted. Everyone can still publish their own new books of Tom Sawyer using the public domain materials, but noone can copy that book of Tom Sawyer.
One of my books is on Anna's Archive. Since I give them away for nothing on my website, it's more flattering than anything. :)
2. Information and knowledge is for all.
3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.
I'd vote for politicians who push for laws like this. Sadly none do.
Even so, I think in most cases if a piece of software has been unedited for 10 years it’s either feature-complete or obsolete. If it’s been under development for those 10 years, the original version being released into the public domain probably isn’t a significant threat to innovation by way of closed source improvements being made.
The issue here isnt the IA's provision of brand new books that are still being published; this few would say should be legal. We're talking dead authors, books no longer in print, or books published so long ago that the second-hand market (which offers no pay to the author) is the place to find them.
As soon as works transition to "second-hand markets" we're no longer talking about the labour of the author being remunerated. At this point, it's pretty clear that it's a net benefit to society to make creative works publically available.
2. LLMs are an incredible step forward in humanity's progression.
3. 10 years from publishing, then public domain afterwards. The content must be commercialised to have copyright; if it's available for free, it should already be public domain, because copyright is supposed to help you make money, not help you control the use of information.
It's a great source of English books for us. Our city library is good, but it doesn't have thousands of picture books.
Libby has about 15 books. We borrow them often enough that it gives the error message that they are unavailable to borrow :/
If it isn't, a tighter awareness of what is in print and out of print might be able to cut into those 500K, if at all possible. If lending is out, best to be aggressive with what's left.
They believed they had the legal right to distribute the books.
You can read the whitepaper about it here: https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/
I feel that IA erred very badly in lifting the one-to-one correspondence that is at the heart of "controlled digital lending" (https://controlleddigitallending.org). It is frankly annoying that they did that, and then still purport to be doing CDL, even though the CDL website clearly states the 1:1 "owned-to-loaned" ratio is a key part of the CDL platform.
For the record I'm extremely pro CDL, but I feel the IA did not do any favors to the CDL movement with this boneheaded "activist" implementation of CDL
I'm tired of watching old shows that have had music redubbed because of the labyrinthian copyright conditions that inherently arise in composite works.
speaking from a myopic view, in an age where source code can be freely distributed while maintaining ownership and rights*, why do literature have so much gatekeeping digitally?
while the authors that make their digital versions freely available bestow some trust on the other end (please don't print our work and sell it), simultaneously they can often benefit during the editorial process (many books are available this way before final publishing). moreover, if you write a work of fiction, nobody can run and create a movie based on it just because you can read the book for free.
this was a good opportunity to set precedence, but it has gone the other direction.
Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk.
They said, there are enough physical books in closed libraries to cover their lending. That's not how this works. They should've asked the publishers for permission first if necessary putting pressure on them via public. This is not a case of it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission because they must have known they won't be forgiven for this. I can't even.
I am not saying this is by any means moral or right. I am saying: this is the law. They actually got relatively lucky for not being fined to oblivion for this.
This dumb move was an existential risk putting all their other work in danger.
If it were just over the emergency library, the court would end the restrictionless lending and likely issue a fine. Instead, the court ruling was that CDL was illegal, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say "as CDL was already illegal, it was also illegal." There also would likely be a fine, but the case is being appealed.
My impression is that publishers were willing to look the other way when IA was distributing a small # of rare/out of print books, but once IA's homepage became unlimited copies of Harry Potter they felt like a line had been crossed.
The NEL was a PR boon for publishers, allowing the narrative to be "the IA deserved it for the few weeks they allowed a couple hundred copies of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe be unfairly borrowed." But it's irrelevant to the actual lawsuit.
And even worse, it was an epic strategic blunder. A campaign of "in this emergency, we would love to share books, but publishers don't agree" would've put massive pressure on publishers. They could've had a shot at advancing the legal situation of digital lending. Instead they opted for a publicity stunt.
Yes, sure, people couldn't go to libraries. That's when you collaborate with Project Gutenberg to address the actual need for reading material, highlight great free books, and keep hammering "and we could also lend you XYZ, if publishers only worked with us".
Then you reach out to publishers like Tor, who are already leaning further on the "unencumbered access" spectrum. And work out a deal with them. Promoting their books in return for larger lending count. Giving people the opportunity to buy additional copies for the digital library. (There's plenty of folks in the donor list)
And you continue saying "Hachette, HC, Wiley, and Penguin still don't want you to read their books".
Yes, what they did was the most idealistic approach. Sometimes, pragmatism is better in the long run.
> "We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers," Chris Freeland, IA's director of library services, wrote in the blog. "But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing."
Is the "lend the books we own" part somehow inaccurate? I'm assuming IA has some sort of claim to the books they're lending and scanned, similar to any physical library. This seems very different from "a gigantic book piracy site".
Furthermore, I'd argue removing access to those books on IA will likely lead to one of the following:
A. people will fall back to actual piracy through other means to get the same content "even less legally" through well known alternatives
B. people simply not being able to access the content, e.g. if it's out of print , not available locally, or only available used for some exorbitant cost that wouldn't go to the publisher
C. people will spend whatever the publisher charges by buying from them directly
My understanding is that A and B are way more likely than C, since the vast majority of books on IA's website include out of print and hard to get books.
Controlled digital lending was tolerated. It was never legal.
I can't buy a bunch of DVDs and start a streaming service even if a each copy can only be watched by a single person at a time.
It really sucks since they do a lot of good work aside from this.
With IA's loss, publishers get to control the way libraries lend digital media because you can't take a hardcopy and legally "scan" it into a digital copy, so the only way to get a digital copy for lending is as a DRMed product from a publisher that does things like, for instance, expire after a certain number of loans.
Publishers considered scanned digital copies controlled by libraries to be a threat to their monetization efforts surrounding digital lending and they would eventually have sued IA regardless of the emergency library.
Moreover, the DRMed digital lending schemes that the publishers are "offering" libraries are very expensive compared to what a hardcover copy of the same work would have been, and publishers are increasingly vacuuming up libraries' entire budgets with excessive digital lending fees.
It's been observed that libraries would be illegal if they didn't already exist, and I think we're starting to walk down the road where they are illegal in the digital world.
I believe this is the crux of the attack by publishers. They don't want libraries to be able to buy books and lend them out. They want libraries to pay a huge monthly fee for every book lent.
"Zediva thought it could circumvent the need to be licensed by literally renting customers a DVD and a DVD player, with your computer, tablet or Google TV as the remote control. Unlike the other streaming movie services, Zediva didn't turn a movie into a file on its servers that it can serve it to as many users as care to see it at once. Instead, Zediva’s servers had DVD drives and actual DVDs. So when you rented a movie, that disc goes out of circulation until you release it back to the company, just like in one of those increasingly rare real-world video stores."
https://www.wired.com/2011/08/zediva-shuts-down/
More: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_I....
The comments here about the lawsuit not being about the Emergency Library completely are technically true, but ignore this sentence. IA poked the bear with it's brazen actions.
> It was never legal.
Before this lawsuit, we weren't sure about this, but by provoking the lawsuit, we've forced the courts to make this decision.
With the monumentally idiotic Aereo[1] decision, I wouldn't be so sure about that.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
You vessenes have an account, you can buy DVDs that I store for you, and you can view these DVDs using my service.
Even then odds are I'd get sued for copyright infringement.
[1] https://archive.org/details/archive_documentary_internet_arc...
Something I really like about ebooks and e-ink displays is that I can set the font as big as I want and it updates instantly. I read a lot better, and as a result I enjoy it a lot more. For me, the Kindle was kind of revelatory.
I borrow books from my library, which allows me to read the Kindle version, and I don't need to pay anything (outside of my taxes, I suppose).
It would take great effort to build such a system, but open source and digital repositories of machine designs would ensure that efforts are not duplicated. The effort would still be substantial, but what hangs in the balance is the opportunity to assure the freedom of all people and the creation of the most significant repository of knowledge humanity has ever conceived of. If we succeed it will be our greatest achievement as a species.
If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.
You're so optimistic to think the law would even be this fair. More like limit access to corporations as "the only custodians responsible enough to wield them", while still allowing the developing world to starve and further increasing their profit margins simultaneously to decreasing working wages and employment levels.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/False_Profits_(episode)
However, the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money - i.e. they would starve without you, so they accept whatever trickle of resources you deign to assign. This is extraordinarily common throughout history, coupled with a threat of violence that all states use.
There are a lot of ways to profit from suffering. And sometimes it's not even about profit—it can just feel so good to have an Other to oppress.
Your argument doesn't even make sense: in the first part you say yes, we need national support for this sector of the economy, while a few words later you say that China is cheating by giving support to the same sector.
They are at best a hazard.
The Chinese government dumped tons of money into every one of those cars, they are being sold at a loss. Not because it's good for any one, rather because china fucked up.
Every single one of those cars is a state funded fire hazard about to go on the road.
EDITL: cause looking up data is hard apparently:
western data:
https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/electric-car-f...
The data we see from china: https://news.metal.com/newscontent/101781161/there-are-about...
The anti china reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKpCiDomgM
Do note, that were talking about a nation that will happily NOT report on stats like youth employment when its bad, so take what you read with more than a few grains of salt.
A lot of people in the west have a vested interest in discrediting Chinese manufacturing but if we put our heads in the sand and refuse to see what is really happening they’re just going to pass us by.
Note that basically every automobile producing country puts government money in to that industry so highlighting that China is doing it is on its own meaningless.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/dolphin/50011 Hmm, that's a pretty good score. Is this version different?
Something like this already happens with housing and NIMBYism.
I’ve been thinking for a while about how historians will view our chunk of history and it ain’t too good.
There will be some bright spots, but for the most part humans have been behaving pretty terribly, at scale, since harnessing the power of electricity.
History shows the labor unions and leftists would also be against replicators. We see that today with how people are very against AI advancements that would put artists out of jobs, they would rather halt progress than lose their jobs.
Of course corporations that stand to lose out are also against it, but don't kid yourself labor movements are just as greedy and anti progress when progress would inconvenience them.
Only because the rich would exploit the replicators and would leave everyone else in the dust starving.
Nobody would have a problem with it, if you could survive on them.
Your idea has been tried over and over. It just makes things worse, far worse.
Related, I'm surprised how fast people stopped worrying about 3D printers making guns.
No.1 in jobless, fat and addicted peoples. You need the full Star Trek experience/mindset before you introduce unlimited everything. Also the first thing that would be produced are weapons, drugs and food....and everything sex.
When a book can be readily transformed into audiobook, or even a song, a movie and anime, a sketch, a scientific diag or anything else, how you define property in that environment? Pretty impossible.
I think a useful analogy is when we lived in caves. A cave is given as is, no way to transform it, to evolve it and optimize it. As long as we found new ways to create an enclosure, then technology advancement really took off. Houses made of rocks, clay, concrete, wood started popping off everywhere.
The same way with books. A printed book is not transformed to anything else really. As long as written words can be represented in a more flexible way, then they are on to the race for technology advancement.
It is absolutely essential that we deploy this technology safely and responsibly, with appropriate guardrails in place.
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It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away.
On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting paid, then by all means let’s go for it.
On the other hand: These proposals are so fanciful and far-fetched (at least in our lifetimes) that these comments read more like a tacit admission that the current system is indeed necessary.
My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by building open source farming robots (see my profile) so that a generation of children grow up understanding that community owned community built robotics are a perfectly viable option, and we don’t need venture capital for robotics infrastructure development.
There’s a generation of adults today who grew up watching Carl Sagan’s COSMOS from 1980 and are now adults working in law to combat climate change - a major call to action in his show the fruits of which Sagan would never live to see.
I fully believe that the world I advocate for will never be fully realized by the time I die. This does not discourage me from laying the ground work and having the conversations. Just as I am working on open source robotics for farming, I encourage other people to contribute to open culture so that we can some day build a better world.
In fact that’s what the people at the internet archive are doing too. Building a better future by fighting now to establish precedent and prove to people what is possible. Human lifetimes are short and I see no reason to restrict our projects to things which can be achieved today.
We could. But historically, it ends in a bloody battle of nobles vs nobles and sometimes they break off and become the next generation of noble. Despite the name, their goals are not necessarily that.
>This does not discourage me from laying the ground work and having the conversations. Just as I am working on open source robotics for farming, I encourage other people to contribute to open culture so that we can some day build a better world.
What ultimately discourages me is that the person who does this will not reao the rewards they sow. On the contrary, the next generation noble may contort it into something absolutely dysyopic.
Conversation doesn't mean much without action. But us non-nobles talking about bloodshed is seen as passe and uncouth. Not much will happen until we take it back by force (not necessarily violent, but a huge, unignoreble gesture coordinated by millions... A very hard problem to do as a grassroots movement)
Super solarpunk, I love it.
Libraries are free.
We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible.
> the current system is indeed necessary.
Not all of the current system is equally necessary. Maybe not necessary at all, it just so happens to be the system we have now. There have been plenty of radically different models of society over the years. Yea, they're gone now, but this current one isn't particularly old either.
Just to be more concrete - if you stop using and protecting your trademark, you can lose it. If you just hoard and don't use a copyright, you won't lose it. We already have systems in place that can provide similar info exchange for free.
The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it.
The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit. Now I'm not arguing that they deserve this profit, but there's no good model so far that both preserves the profit motive, but also make available the copyrighted material digitally and unrestrictedly.
Perhaps there could be a form of library "fee" that is funded by tax payers, in a similar way to how public radio gets funded. The state pays some amount to each published author who make their book available in the library, from a pot of money collected from taxation.
An idea so terrible it might just work.
There is a line here and we may be walking too far on one edge of it. But the comment you replied to does have a utopian tone far from the pragmatism this case actually revolves around.
UBI, on the other hand, is entirely feasible, not least of which because it ditches the completely infeasible "at their current salary" in favor of "enough to live, not enough that most people won't want more". And you'd create substantial growth via startups and other creative endeavors. UBI gives everyone the option to try experiments that might not pay off right away.
It's literally free to distribute all books/newspapers/magazines to all people in the world. Why aren't we?
It's common to have state intervention in markets that are unable to utilize resources efficiently on their own.
About UBI, sure! The point of my comment was that this isn't a "fanciful overhaul of society" but a real possibility that could be implemented given some though and political will. UBI also fits that category, but is probably a bit more expensive and disruptive than financing authors.
The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being made inaccessible.
If we are sticking with a mostly capitalist system so that money is so important to get things created, then a government can provide some for this purpose (and they often do already). It's not like they don't borrow or print money in whatever quantity is needed.
I suspect that it's the same issue that has led certain neoliberals and libertarians to denying that various forms of pollution are a problem. There's just no way that it can be fixed within capitalism, so better just deny that there's any problem at all.
Because expert information comes from experts who are paid a lot to do stuff not involving the authoring of their ideas. And we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information. How many people here have some novel expertise in their fields? How many would help produce technical articles pro Bono? Or for pay but end up mass pirated?
I 1000% agree the publishers themselves take way too much off the top of these authors, but the concept of "just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" doesn't work at scale.
>If we are sticking with a mostly capitalist system so that money is so important to get things created, then a government can provide some for this purpos
Which runs into all the problems we all know too well. Something something politics, something something taxes, something something lobbying.
On top of all that, the government just simply doesn't compensate as well as the private sector. I'm not sure if this will ever change.
Why should that incentive take form of making information a product?
"just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" is a gross misrepresentation of what the person before said, and you even quote the passage indicating as much.
It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pose problems doesn't mean much. The current side of the false dichotomy causes problems as in the OP.
Are we sure about this? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in. And, there are those to-be experts who had to quit, because they didn't have enough resources to fight the established “incentive” structures. Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.
Now I'm not saying that capitalism is the best way to distribute this value, but at least some effort is required in curating all knowledge.
That's like saying f(x)=x is a random function, if x is random.
They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.
I don't know if I agree that 14 years is right, but I'm sure that pretty much everyone can agree that 1 year is too short, and 60 years is too long.
Just because people call it "property rights" does not make it true.
It's as false a term as calling the events of 1939-1945 "World Peace 2".
I mean, I know a bunch of authors. All of them wrote because they needed to write (even the textbook authors). And almost none of them earned much of anything from it (even the textbook authors). One English prof told me that he received almost enough for his morning coffee for about three years. Then he didn't. And he drank just plain coffee.
"The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity." "Less copyright" != "piracy", but I think it has the same effect in this case (theoretically less value placed on the work of an author, but not practically).
Also, this might be coincidence, but copyright has gotten extended at the same time as most authors have received less from publishing.
All that said, I want society as a whole to be better, people to have more opportunities to grow, good ideas more of a chance to flourish. I think that overly strong copyright fights against that. And IME (ok, secondhand experience) that 99.9% of the profits added by strong copyright goes to the publishers, not the authors.
"Why should we lessen or diminish the legal right of authors to control how copies of their work are distributed; the way we've been doing it works well."
is what you SHOULD have said. Doesn't sound as sexy, but here, the accuracy matters.
I don't think this should be discounted so quickly. Nothing in this domain — money, private property, laws, justice — are obviously naturally occurring things. One of the great traditions in the effort to understand how rights and value come to be is the creation of narratives that connect the rights to early natural states. We see this in Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, etc. You could just ask the question of whether the current state "works well", but then you are in the wheelhouse of Jeremy Bentham and other utilitarians. Fine, but so far these kinds of arguments don't lead to worlds many of us like.
That is the clear-cut case for intellectual property, but it’s the same principle for books. I’m not going to write a book that takes tons of effort and exposes my hard-won knowledge if I can’t profit from it, despite how easy it is to copy text. Food for thought
It seems to me that it’s an exceptional case that there’s some idea that’s would benefit society but is only economically viable under the current copyright regime. But our laws apply protections that are only needed in this rare instance to all ideas. I highly recommend “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It changed how I view IP a great deal, and the final chapters are dedicated to how we could practically transition away from our current system.
I’m not an anarchist. I think the government has its place. But it’s undeniable that a lot of fundamental research is held hostage by politics: Certain ideas are in vogue and get funded, while the new ideas and those pursuing them must wait, or perhaps never get funded for whatever political reason.
The profit motive enables risk takers to get funded with high risk, high reward ideas. If there was no way to capture that profit, we would be subject to political whims for the most important innovations for society.
I’d be curious how many actual world-changing innovations were ONLY pursued because of the existence of copyright, that don’t belong to a class of innovation (like pharmaceuticals) that could have a solution, whether copyright, subsidies, or something else applied to the industry as a whole. I don’t doubt that there are some, but I would be shocked if their benefit isn’t dwarfed by the innovation lost to the anticompetitive nature of patents and copyright.
Companies have in fact figured you can be too big to fail and wait until they get their to no longer "please other people" and squeeze them. Or at least, get away with otherwise company killing moves for years longer than they should.
Yet it faded away into irrelevance.
Plenty of other examples.
Nope. Comparatively to what it used to be some 25 years "pleasing" factor went down the tubes. In many cases modern capitalism looks more and more like an extortion business
Do you buy things you don't want?
If you want to build something you’ll need to strike out on your own and take only those who follow you into the wilderness.
This has been imagined many times. It's called Marxism. It's been tried, too, innumerable times. But the anticipated utopia never happened, and the people were far worse off than for-profit free markets.
However, the idea of "intellectual property" is a pure invention. There's zero evidence that IP laws actually promote the creation and distribution of creative works. But there is evidence that the free flow of ideas enhances prosperity.
I assert this as a person who made his living creating IP.
This is exactly how people stayed in power. Knowledge is power, so keep the masses uneducated so they are subservient. I once asked an Englishman why if the British Empire was so great did all of its colonies revolt against it. His response was not what I expected when he said they taught them how to read.
So watching how the school systems keep getting dumber really does get those conspiracy theory synapses firing. Make great again by taking power away from people really goes towards that.
Actually, knowledge is freedom.
> so keep the masses uneducated so they are subservient
Terror makes them subservient. See the Soviet Union's gulags, full of educated people.
You don’t get more golden eggs by killing the goose who lays them.
Also the IA book UI was terrible.
Oh, hello there, dear communism. Same dream, same problems. No, this time around you don’t work either.
They must have no products of their own nor care how the people behind the knowledge they consume make a living.
This is objectively false. There zero actual harm being done here. There is very little, if any, evidence that the vast majority of the 500k removed books contain information that actually provides value to people, as opposed to being fiction and political advocacy non-fiction (for instance, the vast majority of the list of 1300 "banned and challenged books" (that contains many duplicates and is shorter than IA claims)[1] that the IA is clutching their pearls over are almost exclusively non-informational) that result in zero harm when taken away from people.
You also pointedly ignored the fact that the greatest repository of knowledge in human history, by orders of magnitude, is the Internet - even if you restrict yourself to the parts that people have voluntarily made free, you still have the ability to learn everything you need to live a comfortable life, and learn more than you have time for in a thousand lifetimes.
Demanding that the entertainment works that authors wrote with the express intention of making money (and who did not consent to their work being put on IA) be made freely available, regardless of the massive amount of information already voluntarily made free on the Internet that serves almost every need you have (learning to sew, fixing a leak, doing your taxes, getting the equivalent of a PhD in math), is the absolute peak of entitlement.
The only vaguely reasonable vector adjacent to your argument is that academic publishers make their papers freely available, because that's actual human knowledge (and because the funding for the research doesn't come from the publishers).
> We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors.
Now you're just advocating communism, which is one of the actual greatest human follies of all time, and has resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the suffering of hundreds of millions more.
This comment is utterly inappropriate for HN. It is naked political advocacy that is emotionally manipulative, factually incorrect, and contains zero content that aligns with HN's goals of "stimulating intellectual curiosity".
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6S...
"Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process."
Really!
Personally speaking, I'm fucking incensed that ... <fill in usual argument here>
I'm curious what license applies when I buy a physical book, as a library does? Do you have a resource where I could learn more?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
EDIT: looks like the "this is the law" crowd is out in full force on this summer Friday night. All the cool people are doing something else, elsewhere obviously.
Yet, it ironically gave better results than Google does today.
I knew that site at some point.
Actual article: https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/let-readers-read/
Some more discussion, including some IA folks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084