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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

This is an insightful comment and I thank you for sharing it but, after having looked at the brief you linked

> a jealous amicus brief that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too

that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do agree with you on this part though

> the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing

Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently created its e-library was not ideal.

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> that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position

What I meant by “jealous” is that the Internet Archive’s interest was not to improve author notification or to protect foreign authors; it was to provide a competing service under similar or better terms than Google was able to negotiate without spending the time and money that Google did litigating. Kahle wanted what was in Google’s settlement.

And what I meant by “Kahle was wrong” is not that every argument that his lawyers thought up was false; I think the agreement was later amended to fix some issues. My point is that Kahle’s theory of change was wrong. He thought that when the settlement was rejected, then Google would push Congress to create an orphan works law which the Internet Archive could use to publish old books too. As he wrote in his op-ed, “We need to focus on legislation to address works that are caught in copyright limbo. … We are very close to having universal access to all knowledge. Let's not stumble now.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0... As it turns out, the rejection of the class action settlement did not cause Congress to create an orphan works law. In retrospect, we would have been more likely to get an orphan works law if Google had been allowed to set up a proof of the concept, making the monopoly on orphan works temporary.

There's such a weird tone to your posts. It's as if they're meant to give the impression that Kahle had a substantial, if not singlehanded, influence over the outcome. In reality, his input probably didn't have even the impact that Kahle himself hoped for and the appropriate adjective to describe the effect is probably "negligible", if at all. It was a class action lawsuit with extremely dubious underpinnings where over 6,000 people wrote in to ask that they not be considered part of the class.

I think the biggest hurdle was lawyers from the big publishing houses, the only view I heard was "This deal will make Google to powerful", the deal would have had far reaching international effects. In the end we know that Creative Commons was wrong you can not fix copyright by playing along.

I would say it’s much worse then “not ideal”, they may have poisoned the well for decades to come.

Maybe permanently, as societal stances on these sorts of issues tend to solidify over time. In a couple of generations the very idea of a library may be confined to history thanks to IA :(

That is far-fetched, science fabulist style thinking. The average person on the street does not know about Brewster or the IA, but they certainly do know about their local library and would object if it was to disappear.

I expect the average person has never visited a library since school

In fact, in the US, around half the population goes to a library at least once a year

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/libraries-20... https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-gen-z-millen...

"with a majority reporting that libraries ... play at least some role in helping them decide what information they can trust."

Sounds legit

why are you blaming IA for the aggressive and tight fisted behavior of publishers?

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