Copyright is no longer functioning properly, if the Internet Archive cannot survive under it.
IP holders are pushing their luck, lately.
Edit: Lately it feels like everyone is underestimating the power of librarians. Anyone working against librarians is on the wrong side of whatever they're on about.
"Fuck you, I'm doing library stuff." should be a valid legal defense.
You should probably read the article. The case is only about how the Archive did more than just library stuff—they made a ton of copies and gave them out for free, then argued that the cost of maintenance somehow made that act legal.
I did read the article. I'm saying I don't care.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
If the law doesn't maintain a carve-out for librarians to do their work; then the law is a shit law, and it needs to be broken.
There's an older legal principle in play here: anyone trying to shut down libraries needs to fuck right off.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
This is just wrong.
If a library has purchased two copies of a piece of digital media - an ebook, for example - which patrons can check out online, only two people can have it checked out at once, and when the checkout period expires, the content is no longer available to the patron. Now a copy is freed up for the next person to check out.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
This is just wrong.
For decades, libraries freely made copies digital media. It's only been recently that powerful cabals have made it illegal for them to do so.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
Isn't this simply a contrivance to uphold a questionable system?
Are you comparing things that are physically limited by nature to something that is made artificially limited by a trade cartel?
Jawhol!
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
If the law doesn't maintain a carve-out for librarians to do their work; then the law is a shit law, and it needs to be broken.
No carve out is needed, because DRM allows libraries to stay within the bounds of their license agreements. The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
There's an older legal principle in play here: anyone trying to shut down libraries needs to fuck right off.
While I agree with the idea, the internet archive isn’t a library. It was masquerading as a library to try and avoid lawsuits, but did a piss-poor job of it because they flew in the face of the licensing agreements and copyright laws that legal libraries are bound by.
I love the Internet Archive as a resource. I use it once or twice a week. But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea. They painted a giant legal target on their backs, and now they’re pitching a fit because the book publishers called them on it.
The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
It's worse than that. They did use "Controlled Digital Lending" to limit the number of people who can access a book at one time to something resembling the number of physical books that they had. And then they turned that restriction off because of the pandemic. There is no pandemic exception to copyright laws, even if that would make sense from a public health perspective to prevent people from having unnecessary contact at libraries. They screwed themselves and I can only hope that the Wayback Machine archives get a home somewhere else if they do go under.
But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea.
That's a false consensus in my opinion. Assuming 'everyone' agrees, will rarely ever be correct.
You are correct in saying that IA is not a library. In my opinion it should be treated as one, if not better. it provides free knowledge, much like a library, but unlike a library you do not have to give back because of the ability to produce a nearly infinite amount digitally.
the point of lending has become useless for anything that can be digitized. i think copyrighting needs to end. creating and not sharing "intellectual property" is an attack on humanity. the arguments in support of copywriting are all rooted in the same concept that copywriting itself is mostly based on: greed. before it was a resources issue as well. it still is but with diminishing requirements that should and could be trivial in this digital world we have now.
Internet archive turned themselves into an ebook piracy site rather than a digital library. They distributed unlimited copies of books for free. And then Internet Archive defended it with something in the lines of:
It costs a lot of money to make, and distribute, digital copies of books without the permission of the copyright holder... therefore it should be legal for The Internet Archive to do it.
Again, the law is wrong, limiting digital copies is an unreasonable position to place on libraries.
Saying the law is wrong is the worst defense you can have in court.
Wong laws should be challenged outside of courts.
I fully agree with that, but that’s not going to help Internet Archive
They should. But you can't exactly be surprised if you get in trouble because you broke the law, no matter how stupid you think that law is.
I think it's stupid that you can't always turn right on a red light. Plenty of people would agree. I'll get a ticket if I do it anyway, and it'll be my own fault.
Law is never wrong. Got it.
Oh, or was it we should have no defense in court. Whichever.
Laws can very well be wrong, in a moral sense, and quite a few of them still in existence today are, but trying to argue that in court is usually a bad idea.
In court you’re defending that you didn’t break the law. They have no such defense. You can’t just play Calvinball in court.
(unless the Supreme Court really likes you by a 6-4 majority)
It's an excellent difference in political debate.
Nobody gives a shit. Internet Archive is good; the law is wrong.
Internet Archive's other projects like the Wayback Machine may be good but how they handled their digital lending of books during the pandemic was not. They removed the limit on the number of people that can borrow a book at a time, thus taking away any resemblance to traditional physical lending. You can argue that copyright laws are bad and should be changed (and I'd agree) but that doesn't change the facts of what happened under the current law.
How do you propose we break laws without....breaking them?
He is proposing not to break them and work toward changing the law first.
I don't propose we break the laws, I propose we change them.
Straw meet man.
If you think you need to break laws to get them changed, you must've failed Civics 101
If you think you can chang oppressive laws without breaking laws, you're a boot licker with no education of history
That's a really terrible misrepresentation of what happened.You should probably investigate this matter more. This article is supremely biased and basically outright wrong.
The quote you gave, for example, is an almost cartoonist level of distortion of the facts.
[IA] professes to perform the traditional function of a library by lending only limited numbers of these works at a time through “Controlled Digital Lending,” .... CDL’s central tenet, according to a September 2018 Statement and White Paper by a group of librarians, is that an entity that owns a physical book can scan that book and “circulate [the] digitized title in place of [the] physical one in a controlled manner.” .... CDL’s most critical component is a one-to-one “owned to loaned ratio.” Id. Thus, a library or organization that practices CDL will seek to “only loan simultaneously the number of copies that it has legitimately acquired.”
...
Judging itself “uniquely positioned to be able to address this problem quickly and efficiently,” on March 24, 2020, IA launched what it called the National Emergency Library (“NEL”), intending it to “run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.” .... During the NEL, IA lifted the technical controls enforcing its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio and allowed up to ten thousand patrons at a time to borrow each ebook on the Website.
[...]
The Publishers have established a prima facie case of copyright infringement.
First, the Publishers hold exclusive publishing rights in the Works in Suit ...
Second, IA copied the entire Works in Suit without the Publishers’ permission. Specifically, IA does not dispute that it violated the Publishers’ reproduction rights, by creating copies of the Works in Suit ... ; the Publishers’ rights to prepare derivative works, by “recasting” the Publishers’ print books into ebooks ...; the Publishers’ public performance rights, through the “read aloud” function on IA’s Website ...; and the
publishers’ display rights, by showing the Works in Suit to users through IA’s in-browser viewer
Bold added.
It's pretty much not in dispute that Internet Archive distributed the copyrighted works of the publishers without permission, outside of what even a traditional library lending system would allow.
The court filings I've read corroborate the article.
So they did library stuff?
Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There's really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find a compelling legal reason why it isn't.
IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They did that for years, and while likely technically a violation copyright the copyright holders never came after them. Then during the pandemic they stopped the artificial limit and just gave unlimited free copies of scanned books to anybody. Publishers, expectedly, had a meltdown and are now out for blood.
Loads of people don't consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I'm very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
Because the internet has made it both easier to do, and to enforce.
But it's not a new thing at all, patents and copyrights have been enforced from pirates for well over a hundred years. This is from 1906
As others have said, making digital copies and distributing is literally piracy and not library stuff.
Expanding piracy, a pretty brutal form of robbery, to include ignoring digital media copyrights only really makes sense if you're trying to vilify nonviolent criminals. I haven't heard good arguments for more than 5-10 year copyrights.
Copyright is no longer functioning properly, if the Internet Archive cannot survive under it.
IP holders are pushing their luck, lately.
Edit: Lately it feels like everyone is underestimating the power of librarians. Anyone working against librarians is on the wrong side of whatever they're on about.
"Fuck you, I'm doing library stuff." should be a valid legal defense.
You should probably read the article. The case is only about how the Archive did more than just library stuff—they made a ton of copies and gave them out for free, then argued that the cost of maintenance somehow made that act legal.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
If the law doesn't maintain a carve-out for librarians to do their work; then the law is a shit law, and it needs to be broken.
There's an older legal principle in play here: anyone trying to shut down libraries needs to fuck right off.
This is just wrong.
If a library has purchased two copies of a piece of digital media - an ebook, for example - which patrons can check out online, only two people can have it checked out at once, and when the checkout period expires, the content is no longer available to the patron. Now a copy is freed up for the next person to check out.
For decades, libraries freely made copies digital media. It's only been recently that powerful cabals have made it illegal for them to do so.
Isn't this simply a contrivance to uphold a questionable system?
Are you comparing things that are physically limited by nature to something that is made artificially limited by a trade cartel?
Jawhol!
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
No carve out is needed, because DRM allows libraries to stay within the bounds of their license agreements. The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
While I agree with the idea, the internet archive isn’t a library. It was masquerading as a library to try and avoid lawsuits, but did a piss-poor job of it because they flew in the face of the licensing agreements and copyright laws that legal libraries are bound by.
I love the Internet Archive as a resource. I use it once or twice a week. But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea. They painted a giant legal target on their backs, and now they’re pitching a fit because the book publishers called them on it.
It's worse than that. They did use "Controlled Digital Lending" to limit the number of people who can access a book at one time to something resembling the number of physical books that they had. And then they turned that restriction off because of the pandemic. There is no pandemic exception to copyright laws, even if that would make sense from a public health perspective to prevent people from having unnecessary contact at libraries. They screwed themselves and I can only hope that the Wayback Machine archives get a home somewhere else if they do go under.
That's a false consensus in my opinion. Assuming 'everyone' agrees, will rarely ever be correct.
You are correct in saying that IA is not a library. In my opinion it should be treated as one, if not better. it provides free knowledge, much like a library, but unlike a library you do not have to give back because of the ability to produce a nearly infinite amount digitally.
the point of lending has become useless for anything that can be digitized. i think copyrighting needs to end. creating and not sharing "intellectual property" is an attack on humanity. the arguments in support of copywriting are all rooted in the same concept that copywriting itself is mostly based on: greed. before it was a resources issue as well. it still is but with diminishing requirements that should and could be trivial in this digital world we have now.
Internet archive turned themselves into an ebook piracy site rather than a digital library. They distributed unlimited copies of books for free. And then Internet Archive defended it with something in the lines of:
Again, the law is wrong, limiting digital copies is an unreasonable position to place on libraries.
Saying the law is wrong is the worst defense you can have in court.
Wong laws should be challenged outside of courts.
I fully agree with that, but that’s not going to help Internet Archive
They should. But you can't exactly be surprised if you get in trouble because you broke the law, no matter how stupid you think that law is.
I think it's stupid that you can't always turn right on a red light. Plenty of people would agree. I'll get a ticket if I do it anyway, and it'll be my own fault.
Law is never wrong. Got it.
Oh, or was it we should have no defense in court. Whichever.
Laws can very well be wrong, in a moral sense, and quite a few of them still in existence today are, but trying to argue that in court is usually a bad idea.
In court you’re defending that you didn’t break the law. They have no such defense. You can’t just play Calvinball in court.
(unless the Supreme Court really likes you by a 6-4 majority)
It's an excellent difference in political debate.
Nobody gives a shit. Internet Archive is good; the law is wrong.
Internet Archive's other projects like the Wayback Machine may be good but how they handled their digital lending of books during the pandemic was not. They removed the limit on the number of people that can borrow a book at a time, thus taking away any resemblance to traditional physical lending. You can argue that copyright laws are bad and should be changed (and I'd agree) but that doesn't change the facts of what happened under the current law.
How do you propose we break laws without....breaking them?
He is proposing not to break them and work toward changing the law first.
I don't propose we break the laws, I propose we change them.
Straw meet man.
If you think you need to break laws to get them changed, you must've failed Civics 101
If you think you can chang oppressive laws without breaking laws, you're a boot licker with no education of history
That's a really terrible misrepresentation of what happened.You should probably investigate this matter more. This article is supremely biased and basically outright wrong.
The quote you gave, for example, is an almost cartoonist level of distortion of the facts.
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/lbvggjmzovq/internetarchive.pdf
Bold added.
It's pretty much not in dispute that Internet Archive distributed the copyrighted works of the publishers without permission, outside of what even a traditional library lending system would allow.
The court filings I've read corroborate the article.
So they did library stuff?
Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There's really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find a compelling legal reason why it isn't.
They did that for years, and while likely technically a violation copyright the copyright holders never came after them. Then during the pandemic they stopped the artificial limit and just gave unlimited free copies of scanned books to anybody. Publishers, expectedly, had a meltdown and are now out for blood.
Loads of people don't consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I'm very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
Because the internet has made it both easier to do, and to enforce.
But it's not a new thing at all, patents and copyrights have been enforced from pirates for well over a hundred years. This is from 1906
As others have said, making digital copies and distributing is literally piracy and not library stuff.
Expanding piracy, a pretty brutal form of robbery, to include ignoring digital media copyrights only really makes sense if you're trying to vilify nonviolent criminals. I haven't heard good arguments for more than 5-10 year copyrights.