24 ms·

Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive

384 points by nixass 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago
That would be an immeasurable loss to humanity, the IA should be protected by the government. I've contributed some very old cartoons I managed to find on VHS rips and was very glad that the IA exists to safekeep them, many 30-somethings in my country have fond memories of these cartoons. Terabytes upon terabytes of historical data would vanish if the IA were to go bankrupt.
- VonGuard 6y ago
  IA is not a national treasure, it is a world treasure. They can do anything they want in my eyes, because absolutely 0 organizations are doing the work they do publicly. If IA is bankrupted by this, the publishers, lawyers, authors, everyone involved should feel like complete assholes. IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers! Fuck everyone who's saying IA shouldn't do this. You're all seeing the world through your wallets.
  - arkades 6y ago
    > IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers! Just a crazy thought: they weren't just depriving publishers of revenue, they were directly depriving authors. People already not widely renowned as rolling in the dollars, and also hurt during a time of decreased discretionary spending. But they don't count as people, right?
    - kick 6y ago
      This is blatantly ridiculous. IA allows authors to opt out, despite how incredibly unethical it is for authors to opt out, and copying isn't stealing in the first place.
      - xhkkffbf 6y ago
        It doesn't matter. If the authors can't eat, they can't produce. You're still taking food from the author's mouth when you read an unauthorized copy. This hairsplitting baloney about whether the word "theft" applies is a distraction.
        kick 6y ago
        Blaming the children in impoverished towns in places like Louisiana for "stealing" information over blaming the politicians who refuse after all this time to make authoring works sustainable or the system that enforces the same is ridiculous. I'm totally sure that twelve year old "stealing" bytes from LibGen over the wire in their rural town without a library worth its salt is just ripping that sandwich away from the author. Piracy doesn't harm sales, and actually improves them in certain cases: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-... Tell me, though, how someone who can't afford books would be able to buy them in the first place? How are they taking food from the author's mouth? Complete and utter hogwash.
        xhkkffbf 6y ago
        Go ahead. Focus on the extreme outliers. 98% of America can afford to buy a book. I would guess that 90% of America spend more at Starbucks than they do at a bookstore. Yeah, that's their choice, but it proves they can afford it. Heck. Most of the panhandlers make enough in change in an hour to afford a Kindle Single. Please. Don't pretend to care for the small fraction of America that is in bad financial shape. You're just using them to justify your theft.
        VonGuard 6y ago
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > the IA should be protected by the government Bankruptcy doesn't mean dissolution. If the IA goes bankrupt over this National Emergency Library boondoggle, the servers will still be around. A new organization could lift them out, clean them up and re-launch the service with a more focussed mandate and better internal processes.
  - generationP 6y ago
    The question is what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted material). Ideally someone will scrape them and a new similar entity will spring up. Is there anything in law that would prevent that from happening?
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted material) Presumably, they legally hold those data. As such, it could be purchased by a new organization out of bankruptcy (assuming IA loses and goes into liquidation versus restructuring).
      - generationP 6y ago
        Yeah, but could they give it away?
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Prior to a court judgement, yes. After? Uncharted territory.
  - canada_dry 6y ago
    > A new organization could lift them out ... please watch this 30 second Google ad to retrieve your archived content...
- yummypaint 6y ago
  If random for-profit companies can be deemed too important to fail, then the IA absolutely deserves that designation.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  If for-profit companies can be deemed too important to fail, then the IA absolutely deserves that designation.
- sambull 6y ago
  Reinforces sentiment I heard lately from the AG. History is written by the winners.
- jariel 6y ago
  Corona-specific issues aside, I'll bet that publishers don't care that much about the current situation. I do believe however that they're after a precedent being set, and though I'm definitely not a lawyer, I know that at least for brands and trademarks, you have to defend your property or lose it. The same might apply to their literary IP. If IA does it, then 'anyone else can do it', in which case the entire value of publishers business is vaporized. My instinct is that the publishers want the IA to 'stop doing it' and the situation will likely end up something along those lines.
- clarry 6y ago
  > the IA should be protected by the government The IA should be protected from governments.
troughway 6y ago
Is there a way to mirror IA?
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Yes-ish: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive
  - deegles 6y ago
    50 petabytes as of 2014, yikes.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      50k people each donating 1TB in a loss-resistent schema could do it. Miiight? be achievable?
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Yeah, something like ArchiveTeam's Warrior virtual machine [1], but instead of connecting to a JSON tracker to coordinate and download content for archival, it connected to the Internet Archive's bittorrent trackers [2] and consumed then seeded the least available items constrained by the disk space available to the virtual machine. As more virtual machines are launched, item coverage increases automatically. This doesn't take into consideration data the Internet Archive isn't providing as a torrent, such as the Wayback Machine archive or OpenLibrary. OpenLibrary can be replaced by Library Genesis [3], but I am unaware of any replacement for Wayback. EDIT: I'd like to see a rack of Archive storage nodes in every museum or other cultural center in the world, all contributing some space, power, and connectivity to distribute digital cultural archives globally. [1] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr... [2] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004715251-Archive-BitTorrents https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004715251-Arch... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
What can users do to help the Internet Archive in its time of need?
- xtracto 6y ago
  Donate please!
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    And we need to form an IA backup. Some org that has all of the (non-book) data so if IA goes down, the important content is still available.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    Done. Some quid that I could have spent in a book by Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley or Penguin Random House went instead to the Internet Archive, and I'll be doing the same every time I plan to buy a book by the above publishers, which I have just put in my do-not-buy-from list. Clarification: not that their reasons were unsound, they're perfectly understandable, but going straight with a lawsuit without other attempts to solve the problem equals to bullying, and I'm not supporting it with my wallet.
    - neaden 6y ago
      They did first try asking the IA to stop unlimited lending, so they did not go straight to a lawsuit.
david2020 6y ago
Whilst I agree with their archival mission for the internet, I find it abhorrent that THEY are charging people to access other people's books (and not paying the copyright holder anything). Take a look at the screenshots at page 25 of the complaint filed before the court. https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit-internet-archive.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit-interne... The Authors' Guild said that the Internet Archive said: "has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author." and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) said: "It is the height of hypocrisy that the Internet Archive is choosing this moment - when lives, livelihoods and the economy are all in jeopardy - to make a cynical play to undermine copyright, and all the scientific, creative, and economic opportunity that it supports."
- Narishma 6y ago
  Who is 'they'?
acd 6y ago
The dataloss would be over 18 petabytes. Why not stop lending? Could one claim Force majeure? Ia is a library.
curiousgal 6y ago
Hachette HarperCollins Wiley Penguin Random House Fuck them. The IA is a treasure for the entire human race.
alexpetralia 6y ago
> However, the publishers may not be interested in forcing the Internet Archive out of business. Their goal is to get the Internet Archive to stop scanning their books. If they win the lawsuit, they might force the group to shut down its book scanning operation and promise to not start it up again, then allow it to continue its other, less controversial offerings. Some context is useful. The IA, due to the coronavirus, is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending." Now, an "unlimited number of people can check out the same book at the same time." I can understand why the publishers would be upset. The IA need not go bankrupt for this. They may simply capitulate and revert this new feature. I am not convinced the publishers want to take the IA down; they merely want to threaten that unlimited concurrent checkouts should not be permitted (and perhaps, even more, that no books at all should be scanned).
- criddell 6y ago
  As I understand it, the lawsuit is a result of IA refusing a request to revert the feature. IA will lose and even if they do capitulate now, they are probably going to have to pay the plaintiff's lawyers.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending." This is definitely inaccurate. Many elements of CDL are clearly still in effect, such as the use of DRM to enforce the "check out" provision. It's a real lending system. The only thing that's new is the "unlimited" claim wrt. the number of copies that can be checked out at any given time - and we still don't know how far that "unlimited" actually goes. We should wait for IA's legal response on this.
  - vonquant 6y ago
    Is the extent of the 'unlimited' important? Lending a single book more than they own is an impossibility if they are respecting IP - no different to a physical library photocopying entire books so they can lend more.
- mcguire 6y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even if IA only owned one physical copy. This was a complete overreach by IA and they are paying the price. If you lend out digital versions all of which are backed by a physical copy, it is hard to argue that the publisher is being harmed. However, if you loan out unlimited digital versions of a single copy, that is much harder to justify, and that provided the the opening the publishers needed for a lawsuit. I love what the IA has done, but i think they unnecessarily stepped into a minefield for not that much benefit. Even Google with all its resources has not directly challenged the publishers.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Absolutely agree. But also, I think that IA was entirely morally right to do this. The publishers seized the opportunity to do something they've wanted to do for a while, and in my opinion, it's despicable.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > IA was entirely morally right to do this That's fair. But the consequences should have been obvious. Part of launching a test case is segregating the liability. If IA wanted to launch a legal challenge, they should have segregated the risk from the main organization. Setting precedent with out-of-copyright and licensed works would have been one way. Allowing a third party to run the National Emergency Library would have been another. Instead, it seems they thought of an idea and ran with it. For an organization aiming for longevity, that's poor process.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Sure, I don't disagree.
    - kick 6y ago
      Setting precedent with out-of-copyright and They already did allow out-of-copyright works to be downloaded as many times as anyone wants, without DRM. They're out of copyright. That's unambiguously legal and always has been. There, they've done what you wanted them to, they "segregated the risk from the main organization" (you'd have to have a pretty warped worldview to imagine it makes a difference, but nothing in your comment would have actually done that). Allowing a third party to run the National Emergency Library would have been another. I've read this line over and over again. Is this what you meant by it? "The organization that has all of the books and is registered as a library shouldn't have run the library that's legally grounded in them being legally-recognized as a library and having all of the books that they have." If so, I completely disagree with you. This makes way more sense than you're giving credit for. IA isn't run by a five year old.
QuadrupleA 6y ago
Love the IA and I am a donor, but kinda agree they stepped over the line here, maybe got a little overexcited when the pandemic hit. Hopefully they can be humble, admit the mistake, clamp down on the book piracy part and get things legal again so it doesn't put the rest of their great stuff in jeopardy.
rkwasny 6y ago
We need to put Internet Archive on IPFS or something similar, finding a single location for 50PB+ archive is going to be difficult but one can easily find 50000 people with 1TB of free space and a stable server+internet connection.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  https://decentralizedweb.net/ https://decentralizedweb.net/
- progval 6y ago
  https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    > IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.
- generationP 6y ago
  Is there a way to cut the archive down to a manageable yet relevant subset based on one's interests? Say, "I have 500GB free space and I care about mathematics, what do I take from the archive"? Because 50000TB is too much for crowdsourcing, particularly if it's supposed to be crowd-served rather than just crowd-hoarded. I would guess a high percentage of that is video, which perhaps should never have been part of the archive to begin with due to its signal-to-noise rate.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    In 30 years with our 2^largenumber drives, we’d be regretting we didn’t add chive more video.
    - boogies 6y ago
      But will we have "2^largenumber drives"? Aren't SSDs already beginning to have problems with bit flipping?
patrickhogan1 6y ago
The argument that is made in this article on behalf of IA that millions of books are locked up in libraries during the pandemic won’t hold. Almost all libraries during the pandemic have dramatically increased access to digital lending. Library usage has increased with many books fully checked out at libraries. Meaning these locked up copies are in use. IA rocks, yet this new program hurts authors. Not just publishers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jawns 6y ago
  Even if the library books were _entirely_ inaccessible during the pandemic, that doesn't mean that they temporarily become the property of IA to disseminate as it wishes. I can understand if IA were to make the argument, "Because libraries are closed, we are buying more copies of books so we can make them accessible via Controlled Digital Lending." But IA's argument has been, "Because libraries are closed, we now have the authority to pretend that those inaccessible physical copies belong to us, and we're merely lending them out." Full disclosure: I'm an author, and at least one of my recent books has ended up in IA's emergency library. I'm all for copyright reform, but I'm not for an all-out end to copyright, which is what would need to happen for IA's scheme to be legal.
  - martimarkov 6y ago
    IA haven’t come out with an official argument so there is no need to put words in their mouths. Also if the IA scheme becomes legal it would certainly not be a an all out end to copyright. Just the realisation that limiting an unlimited digital asset is stupid and copyright in the digital age should be defined in a new way. Ppl still would not be able to use your work for free. Edit: Like back when we only had physical things it made sense. There was a physical limitation. Now we are trying to apply the same concept in a very different world. I just think that doesn’t hold and we should just have a new definition. E.g: there is no reason to own a physical copy to lend a digital one as the medium should not hold the copyright. Maybe charge a fee for access and then if you want the physical book you only pay for the medium but if you want the digital one there is no additional fee. My point is more the fact that the medium limitation is something that never really gets the focus and that is a very broken part of copyright in the digital age.
smcphile 6y ago
> In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even if IA only owned one physical copy. I don't understand why the IA people thought this change would go unchallenged. Seems like a pretty suicidal move to me, although I wish them luck.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
naringas 6y ago
in a society with digital technology the publishers are basically rent seekers. aggregators will end up replacing them. a business model for aggregators other than advertisement is needed.
- enitihas 6y ago
  Publishers are rent seekers and software companies are not? Microsoft selling windows and office is ok but publishers making money is not?
  - martimarkov 6y ago
    Microsoft actually makes something in crude terms. Software companies create value with the product they build. The IP is the product. Publishers take someone’s work in crude terms. They might build a bit on top of it (proofread, format, etc) and then put it on a medium for distribution. Medium is technically the product here. To me a better comparison would be a company writing the windows installation to a CD and then selling = publisher. I could be wrong so am very open to hear the reverse argument. PS: recently a friend wanted to publish his own book and the publisher asked for him to pay the entire printing cost and a lot of other fees plus taking a % of sales. This is the closest I got to interact with the industry and was a bit shocked and also understanding that they can’t find everyone but still... came to be as a bit greedy
    - yarrel 6y ago
      Microsoft just charges you for math. Historically speaking what they make are contracts with hardware manufacturers and lawsuits over patents on that math. Mainstream publishers lend authors money to write books as advances, edit their writing (don't knock editing until you see the difference a good editor can make to your writing), produce and distribute the resulting work across media and platforms (don't knock book layout until you've tried to do it), promote the books, manage book-keeping on the resulting revenue, and various other tasks that I've forgotten about. Your friend was targeted by a vanity press. Vanity presses don't do any of that. As you saw, they just gouge you to exploit your desire to see your name on a book. So they are not a good model for actual mainstream publishing houses. (None of this has anything to do with my support for the Internet Archive.)
kingkawn 6y ago
they’re just a few months ahead of themselves on the collapse of the legal system
nmstoker 6y ago
Concerning as they seem to have been foolhardy. I'm a donor and am now torn between donating more so they can get through it or cutting donations as it's all going to get passed to the publishers (given what appears their legitimate concern with IA's behaviour on this) What's the best approach?
- Nemo_bis 6y ago
  Donate as usual: the money doesn't stay on the Internet Archive's bank account for long, it won't go to publishers. You can donate more later if the Internet Archive asks for donations specifically for the lawsuit, and at any rate after the lawsuit to accelerate operations (whether they win or lose).
shadowgovt 6y ago
Where can people donate to their legal defense fund?
- Nemo_bis 6y ago
  For now there's always https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
Qahlel 6y ago
We still don't understand digital ownership and the copyright laws are lagging far behind against the consumers. Before Internet, once you created something, the only way for someone to steal your "work" was to steal/copy an actual thing. In the digital age, everything is just ones and zeros. Law makers are clueless to what awaits us.
- tzs 6y ago
  That's arguably backwards. See Breyer's article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs" [1], where he made the argument in 1970 that because copying was relatively slow and expensive, and most works made most of the money in a limited window after release, there really wasn't much need for long term copyright protection. By the time copiers could make and distribute copies there wouldn't be enough of the market left for them to get back their costs. As copying technology becomes cheaper and faster the case for copyright gets stronger, at least if we are going to stick with the approach we currently use. That approach is based on the idea that a free market is an optimal way to determine the allocation of resources and we should use it whenever we can. The mathematical economists can actually prove that is true in markets for goods that have certain properties. Copyright law (and patent law) artificially imbue certain intellectual works with those properties. There are, of course, other systems we could use. One approach would be to treat these works as a public good. Have some tax funded government agency give out grants to authors and film makers and so on to make new works, and their output is public domain. Some problems with that approach include determining the budget, and determining what works get funded. It's hard to see either of those not getting politicized out the wazoo. Another possibility is similar, except you give out the grants after works are created. An author creates something, releases it to the public domain, and the agency determines how many people are actually reading/viewing/etc the work. Then pay the creator based on that. Another approach is similar, but without taxes. Creators can be funded by charitable foundations, or by directly soliciting donations from the public. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright
  - nybble41 6y ago
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" -Alternatively attributed (in one form or another) to Edmund Burke, George Santayana, and Sir Winston Churchill, and possibly your high school history teacher, as well! Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationis... Also, if you're criticizing or downvoting this (which I am completely OK with, BTW!), you're equally-and-oppositely criticizing and downvoting all of the links above. I see myself only as a messenger... a simple "knowlege-mover"... I only move knowledge from point A (the links above) to point B (Hacker News)... That, and I see myself as simple, humble student of history... OK, now that that's said, you may proceed to downvote and criticize to your heart's content! <g> In fact, I'd be glad if you did!: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect The Internet Archive is worth at least 1,000 Googles -- because of the History it provides... it's the closest thing to a record of our Civilization (through the years that it was active) that we have at this point in time. Destroy History, and you destroy Civilization itself...
- ketzu 6y ago
  Disagreeing with you or your post is not disagreeing with the content of those links. Neither is critizising you transitive. Giving more context and explaining your points besides name-dropping would be helpful. I get the impression, that your comment, disregarding complaints about possible downvotes, could be reduced to: "censorship"
Cactus2018 6y ago
Speaking of the Internet Archive, what happened to the "MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video]"[1]? That link was HN front page[2] material less than a month ago, and the link never worked for me. [1] https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-collection/ https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-colle... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867
- yarrel 6y ago
  MTV decided they wanted to remain historically irrelevant and sent a takedown notice.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Anyone remember when MTV was "Music Television"? Yah, me neither.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Nemo_bis 6y ago
  There was a takedown request shortly after it was posted. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200511/11291844477/copyright-making-sure-that-mtv-remains-irrelevant-relic-rather-than-cultural-icon.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200511/11291844477/copyr...
calimac 6y ago
The internet archive must look into placing their property into trust
sonofaplum 6y ago
The IA is good, but the decision they made is very bad and has put their entire operation at risk. Their leadership clearly both cares about archiving the web and also for advocating an expansionist view of content distribution (that in an emergency, any private organization has the right to distribute whatever content they want however they want to without regard for the right holders of the content?). That's fine for them to hold both views but both roles are now at risk. It's a very sad and completely avoidable situation and I hope that the IA will course correct and avoid disaster.
MintelIE 6y ago
That’s OK. Archive has been deleting all kinds of content because it ruffles their Bay Area feathers. It’s clear that projects like this aren’t ready for the long haul and once you let activists become curators it’s all over.
- ajayyy 6y ago
  They didn't delete it, they hid it. It still exists and will probably be made public again when it becomes historically significant
- hnaccy 6y ago
  What content have they been deleting or hiding?
fxtentacle 6y ago
A lot of the comments claim that publishers could collect $150k per work in statutory damages. However, that usually only works if the book was registered timely with the USCO. I don't know the rate among book authors, but most photographers don't register, so they don't qualify. If the IA was clever to only choose books without registration, then the maximum they can be trialed for is the financial damages that publishers can prove. Given that everyone is trying to save money nowadays, it's very hard to convincingly argue that everyone would have bought the book if there had been a waiting list for renting it. I also see the possibility that the IA is just trolling publishers. Maybe they did keep track of the numbers internally and never lent out to more people than they had licenses available through their partners. In that case, the publishers would incur large legal costs only to later be told by the court that nothing illegal had happened. EDIT: There's also the claim by the IA that the average user only looks at the book for 30 minutes. That, in turn, would mean that what the publishers call "borrowing" here is more akin to me browsing an in-person library without actually checking out anything. So there's a good chance that 2-3 copies of each book are enough to make it difficult to prove this illegal, meaning maybe this is clever trolling after all. https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-l...
- Nemo_bis 6y ago
  The lawsuit is about 127 books which have a copyright registration, listed in the attachment: https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.1.pdf https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us... The publishers have already proposed an alternative to statutory damages: > Alternatively, ordering Internet Archive to render a full and complete accounting to Plaintiffs of Internet Archive’s profits, gains, advantages, or the value of business opportunities received from the foregoing acts of infringement of the Works and entering judgment for Plaintiffs against Internet Archive for all damages suffered by Plaintiffs and for any profits or gain by Internet Archive attributable to the infringements alleged above of Plaintiffs’ copyrights in amounts to be determined at trial; https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0.pdf https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us... This would probably be a very long discovery process, like ACS and Elsevier vs. ResearchGate: https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643 https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643
usr1106 6y ago
I don't see any information about how many books were actually "borrowed". Somehow I have the feeling it might be fewer than sitting in the shelves of all the physical libraries. Has this emergency library been popular? I read about it on HN, not anywhere else. The world is not full of HN readers. I'm considering writing to those publishers that I will stop buying books published by them and borrow them from a (physical) library instead, copying pages I want to keep. Be the letter of the law whatever it is, this was a exceptional situation and it was not done for personal benefit.
- Nemo_bis 6y ago
  It's in https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-l... > Trying to compare a physical check-out of a book with a digital check-out is difficult. Assuming that the number of physical books borrowed from a library corresponds to digitally borrowed books that are read after the first day, then the Internet Archive currently lends about as many as a US library that serves a population of about 30,000. Of course you won't find any real information in the publishers' complaint. It's all rhetoric and no substance, except where they claim everything and its opposite.
zatel 6y ago
I am an author and I support the IA in this decision.
enitihas 6y ago
I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea. Considering that a large part of HN makes fat salaries writing software which is either sold for high price(MSFT types), or mining user data and advertising (GOOG types). If their work was being distributed for free (SQL server, Windows), software developers would make much less money and would be up in arms here. Why should authors be deprived of the value of their labour. If not, will you be happy if all software was made free in "National Emergency Software Library", and you were being paid peanuts? After all , people also need a good OS and Database apart from books.
- chmod775 6y ago
  Since I'm neither of the types you mentioned, do I get to say such things in your opinion?
  - enitihas 6y ago
    Everyone gets to say anything in my opinion, I am no-one to stop people. But they should also try to ponder over the question over why authors don't deserve to be paid for their labour.
    - nybble41 6y ago
      No one deserves to be paid for their labor. The mere fact that you put labor into something does not entitle you to other people's money. You get paid because you have something other people want and they are willing to pay you to give it to them. This is completely at odds with the way publishers are used to operating, which is founded in legally-sanctioned monopolies and disproportionate punishment for anyone who dares to infringe their special privileges by using their own labor to create their own copies of existing works without consulting the copyright holder. If you want to be paid for your labor, withhold either the labor itself or the finished product (i.e. the original copy) until you have negotiated a contract for payment. Don't put the content out in public where it can easily be copied and then expect people to pay you large sums for the trivial work of distribution which they could easily accomplish on their own.
hysan 6y ago
I hope this news isn't drowned out by the current protests. Unpopular lawsuits, bills, etc. tend to appear and get a hard push during times when media attention is focused on some other larger outrage. The timing of this is extremely opportunistic and reinforces the idea that the IA is in the moral right (not necessarily the legal right). Imagine if this was filed when the only news was about COVID-19 and working from home? What type of outrage would it have manufactured by all of the working parents stranded at home trying to fulfill the duties of being a teacher too? Of course publishers wouldn't do that. It would be a PR death move.
habanany 6y ago
I knew the wayback machine wouldn’t last longer, it was just uncovering too many dirt of powerful people
phendrenad2 6y ago
Is there a backup on the IA? If this lawsuit takes down IA, will the wayback machine content simply be lost forever?
Taek 6y ago
We are in the middle of a national emergency and the IA made an aggressive an panicked move to try and improve people's lives at a time when frankly people really needed help. I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked. The IA probably overstepped, but given the circumstances I hope that any court decision amounts to little more than requiring the IA to roll back their unlimited policy. No damages awarded. We should encourage people to help each other in times of crisis, any judgement granting damages sets a very bitter tone for future crisis management.
- fredrb 6y ago
  > I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked. This could be read as: > the end justifies the means "Compassion" can be stretched to mean anything as long it's good to someone. I think IA's cause is a very noble one. I can stand behind that. However, noble causes don't give you legal exemption.
surround 6y ago
One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that IA allowed authors to remove their books from the national emergency library. This doesn’t make publishers happy because they can’t make the decision for their authors.
ineedasername 6y ago
I really like what IA does, but I can't see a justification under copyright law that would allow them to have unlimited checkouts of the same book. They'd be well advised to drop the policy and hope the limited time they offered this, and their status as a non-profit, is enough to get those who filed the suits to drop them.
greyhair 6y ago
It is a bummer, but they messed up. Is it possible they were under financial duress anyway and were looking for attention grabbing move to garner support? I don't understand it, and I find it hard to believe that their legal counsel green lighted it.
erikw 6y ago
This is so frustrating to hear. A lot of comments mention the IA "overreaching" with this. While I agree from a legal perspective, I don't agree morally. The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. Is there any individual who argues that 120 years of monopoly is reasonable? The worst part for me is the lack of agency I feel. I see something so vehement being enforced globally, and it makes me feel like I'm being ruled by some enemy mafia, not a representative democracy. Similar to the war on drugs in the US, I see this as actively sabotaging society for the benefit of a few.
- smcphile 6y ago
  > The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. I agree, but I don’t see why that automatically makes the recent modifications (that brought on the lawsuit) by IA morally right. Even if some works should already be in the public domain and are not yet, the IA modification was also taking money away from relatively recent works.
aiscapehumanity 6y ago
They're just going to make everyone use libgen which won't end piracy.

384 points by nixass 6y ago

That would be an immeasurable loss to humanity, the IA should be protected by the government. I've contributed some very old cartoons I managed to find on VHS rips and was very glad that the IA exists to safekeep them, many 30-somethings in my country have fond memories of these cartoons. Terabytes upon terabytes of historical data would vanish if the IA were to go bankrupt.

VonGuard 6y ago
IA is not a national treasure, it is a world treasure. They can do anything they want in my eyes, because absolutely 0 organizations are doing the work they do publicly. If IA is bankrupted by this, the publishers, lawyers, authors, everyone involved should feel like complete assholes. IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers! Fuck everyone who's saying IA shouldn't do this. You're all seeing the world through your wallets.
- arkades 6y ago
  > IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers! Just a crazy thought: they weren't just depriving publishers of revenue, they were directly depriving authors. People already not widely renowned as rolling in the dollars, and also hurt during a time of decreased discretionary spending. But they don't count as people, right?
  - kick 6y ago
    This is blatantly ridiculous. IA allows authors to opt out, despite how incredibly unethical it is for authors to opt out, and copying isn't stealing in the first place.
    - xhkkffbf 6y ago
      It doesn't matter. If the authors can't eat, they can't produce. You're still taking food from the author's mouth when you read an unauthorized copy. This hairsplitting baloney about whether the word "theft" applies is a distraction.
      - kick 6y ago
        Blaming the children in impoverished towns in places like Louisiana for "stealing" information over blaming the politicians who refuse after all this time to make authoring works sustainable or the system that enforces the same is ridiculous. I'm totally sure that twelve year old "stealing" bytes from LibGen over the wire in their rural town without a library worth its salt is just ripping that sandwich away from the author. Piracy doesn't harm sales, and actually improves them in certain cases: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-... Tell me, though, how someone who can't afford books would be able to buy them in the first place? How are they taking food from the author's mouth? Complete and utter hogwash.
        xhkkffbf 6y ago
        Go ahead. Focus on the extreme outliers. 98% of America can afford to buy a book. I would guess that 90% of America spend more at Starbucks than they do at a bookstore. Yeah, that's their choice, but it proves they can afford it. Heck. Most of the panhandlers make enough in change in an hour to afford a Kindle Single. Please. Don't pretend to care for the small fraction of America that is in bad financial shape. You're just using them to justify your theft.
      - VonGuard 6y ago
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> the IA should be protected by the government Bankruptcy doesn't mean dissolution. If the IA goes bankrupt over this National Emergency Library boondoggle, the servers will still be around. A new organization could lift them out, clean them up and re-launch the service with a more focussed mandate and better internal processes.
- generationP 6y ago
  The question is what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted material). Ideally someone will scrape them and a new similar entity will spring up. Is there anything in law that would prevent that from happening?
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > what will happen with the archived data (wayback and user-submitted material) Presumably, they legally hold those data. As such, it could be purchased by a new organization out of bankruptcy (assuming IA loses and goes into liquidation versus restructuring).
    - generationP 6y ago
      Yeah, but could they give it away?
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Prior to a court judgement, yes. After? Uncharted territory.
- canada_dry 6y ago
  > A new organization could lift them out ... please watch this 30 second Google ad to retrieve your archived content...
yummypaint 6y ago
If random for-profit companies can be deemed too important to fail, then the IA absolutely deserves that designation.
yummypaint 6y ago
If for-profit companies can be deemed too important to fail, then the IA absolutely deserves that designation.
sambull 6y ago
Reinforces sentiment I heard lately from the AG. History is written by the winners.
jariel 6y ago
Corona-specific issues aside, I'll bet that publishers don't care that much about the current situation. I do believe however that they're after a precedent being set, and though I'm definitely not a lawyer, I know that at least for brands and trademarks, you have to defend your property or lose it. The same might apply to their literary IP. If IA does it, then 'anyone else can do it', in which case the entire value of publishers business is vaporized. My instinct is that the publishers want the IA to 'stop doing it' and the situation will likely end up something along those lines.
clarry 6y ago
> the IA should be protected by the government The IA should be protected from governments.

troughway 6y ago

Is there a way to mirror IA?

doublerabbit 6y ago
Yes-ish: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive
- deegles 6y ago
  50 petabytes as of 2014, yikes.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    50k people each donating 1TB in a loss-resistent schema could do it. Miiight? be achievable?
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Yeah, something like ArchiveTeam's Warrior virtual machine [1], but instead of connecting to a JSON tracker to coordinate and download content for archival, it connected to the Internet Archive's bittorrent trackers [2] and consumed then seeded the least available items constrained by the disk space available to the virtual machine. As more virtual machines are launched, item coverage increases automatically. This doesn't take into consideration data the Internet Archive isn't providing as a torrent, such as the Wayback Machine archive or OpenLibrary. OpenLibrary can be replaced by Library Genesis [3], but I am unaware of any replacement for Wayback. EDIT: I'd like to see a rack of Archive storage nodes in every museum or other cultural center in the world, all contributing some space, power, and connectivity to distribute digital cultural archives globally. [1] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr... [2] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004715251-Archive-BitTorrents https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004715251-Arch... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago

What can users do to help the Internet Archive in its time of need?

xtracto 6y ago
Donate please!
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  And we need to form an IA backup. Some org that has all of the (non-book) data so if IA goes down, the important content is still available.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  Done. Some quid that I could have spent in a book by Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley or Penguin Random House went instead to the Internet Archive, and I'll be doing the same every time I plan to buy a book by the above publishers, which I have just put in my do-not-buy-from list. Clarification: not that their reasons were unsound, they're perfectly understandable, but going straight with a lawsuit without other attempts to solve the problem equals to bullying, and I'm not supporting it with my wallet.
  - neaden 6y ago
    They did first try asking the IA to stop unlimited lending, so they did not go straight to a lawsuit.

david2020 6y ago

Whilst I agree with their archival mission for the internet, I find it abhorrent that THEY are charging people to access other people's books (and not paying the copyright holder anything). Take a look at the screenshots at page 25 of the complaint filed before the court. https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit-internet-archive.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/06/01/publishers-lawsuit-interne... The Authors' Guild said that the Internet Archive said: "has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author." and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) said: "It is the height of hypocrisy that the Internet Archive is choosing this moment - when lives, livelihoods and the economy are all in jeopardy - to make a cynical play to undermine copyright, and all the scientific, creative, and economic opportunity that it supports."

Narishma 6y ago
Who is 'they'?

acd 6y ago

The dataloss would be over 18 petabytes. Why not stop lending? Could one claim Force majeure? Ia is a library.

curiousgal 6y ago

Hachette HarperCollins Wiley Penguin Random House Fuck them. The IA is a treasure for the entire human race.

alexpetralia 6y ago

> However, the publishers may not be interested in forcing the Internet Archive out of business. Their goal is to get the Internet Archive to stop scanning their books. If they win the lawsuit, they might force the group to shut down its book scanning operation and promise to not start it up again, then allow it to continue its other, less controversial offerings. Some context is useful. The IA, due to the coronavirus, is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending." Now, an "unlimited number of people can check out the same book at the same time." I can understand why the publishers would be upset. The IA need not go bankrupt for this. They may simply capitulate and revert this new feature. I am not convinced the publishers want to take the IA down; they merely want to threaten that unlimited concurrent checkouts should not be permitted (and perhaps, even more, that no books at all should be scanned).

criddell 6y ago
As I understand it, the lawsuit is a result of IA refusing a request to revert the feature. IA will lose and even if they do capitulate now, they are probably going to have to pay the plaintiff's lawyers.
zozbot234 6y ago
> is no longer lending digital books via "controlled digital lending." This is definitely inaccurate. Many elements of CDL are clearly still in effect, such as the use of DRM to enforce the "check out" provision. It's a real lending system. The only thing that's new is the "unlimited" claim wrt. the number of copies that can be checked out at any given time - and we still don't know how far that "unlimited" actually goes. We should wait for IA's legal response on this.
- vonquant 6y ago
  Is the extent of the 'unlimited' important? Lending a single book more than they own is an impossibility if they are respecting IP - no different to a physical library photocopying entire books so they can lend more.
mcguire 6y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam, the Internet Archive announced it was dispensing with this waiting-list system. Under a program it called the National Emergency Library, IA began allowing an unlimited number of people to check out the same book at the same time—even if IA only owned one physical copy. This was a complete overreach by IA and they are paying the price. If you lend out digital versions all of which are backed by a physical copy, it is hard to argue that the publisher is being harmed. However, if you loan out unlimited digital versions of a single copy, that is much harder to justify, and that provided the the opening the publishers needed for a lawsuit. I love what the IA has done, but i think they unnecessarily stepped into a minefield for not that much benefit. Even Google with all its resources has not directly challenged the publishers.

StavrosK 6y ago
Absolutely agree. But also, I think that IA was entirely morally right to do this. The publishers seized the opportunity to do something they've wanted to do for a while, and in my opinion, it's despicable.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > IA was entirely morally right to do this That's fair. But the consequences should have been obvious. Part of launching a test case is segregating the liability. If IA wanted to launch a legal challenge, they should have segregated the risk from the main organization. Setting precedent with out-of-copyright and licensed works would have been one way. Allowing a third party to run the National Emergency Library would have been another. Instead, it seems they thought of an idea and ran with it. For an organization aiming for longevity, that's poor process.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Sure, I don't disagree.
  - kick 6y ago
    Setting precedent with out-of-copyright and They already did allow out-of-copyright works to be downloaded as many times as anyone wants, without DRM. They're out of copyright. That's unambiguously legal and always has been. There, they've done what you wanted them to, they "segregated the risk from the main organization" (you'd have to have a pretty warped worldview to imagine it makes a difference, but nothing in your comment would have actually done that). Allowing a third party to run the National Emergency Library would have been another. I've read this line over and over again. Is this what you meant by it? "The organization that has all of the books and is registered as a library shouldn't have run the library that's legally grounded in them being legally-recognized as a library and having all of the books that they have." If so, I completely disagree with you. This makes way more sense than you're giving credit for. IA isn't run by a five year old.

QuadrupleA 6y ago

Love the IA and I am a donor, but kinda agree they stepped over the line here, maybe got a little overexcited when the pandemic hit. Hopefully they can be humble, admit the mistake, clamp down on the book piracy part and get things legal again so it doesn't put the rest of their great stuff in jeopardy.

rkwasny 6y ago

We need to put Internet Archive on IPFS or something similar, finding a single location for 50PB+ archive is going to be difficult but one can easily find 50000 people with 1TB of free space and a stable server+internet connection.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
https://decentralizedweb.net/ https://decentralizedweb.net/
progval 6y ago
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.
generationP 6y ago
Is there a way to cut the archive down to a manageable yet relevant subset based on one's interests? Say, "I have 500GB free space and I care about mathematics, what do I take from the archive"? Because 50000TB is too much for crowdsourcing, particularly if it's supposed to be crowd-served rather than just crowd-hoarded. I would guess a high percentage of that is video, which perhaps should never have been part of the archive to begin with due to its signal-to-noise rate.
- dannyw 6y ago
  In 30 years with our 2^largenumber drives, we’d be regretting we didn’t add chive more video.
  - boogies 6y ago
    But will we have "2^largenumber drives"? Aren't SSDs already beginning to have problems with bit flipping?

patrickhogan1 6y ago

The argument that is made in this article on behalf of IA that millions of books are locked up in libraries during the pandemic won’t hold. Almost all libraries during the pandemic have dramatically increased access to digital lending. Library usage has increased with many books fully checked out at libraries. Meaning these locked up copies are in use. IA rocks, yet this new program hurts authors. Not just publishers.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jawns 6y ago
Even if the library books were _entirely_ inaccessible during the pandemic, that doesn't mean that they temporarily become the property of IA to disseminate as it wishes. I can understand if IA were to make the argument, "Because libraries are closed, we are buying more copies of books so we can make them accessible via Controlled Digital Lending." But IA's argument has been, "Because libraries are closed, we now have the authority to pretend that those inaccessible physical copies belong to us, and we're merely lending them out." Full disclosure: I'm an author, and at least one of my recent books has ended up in IA's emergency library. I'm all for copyright reform, but I'm not for an all-out end to copyright, which is what would need to happen for IA's scheme to be legal.
- martimarkov 6y ago
  IA haven’t come out with an official argument so there is no need to put words in their mouths. Also if the IA scheme becomes legal it would certainly not be a an all out end to copyright. Just the realisation that limiting an unlimited digital asset is stupid and copyright in the digital age should be defined in a new way. Ppl still would not be able to use your work for free. Edit: Like back when we only had physical things it made sense. There was a physical limitation. Now we are trying to apply the same concept in a very different world. I just think that doesn’t hold and we should just have a new definition. E.g: there is no reason to own a physical copy to lend a digital one as the medium should not hold the copyright. Maybe charge a fee for access and then if you want the physical book you only pay for the medium but if you want the digital one there is no additional fee. My point is more the fact that the medium limitation is something that never really gets the focus and that is a very broken part of copyright in the digital age.

smcphile 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

naringas 6y ago

in a society with digital technology the publishers are basically rent seekers. aggregators will end up replacing them. a business model for aggregators other than advertisement is needed.

enitihas 6y ago
Publishers are rent seekers and software companies are not? Microsoft selling windows and office is ok but publishers making money is not?
- martimarkov 6y ago
  Microsoft actually makes something in crude terms. Software companies create value with the product they build. The IP is the product. Publishers take someone’s work in crude terms. They might build a bit on top of it (proofread, format, etc) and then put it on a medium for distribution. Medium is technically the product here. To me a better comparison would be a company writing the windows installation to a CD and then selling = publisher. I could be wrong so am very open to hear the reverse argument. PS: recently a friend wanted to publish his own book and the publisher asked for him to pay the entire printing cost and a lot of other fees plus taking a % of sales. This is the closest I got to interact with the industry and was a bit shocked and also understanding that they can’t find everyone but still... came to be as a bit greedy
  - yarrel 6y ago
    Microsoft just charges you for math. Historically speaking what they make are contracts with hardware manufacturers and lawsuits over patents on that math. Mainstream publishers lend authors money to write books as advances, edit their writing (don't knock editing until you see the difference a good editor can make to your writing), produce and distribute the resulting work across media and platforms (don't knock book layout until you've tried to do it), promote the books, manage book-keeping on the resulting revenue, and various other tasks that I've forgotten about. Your friend was targeted by a vanity press. Vanity presses don't do any of that. As you saw, they just gouge you to exploit your desire to see your name on a book. So they are not a good model for actual mainstream publishing houses. (None of this has anything to do with my support for the Internet Archive.)

kingkawn 6y ago

they’re just a few months ahead of themselves on the collapse of the legal system

nmstoker 6y ago

Concerning as they seem to have been foolhardy. I'm a donor and am now torn between donating more so they can get through it or cutting donations as it's all going to get passed to the publishers (given what appears their legitimate concern with IA's behaviour on this) What's the best approach?

Nemo_bis 6y ago
Donate as usual: the money doesn't stay on the Internet Archive's bank account for long, it won't go to publishers. You can donate more later if the Internet Archive asks for donations specifically for the lawsuit, and at any rate after the lawsuit to accelerate operations (whether they win or lose).

shadowgovt 6y ago

Where can people donate to their legal defense fund?

Nemo_bis 6y ago
For now there's always https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/

Qahlel 6y ago

We still don't understand digital ownership and the copyright laws are lagging far behind against the consumers. Before Internet, once you created something, the only way for someone to steal your "work" was to steal/copy an actual thing. In the digital age, everything is just ones and zeros. Law makers are clueless to what awaits us.

tzs 6y ago
That's arguably backwards. See Breyer's article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs" [1], where he made the argument in 1970 that because copying was relatively slow and expensive, and most works made most of the money in a limited window after release, there really wasn't much need for long term copyright protection. By the time copiers could make and distribute copies there wouldn't be enough of the market left for them to get back their costs. As copying technology becomes cheaper and faster the case for copyright gets stronger, at least if we are going to stick with the approach we currently use. That approach is based on the idea that a free market is an optimal way to determine the allocation of resources and we should use it whenever we can. The mathematical economists can actually prove that is true in markets for goods that have certain properties. Copyright law (and patent law) artificially imbue certain intellectual works with those properties. There are, of course, other systems we could use. One approach would be to treat these works as a public good. Have some tax funded government agency give out grants to authors and film makers and so on to make new works, and their output is public domain. Some problems with that approach include determining the budget, and determining what works get funded. It's hard to see either of those not getting politicized out the wazoo. Another possibility is similar, except you give out the grants after works are created. An author creates something, releases it to the public domain, and the agency determines how many people are actually reading/viewing/etc the work. Then pay the creator based on that. Another approach is similar, but without taxes. Creators can be funded by charitable foundations, or by directly soliciting donations from the public. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright
- nybble41 6y ago

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" -Alternatively attributed (in one form or another) to Edmund Burke, George Santayana, and Sir Winston Churchill, and possibly your high school history teacher, as well! Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_negationis... Also, if you're criticizing or downvoting this (which I am completely OK with, BTW!), you're equally-and-oppositely criticizing and downvoting all of the links above. I see myself only as a messenger... a simple "knowlege-mover"... I only move knowledge from point A (the links above) to point B (Hacker News)... That, and I see myself as simple, humble student of history... OK, now that that's said, you may proceed to downvote and criticize to your heart's content! <g> In fact, I'd be glad if you did!: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect The Internet Archive is worth at least 1,000 Googles -- because of the History it provides... it's the closest thing to a record of our Civilization (through the years that it was active) that we have at this point in time. Destroy History, and you destroy Civilization itself...

ketzu 6y ago
Disagreeing with you or your post is not disagreeing with the content of those links. Neither is critizising you transitive. Giving more context and explaining your points besides name-dropping would be helpful. I get the impression, that your comment, disregarding complaints about possible downvotes, could be reduced to: "censorship"

Cactus2018 6y ago

Speaking of the Internet Archive, what happened to the "MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video]"[1]? That link was HN front page[2] material less than a month ago, and the link never worked for me. [1] https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-collection/ https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-colle... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071867

yarrel 6y ago
MTV decided they wanted to remain historically irrelevant and sent a takedown notice.
- mcguire 6y ago
  Anyone remember when MTV was "Music Television"? Yah, me neither.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Nemo_bis 6y ago
There was a takedown request shortly after it was posted. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200511/11291844477/copyright-making-sure-that-mtv-remains-irrelevant-relic-rather-than-cultural-icon.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200511/11291844477/copyr...

calimac 6y ago

The internet archive must look into placing their property into trust

sonofaplum 6y ago

The IA is good, but the decision they made is very bad and has put their entire operation at risk. Their leadership clearly both cares about archiving the web and also for advocating an expansionist view of content distribution (that in an emergency, any private organization has the right to distribute whatever content they want however they want to without regard for the right holders of the content?). That's fine for them to hold both views but both roles are now at risk. It's a very sad and completely avoidable situation and I hope that the IA will course correct and avoid disaster.

MintelIE 6y ago

That’s OK. Archive has been deleting all kinds of content because it ruffles their Bay Area feathers. It’s clear that projects like this aren’t ready for the long haul and once you let activists become curators it’s all over.

ajayyy 6y ago
They didn't delete it, they hid it. It still exists and will probably be made public again when it becomes historically significant
hnaccy 6y ago
What content have they been deleting or hiding?

fxtentacle 6y ago

A lot of the comments claim that publishers could collect $150k per work in statutory damages. However, that usually only works if the book was registered timely with the USCO. I don't know the rate among book authors, but most photographers don't register, so they don't qualify. If the IA was clever to only choose books without registration, then the maximum they can be trialed for is the financial damages that publishers can prove. Given that everyone is trying to save money nowadays, it's very hard to convincingly argue that everyone would have bought the book if there had been a waiting list for renting it. I also see the possibility that the IA is just trolling publishers. Maybe they did keep track of the numbers internally and never lent out to more people than they had licenses available through their partners. In that case, the publishers would incur large legal costs only to later be told by the court that nothing illegal had happened. EDIT: There's also the claim by the IA that the average user only looks at the book for 30 minutes. That, in turn, would mean that what the publishers call "borrowing" here is more akin to me browsing an in-person library without actually checking out anything. So there's a good chance that 2-3 copies of each book are enough to make it difficult to prove this illegal, meaning maybe this is clever trolling after all. https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-l...

Nemo_bis 6y ago
The lawsuit is about 127 books which have a copyright registration, listed in the attachment: https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.1.pdf https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us... The publishers have already proposed an alternative to statutory damages: > Alternatively, ordering Internet Archive to render a full and complete accounting to Plaintiffs of Internet Archive’s profits, gains, advantages, or the value of business opportunities received from the foregoing acts of infringement of the Works and entering judgment for Plaintiffs against Internet Archive for all damages suffered by Plaintiffs and for any profits or gain by Internet Archive attributable to the infringements alleged above of Plaintiffs’ copyrights in amounts to be determined at trial; https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0.pdf https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.us... This would probably be a very long discovery process, like ACS and Elsevier vs. ResearchGate: https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643 https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.mdd.433643

usr1106 6y ago

I don't see any information about how many books were actually "borrowed". Somehow I have the feeling it might be fewer than sitting in the shelves of all the physical libraries. Has this emergency library been popular? I read about it on HN, not anywhere else. The world is not full of HN readers. I'm considering writing to those publishers that I will stop buying books published by them and borrow them from a (physical) library instead, copying pages I want to keep. Be the letter of the law whatever it is, this was a exceptional situation and it was not done for personal benefit.

Nemo_bis 6y ago
It's in https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-l... > Trying to compare a physical check-out of a book with a digital check-out is difficult. Assuming that the number of physical books borrowed from a library corresponds to digitally borrowed books that are read after the first day, then the Internet Archive currently lends about as many as a US library that serves a population of about 30,000. Of course you won't find any real information in the publishers' complaint. It's all rhetoric and no substance, except where they claim everything and its opposite.

zatel 6y ago

I am an author and I support the IA in this decision.

enitihas 6y ago

I don't understand how so many people here are commenting as if giving out books for free was a good idea. Considering that a large part of HN makes fat salaries writing software which is either sold for high price(MSFT types), or mining user data and advertising (GOOG types). If their work was being distributed for free (SQL server, Windows), software developers would make much less money and would be up in arms here. Why should authors be deprived of the value of their labour. If not, will you be happy if all software was made free in "National Emergency Software Library", and you were being paid peanuts? After all , people also need a good OS and Database apart from books.

chmod775 6y ago
Since I'm neither of the types you mentioned, do I get to say such things in your opinion?
- enitihas 6y ago
  Everyone gets to say anything in my opinion, I am no-one to stop people. But they should also try to ponder over the question over why authors don't deserve to be paid for their labour.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    No one deserves to be paid for their labor. The mere fact that you put labor into something does not entitle you to other people's money. You get paid because you have something other people want and they are willing to pay you to give it to them. This is completely at odds with the way publishers are used to operating, which is founded in legally-sanctioned monopolies and disproportionate punishment for anyone who dares to infringe their special privileges by using their own labor to create their own copies of existing works without consulting the copyright holder. If you want to be paid for your labor, withhold either the labor itself or the finished product (i.e. the original copy) until you have negotiated a contract for payment. Don't put the content out in public where it can easily be copied and then expect people to pay you large sums for the trivial work of distribution which they could easily accomplish on their own.

hysan 6y ago

I hope this news isn't drowned out by the current protests. Unpopular lawsuits, bills, etc. tend to appear and get a hard push during times when media attention is focused on some other larger outrage. The timing of this is extremely opportunistic and reinforces the idea that the IA is in the moral right (not necessarily the legal right). Imagine if this was filed when the only news was about COVID-19 and working from home? What type of outrage would it have manufactured by all of the working parents stranded at home trying to fulfill the duties of being a teacher too? Of course publishers wouldn't do that. It would be a PR death move.

habanany 6y ago

I knew the wayback machine wouldn’t last longer, it was just uncovering too many dirt of powerful people

phendrenad2 6y ago

Is there a backup on the IA? If this lawsuit takes down IA, will the wayback machine content simply be lost forever?

Taek 6y ago

We are in the middle of a national emergency and the IA made an aggressive an panicked move to try and improve people's lives at a time when frankly people really needed help. I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked. The IA probably overstepped, but given the circumstances I hope that any court decision amounts to little more than requiring the IA to roll back their unlimited policy. No damages awarded. We should encourage people to help each other in times of crisis, any judgement granting damages sets a very bitter tone for future crisis management.

fredrb 6y ago
> I would like to live in a society where temporary actions made in the name of compassion during an emergency can be overlooked. This could be read as: > the end justifies the means "Compassion" can be stretched to mean anything as long it's good to someone. I think IA's cause is a very noble one. I can stand behind that. However, noble causes don't give you legal exemption.

surround 6y ago

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that IA allowed authors to remove their books from the national emergency library. This doesn’t make publishers happy because they can’t make the decision for their authors.

ineedasername 6y ago

I really like what IA does, but I can't see a justification under copyright law that would allow them to have unlimited checkouts of the same book. They'd be well advised to drop the policy and hope the limited time they offered this, and their status as a non-profit, is enough to get those who filed the suits to drop them.

greyhair 6y ago

It is a bummer, but they messed up. Is it possible they were under financial duress anyway and were looking for attention grabbing move to garner support? I don't understand it, and I find it hard to believe that their legal counsel green lighted it.

erikw 6y ago

This is so frustrating to hear. A lot of comments mention the IA "overreaching" with this. While I agree from a legal perspective, I don't agree morally. The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. Is there any individual who argues that 120 years of monopoly is reasonable? The worst part for me is the lack of agency I feel. I see something so vehement being enforced globally, and it makes me feel like I'm being ruled by some enemy mafia, not a representative democracy. Similar to the war on drugs in the US, I see this as actively sabotaging society for the benefit of a few.

smcphile 6y ago
> The IP lobby overreached when they got life of author + 70 years / 120 years corporate copyright monopolies passed into law. I agree, but I don’t see why that automatically makes the recent modifications (that brought on the lawsuit) by IA morally right. Even if some works should already be in the public domain and are not yet, the IA modification was also taking money away from relatively recent works.

aiscapehumanity 6y ago

They're just going to make everyone use libgen which won't end piracy.