12 ms·

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just ste

by jjcon 6y ago

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through the courts (for movies/television) and it failed miserably: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VidAngel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VidAngel > In June 2019, a jury ordered VidAngel to pay over $62 million in damages for copyright violations.

gjsman-1000 6y ago
Agreed. However, I would expect the EFF to (possibly) be good negotiators. They might be able to make a settlement that keeps the IA's website open while satisfying the publishers - or at least making the lawsuit complicated enough that the publishers won't keep going. Without this representation, the publishers could almost certainly bankrupt the IA, even if they are given the minimum infringement fine of $200/ea.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  To note, bankrupting IA doesn't make digital copies of these books go away. It'll just accelerate Library Genesis [1] while burning down a cultural archive. The Internet Archive needs to be reasonable, as they operate within US jurisdiction. Other projects need not (LibGen, SciHub, etc). If operating outside of the US (and other countries that are a party to the Berne Convention) is required due to publishers continuing to embrace overly restrictive copyright law, that is what will be done by those interested in this sort of work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis ("As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.") contrast with IA's OpenLibrary corpus (with Controlled Lending): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library ("In total, the Open Library offers over 1.4 million books for digital lending.")
- evgen 6y ago
  It is possible that this is one outcome that the EFF is hoping for by joining this particular bit of litigation, but I just do not see it working out that well. No one, outside of a small group of techies, knows about or cares about the EFF; having the EFF formally on the IA side is not going to move the needle much in terms of PR. On the other hand, having the EFF on the opposition may galvanize the publishers to not negotiate at all and go for a big win in court just for the sake of chalking up a win against the EFF (who is often supportive of causes and groups that are opposed to the publishers.) Make no mistake here, the IA _will_ lose this case and the publishers _will_ bankrupt the IA. There are few things that I can say are almost certainly a foregone conclusion, and the IA losing this case is one of them.
  - bosswipe 6y ago
    In a just world the destruction of the Wayback machine should be a much bigger crime than some copyright violation. Sadly our world is not just, content conglomerates have bought themselves the most draconian laws possible to protect their profits above all other benefits to humanity. They must be stopped!
    - gknoy 6y ago
      What prevents them from selling/giving the data of the wayback machine to another curator?
      - evgen 6y ago
        The wayback machine is an asset of the IA. The courts tend to take a dim view of obvious attempts to hide assets from judgements.
        Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        In this case, I don't think the "asset" has any monetary value though.
    - evgen 6y ago
- _jal 6y ago
  > the publishers could almost certainly bankrupt the IA They do that and they will find themselves with a Napster/sci-hub problem. If it weren't so destructive, the chronic inability of legacy industries to learn would be funny.
dehrmann 6y ago
Remind me not to donate to EFF. This money and time would be better spent on fighting EARN IT. The Internet Archive's best bet is to settle and apologize very publicly.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > The Internet Archive's best bet is to settle and apologize very publicly. One should never apologize for civil disobedience against unjust laws.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Most people view copyright overall as a just law even if the details are argued about.
    - bosswipe 6y ago
      You don't know that about "most people". Most people will deliberately pirate content given the chance.
    - antonzabirko 6y ago
      I personally would say it's the bad side of justice - there is no downside to giving away that which is unlimited. It's mostly greed, but greed has utilitarian roots also, because encouraging piracy will discourage innovation. It's a sad situation really: that the best solution we must adhere to is denying free resources to the masses. Not really human.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    Quit trolling/baiting this thread - this isn’t some big corporatist conspiracy - this is protecting creator livelihoods big and small. The vast majority of the civilized world agrees it is good to protect ‘art’ (from code to books) to keep it sustainable. Just because it can be infinitely duplicated and shared ‘freely’ does not mean it is sustainable to do so. If there is no money in art, less art will be made and most agree that this is not desirable.
gpm 6y ago
Even if you broke the law you don't just role over and give the other side whatever they want. They're inevitable going to ask for more compensation than they are entitled to (why wouldn't they), and you need to push back to make the penalty fair. That's just how our legal system is set up to work. The EFF is on the right side of the law the same way a lawyer for a criminal is. The lawyer (eff) is fulfilling a necessary function of the judicial system even when the party they are representing is in the wrong. The EFF has a keen interest in this case because the publishers will be doubt use this case to push for copyright maximalist interpretations of the law, and letting those interpretations become case law unchallenged is bad for society. Edit: At a glance the vid angel lawsuit you quote is about circumventing DRM, something that is not relevant to this case since the physical books they scan have no DRM.
- jjcon 6y ago
  > The EFF is on the right side of the law the same way a lawyer for a criminal is. By this definition, no lawyer can be on the wrong side - you know what is meant by the phrase ‘wrong side of the law’ stop it with the mental gymnastics.
  - gpm 6y ago
    No, the criminal in the above is absolutely on the wrong side of the law. That's the assumption after all. Lawyers are on the wrong side of the law when they break it themselves (see, e.g., Avenatti), but not when they represent people on the wrong side of the law. The latter is necessary for the common law court system to work at all.
    - aka1234 6y ago
      > "No, the criminal in the above is absolutely on the wrong side of the law. That's the assumption after all." In America at least, the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. So the assumption should be that the defendant is on the right side of the law. It's the prosecutor or complainant's job to prove the defendant is in fact on the wrong side of the law. To call a defendant 'the criminal' (and saying the defendant is in the wrong) is putting the cart before the horse.
agustif 6y ago
I won a civil law case against the MAFIAA being the owner of a site where links to download movies and tv shows as user-generated content. I won, but I was in Spain, not the US.
- webmaven 6y ago
  This sounds interesting. Can you provide more details?
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > I won a civil law case against the MAFIAA being the owner of a site where links to download movies and tv shows as user-generated content. Sure. But this is totally different. IA is the one doing both the copying and the distribution.
maxlybbert 6y ago
I don’t remember the outcome of the particular case mentioned in https://www.theregister.com/2005/12/06/eff_needs_to_die/ https://www.theregister.com/2005/12/06/eff_needs_to_die/ , but I know their track record isn’t as good as this article’s headline implies.
tzs 6y ago
I may be misunderstanding this case, but the impression I get is that they are not defending the unlimited lending that IA did as part of their "National Emergency Library" (NEL). They are just defending the earlier "Controlled Digital Lending" (CDL) program where the number of copies lent out at any one time was limited to the number of physical copies in the physical libraries [1]. The lawsuit is going after both NEL and CDL. The defense is trying to save CDL. I don't think VidAngel is necessarily relevant here because VidAngel was making derivative works. [1] If someone checked out a physical copy, did they reduce the number of digital copies that could be out until the physical copy was returned?
- gpm 6y ago
  > I don't think VidAngel is necessarily relevant here because VidAngel was making derivative works. And also because they were circumventing DRM, which is what the Wikipedia article would have you believe the case was about (I haven't looked closer than that).
- jjcon 6y ago
  > If someone checked out a physical copy, did they reduce the number of digital copies that could be out until the physical copy was returned? In the case of VidAngel yes - you would buy a copy from VidAngel, stream it, then return it for the same amount sans a dollar fee. Vidangel would often run out of copies of popular shows to stream and they would alert you when that was the case and not let you stream it.
- WaltPurvis 6y ago
  That's the way I understand it as well. It may be worthwhile defending CDL (I don't know enough to have an informed opinion), but the NEL is indefensible, and it doesn't appear the EFF intends to defend it.
elliekelly 6y ago
It isn’t always about winning. Most of the time it’s more about not losing too much money. EFF’s legal team will help IA mitigate the damage wherever possible so that IA will have a shot at continuing to exist.
kstenerud 6y ago
"EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here" Are they? We can armchair critique all we want, but I find it doubtful that an organization with so much litigation and advocacy experience under their belt would naively throw away a ton of money on a losing battle.
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > I find it doubtful that an organization with so much litigation and advocacy experience under their belt would naively throw away a ton of money on a losing battle. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why the EFF might step in. 1. The IA is valuable enough that even a small increase in its chances of survival is worth spending a lot of money on 2. They don't think they can win, but they think they can mitigate the IA's losses 3. They think they can win in the media 4. They want to steer the legal arguments of IA in such a way that "controlled digital lending" has the best chance of surviving the lawsuit
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Even with losing cases, there is value in having a competent legal team. With luck, the entire Internal Archive will not be at stake.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Indeed. IA's defense is mostly about controlled digital lending, while the National Emergency Library was definitely uncontrolled digital lending, and really has no good precedent to base upon. I think it's unfortunate that this case is likely to blowback on CDL as a concept, even though the issue was uncontrolled lending.
devit 6y ago
If the books were not being sold as digital copies, maybe they could invoke fair use due to the pandemic making other ways to access the books impossible. That said, the best avenue would seem to be a PR campaign with a call for a boycott and public shaming of the publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, John Wiley & Sons, and HarperCollins) that are putting their profit ahead of public access to the books. In fact, it seems pretty surprising that the publishers would risk such an hit to their reputation given that the Internet Archive probably doesn't have much money to give them as compensation anyway.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Publishers (for books, movies, and music) do not really have much shame when it comes to copyright enforcement. For one, they're natural monopolies, where a given content is solely owned by them, and you can't get it through any of their competitors. And especially in the case of books, very few people think about a book in terms of the publisher who published it, and very few people buy their books based on which publisher has the rights to it. So the value of public reputation for a book publisher is very low. They do not care about the compensation. They are aware that they will probably see effectively no dollar bills here. However, the publishers are interested in shutting down a distribution method they see as unlawful/theft, and most importantly, they want to publicly destroy any company who engages in it to deter future offenders.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    I agree completely on most items, except that copyright is not a natural monopoly. There isn't a high barrier of entry to printing a different book, nor is there a very limited supply of printing presses. Copyright is entirely a government-granted monopoly, intended to serve the public good by promoting good writing. In cases where it doesn't serve the public good, it is reasonable to reduce the strength of copyright.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      That's fair. It'd be more correct to call it a government-granted monopoly, indeed. My point was mostly that for any given book, the publisher has no competition, so the reputation of the publisher doesn't matter too much to someone who needs to buy that book.
mtgx 6y ago
> You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. As hard as big content producers try to make copyright synonym to "property", it's not and it never was. Why? Because ideas can't be copyrighted and all ideas are remixed. Nothing is 100% original. NOTHING. Not to mention copyright used to apply for only 14 years. But corporations, which have bought just about everything else in the government, have also bought copyright laws that now last life + 70 years. And they keep trying to extend it all the time. Relevant: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series
wolco 6y ago
Fair use is a term and redefining is a big hill to climb but a worthly one. All copyrights expire and all works have fair use clauses. It's just a matter of when and what country is issuing the copyright. You can give away free digital books. Project Gutenburg has been doing it for years. Even if the author's family doesn't like it. It's not stealing either. It's simply waiting for the copyright to expire. In this case they are using borrowing like a libruary as a defensive with covid hardship thrown in to justify removing a limit on the amount of books they can lend.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. I don't understand how people have such certainty about this. You have a situation where there are libraries who have bought millions of books from authors/publishers. The authors have been paid. Then, there is a pandemic and the libraries are closed, so the public has lost access to all the books they've paid for. Giving them back access to the books they've paid for is obviously wrong? They're definitely going to lose? It would be one thing if they had lent out more books than existed in all of the closed libraries, but is there any evidence that this is the case? That seems quite implausible, considering the massive number of books that have been paid for in all of those libraries.
- myself248 6y ago
  It would've been interesting if they'd tried to compile a list of all the books that existed at all the closed libraries, and then only lent up to the limits of that list (which would continue to expand as more data were added), but I don't think anyone would argue that was practical to do at the time. The whole country can be shuttered at a moment's notice, compiling data like that takes tremendous effort. However, in retrospect, I suspect the case might hinge on someone actually compiling that data. Did they, at any point, lend more copies of any particular title than existed at the time within all the shuttered libraries combined?
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    > compiling data like that takes tremendous effort. It is a lifetime ago, but when I still went to the library in my country, about 27 years ago for the last time, there was already a system which had all books of all libaries at every library, where you could look up which copy of what book was in which library, how many of those author’s books all libraries had together etc. This was 27 years (and longer) ago; you are saying that, in 2020, I cannot press one button and get this info in all, at least, western countries? That is pretty depressing if so. Edit; come to think of it, it must be longer ago as I tried to copy (the UI and functionality without networking of) that system for my own books at home on my MSX; I stopped using that system when I got an Amiga more than 30 years ago.
sp332 6y ago
The lawsuit is only asking for damages for 127 books, for a theoretical maximum of $19 million according to https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/6/23/21293875/internet-archive-website-lawsuit-open-library-wayback-machine-controversy-copyright https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/6/23/21293875/internet... And with books from the last 5 years excluded, and the opt-out, and the fact they were partnering with multiple other libraries and could probably include their copies, the damages the authors could show will probably be relatively small.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
If by common sense you mean ethically, then a lot of people would disagree. This is a worthy battle and future case law.

by jjcon 6y ago

gjsman-1000 6y ago

Agreed. However, I would expect the EFF to (possibly) be good negotiators. They might be able to make a settlement that keeps the IA's website open while satisfying the publishers - or at least making the lawsuit complicated enough that the publishers won't keep going. Without this representation, the publishers could almost certainly bankrupt the IA, even if they are given the minimum infringement fine of $200/ea.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
To note, bankrupting IA doesn't make digital copies of these books go away. It'll just accelerate Library Genesis [1] while burning down a cultural archive. The Internet Archive needs to be reasonable, as they operate within US jurisdiction. Other projects need not (LibGen, SciHub, etc). If operating outside of the US (and other countries that are a party to the Berne Convention) is required due to publishers continuing to embrace overly restrictive copyright law, that is what will be done by those interested in this sort of work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis ("As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.") contrast with IA's OpenLibrary corpus (with Controlled Lending): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library ("In total, the Open Library offers over 1.4 million books for digital lending.")
evgen 6y ago
It is possible that this is one outcome that the EFF is hoping for by joining this particular bit of litigation, but I just do not see it working out that well. No one, outside of a small group of techies, knows about or cares about the EFF; having the EFF formally on the IA side is not going to move the needle much in terms of PR. On the other hand, having the EFF on the opposition may galvanize the publishers to not negotiate at all and go for a big win in court just for the sake of chalking up a win against the EFF (who is often supportive of causes and groups that are opposed to the publishers.) Make no mistake here, the IA _will_ lose this case and the publishers _will_ bankrupt the IA. There are few things that I can say are almost certainly a foregone conclusion, and the IA losing this case is one of them.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  In a just world the destruction of the Wayback machine should be a much bigger crime than some copyright violation. Sadly our world is not just, content conglomerates have bought themselves the most draconian laws possible to protect their profits above all other benefits to humanity. They must be stopped!
  - gknoy 6y ago
    What prevents them from selling/giving the data of the wayback machine to another curator?
    - evgen 6y ago
      The wayback machine is an asset of the IA. The courts tend to take a dim view of obvious attempts to hide assets from judgements.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        In this case, I don't think the "asset" has any monetary value though.
  - evgen 6y ago
_jal 6y ago
> the publishers could almost certainly bankrupt the IA They do that and they will find themselves with a Napster/sci-hub problem. If it weren't so destructive, the chronic inability of legacy industries to learn would be funny.

dehrmann 6y ago

Remind me not to donate to EFF. This money and time would be better spent on fighting EARN IT. The Internet Archive's best bet is to settle and apologize very publicly.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
> The Internet Archive's best bet is to settle and apologize very publicly. One should never apologize for civil disobedience against unjust laws.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Most people view copyright overall as a just law even if the details are argued about.
  - bosswipe 6y ago
    You don't know that about "most people". Most people will deliberately pirate content given the chance.
  - antonzabirko 6y ago
    I personally would say it's the bad side of justice - there is no downside to giving away that which is unlimited. It's mostly greed, but greed has utilitarian roots also, because encouraging piracy will discourage innovation. It's a sad situation really: that the best solution we must adhere to is denying free resources to the masses. Not really human.
- jjcon 6y ago
  Quit trolling/baiting this thread - this isn’t some big corporatist conspiracy - this is protecting creator livelihoods big and small. The vast majority of the civilized world agrees it is good to protect ‘art’ (from code to books) to keep it sustainable. Just because it can be infinitely duplicated and shared ‘freely’ does not mean it is sustainable to do so. If there is no money in art, less art will be made and most agree that this is not desirable.

gpm 6y ago

Even if you broke the law you don't just role over and give the other side whatever they want. They're inevitable going to ask for more compensation than they are entitled to (why wouldn't they), and you need to push back to make the penalty fair. That's just how our legal system is set up to work. The EFF is on the right side of the law the same way a lawyer for a criminal is. The lawyer (eff) is fulfilling a necessary function of the judicial system even when the party they are representing is in the wrong. The EFF has a keen interest in this case because the publishers will be doubt use this case to push for copyright maximalist interpretations of the law, and letting those interpretations become case law unchallenged is bad for society. Edit: At a glance the vid angel lawsuit you quote is about circumventing DRM, something that is not relevant to this case since the physical books they scan have no DRM.

jjcon 6y ago
> The EFF is on the right side of the law the same way a lawyer for a criminal is. By this definition, no lawyer can be on the wrong side - you know what is meant by the phrase ‘wrong side of the law’ stop it with the mental gymnastics.
- gpm 6y ago
  No, the criminal in the above is absolutely on the wrong side of the law. That's the assumption after all. Lawyers are on the wrong side of the law when they break it themselves (see, e.g., Avenatti), but not when they represent people on the wrong side of the law. The latter is necessary for the common law court system to work at all.
  - aka1234 6y ago
    > "No, the criminal in the above is absolutely on the wrong side of the law. That's the assumption after all." In America at least, the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. So the assumption should be that the defendant is on the right side of the law. It's the prosecutor or complainant's job to prove the defendant is in fact on the wrong side of the law. To call a defendant 'the criminal' (and saying the defendant is in the wrong) is putting the cart before the horse.

agustif 6y ago

I won a civil law case against the MAFIAA being the owner of a site where links to download movies and tv shows as user-generated content. I won, but I was in Spain, not the US.

webmaven 6y ago
This sounds interesting. Can you provide more details?
nordsieck 6y ago
> I won a civil law case against the MAFIAA being the owner of a site where links to download movies and tv shows as user-generated content. Sure. But this is totally different. IA is the one doing both the copying and the distribution.

maxlybbert 6y ago

I don’t remember the outcome of the particular case mentioned in https://www.theregister.com/2005/12/06/eff_needs_to_die/ https://www.theregister.com/2005/12/06/eff_needs_to_die/ , but I know their track record isn’t as good as this article’s headline implies.

tzs 6y ago

I may be misunderstanding this case, but the impression I get is that they are not defending the unlimited lending that IA did as part of their "National Emergency Library" (NEL). They are just defending the earlier "Controlled Digital Lending" (CDL) program where the number of copies lent out at any one time was limited to the number of physical copies in the physical libraries [1]. The lawsuit is going after both NEL and CDL. The defense is trying to save CDL. I don't think VidAngel is necessarily relevant here because VidAngel was making derivative works. [1] If someone checked out a physical copy, did they reduce the number of digital copies that could be out until the physical copy was returned?

gpm 6y ago
> I don't think VidAngel is necessarily relevant here because VidAngel was making derivative works. And also because they were circumventing DRM, which is what the Wikipedia article would have you believe the case was about (I haven't looked closer than that).
jjcon 6y ago
> If someone checked out a physical copy, did they reduce the number of digital copies that could be out until the physical copy was returned? In the case of VidAngel yes - you would buy a copy from VidAngel, stream it, then return it for the same amount sans a dollar fee. Vidangel would often run out of copies of popular shows to stream and they would alert you when that was the case and not let you stream it.
WaltPurvis 6y ago
That's the way I understand it as well. It may be worthwhile defending CDL (I don't know enough to have an informed opinion), but the NEL is indefensible, and it doesn't appear the EFF intends to defend it.

elliekelly 6y ago

It isn’t always about winning. Most of the time it’s more about not losing too much money. EFF’s legal team will help IA mitigate the damage wherever possible so that IA will have a shot at continuing to exist.

kstenerud 6y ago

"EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here" Are they? We can armchair critique all we want, but I find it doubtful that an organization with so much litigation and advocacy experience under their belt would naively throw away a ton of money on a losing battle.

nordsieck 6y ago
> I find it doubtful that an organization with so much litigation and advocacy experience under their belt would naively throw away a ton of money on a losing battle. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why the EFF might step in. 1. The IA is valuable enough that even a small increase in its chances of survival is worth spending a lot of money on 2. They don't think they can win, but they think they can mitigate the IA's losses 3. They think they can win in the media 4. They want to steer the legal arguments of IA in such a way that "controlled digital lending" has the best chance of surviving the lawsuit
saagarjha 6y ago
Even with losing cases, there is value in having a competent legal team. With luck, the entire Internal Archive will not be at stake.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Indeed. IA's defense is mostly about controlled digital lending, while the National Emergency Library was definitely uncontrolled digital lending, and really has no good precedent to base upon. I think it's unfortunate that this case is likely to blowback on CDL as a concept, even though the issue was uncontrolled lending.

devit 6y ago

If the books were not being sold as digital copies, maybe they could invoke fair use due to the pandemic making other ways to access the books impossible. That said, the best avenue would seem to be a PR campaign with a call for a boycott and public shaming of the publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, John Wiley & Sons, and HarperCollins) that are putting their profit ahead of public access to the books. In fact, it seems pretty surprising that the publishers would risk such an hit to their reputation given that the Internet Archive probably doesn't have much money to give them as compensation anyway.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Publishers (for books, movies, and music) do not really have much shame when it comes to copyright enforcement. For one, they're natural monopolies, where a given content is solely owned by them, and you can't get it through any of their competitors. And especially in the case of books, very few people think about a book in terms of the publisher who published it, and very few people buy their books based on which publisher has the rights to it. So the value of public reputation for a book publisher is very low. They do not care about the compensation. They are aware that they will probably see effectively no dollar bills here. However, the publishers are interested in shutting down a distribution method they see as unlawful/theft, and most importantly, they want to publicly destroy any company who engages in it to deter future offenders.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  I agree completely on most items, except that copyright is not a natural monopoly. There isn't a high barrier of entry to printing a different book, nor is there a very limited supply of printing presses. Copyright is entirely a government-granted monopoly, intended to serve the public good by promoting good writing. In cases where it doesn't serve the public good, it is reasonable to reduce the strength of copyright.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    That's fair. It'd be more correct to call it a government-granted monopoly, indeed. My point was mostly that for any given book, the publisher has no competition, so the reputation of the publisher doesn't matter too much to someone who needs to buy that book.

mtgx 6y ago

> You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. As hard as big content producers try to make copyright synonym to "property", it's not and it never was. Why? Because ideas can't be copyrighted and all ideas are remixed. Nothing is 100% original. NOTHING. Not to mention copyright used to apply for only 14 years. But corporations, which have bought just about everything else in the government, have also bought copyright laws that now last life + 70 years. And they keep trying to extend it all the time. Relevant: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series

wolco 6y ago

Fair use is a term and redefining is a big hill to climb but a worthly one. All copyrights expire and all works have fair use clauses. It's just a matter of when and what country is issuing the copyright. You can give away free digital books. Project Gutenburg has been doing it for years. Even if the author's family doesn't like it. It's not stealing either. It's simply waiting for the copyright to expire. In this case they are using borrowing like a libruary as a defensive with covid hardship thrown in to justify removing a limit on the amount of books they can lend.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. I don't understand how people have such certainty about this. You have a situation where there are libraries who have bought millions of books from authors/publishers. The authors have been paid. Then, there is a pandemic and the libraries are closed, so the public has lost access to all the books they've paid for. Giving them back access to the books they've paid for is obviously wrong? They're definitely going to lose? It would be one thing if they had lent out more books than existed in all of the closed libraries, but is there any evidence that this is the case? That seems quite implausible, considering the massive number of books that have been paid for in all of those libraries.

myself248 6y ago
It would've been interesting if they'd tried to compile a list of all the books that existed at all the closed libraries, and then only lent up to the limits of that list (which would continue to expand as more data were added), but I don't think anyone would argue that was practical to do at the time. The whole country can be shuttered at a moment's notice, compiling data like that takes tremendous effort. However, in retrospect, I suspect the case might hinge on someone actually compiling that data. Did they, at any point, lend more copies of any particular title than existed at the time within all the shuttered libraries combined?
- tluyben2 6y ago
  > compiling data like that takes tremendous effort. It is a lifetime ago, but when I still went to the library in my country, about 27 years ago for the last time, there was already a system which had all books of all libaries at every library, where you could look up which copy of what book was in which library, how many of those author’s books all libraries had together etc. This was 27 years (and longer) ago; you are saying that, in 2020, I cannot press one button and get this info in all, at least, western countries? That is pretty depressing if so. Edit; come to think of it, it must be longer ago as I tried to copy (the UI and functionality without networking of) that system for my own books at home on my MSX; I stopped using that system when I got an Amiga more than 30 years ago.

sp332 6y ago

The lawsuit is only asking for damages for 127 books, for a theoretical maximum of $19 million according to https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/6/23/21293875/internet-archive-website-lawsuit-open-library-wayback-machine-controversy-copyright https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/6/23/21293875/internet... And with books from the last 5 years excluded, and the opt-out, and the fact they were partnering with multiple other libraries and could probably include their copies, the damages the authors could show will probably be relatively small.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

If by common sense you mean ethically, then a lot of people would disagree. This is a worthy battle and future case law.