4 ms·
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
by 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 agoPublishers (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 agoI 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 agoThat'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.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoExactly. Anti-copyright people love to claim the book author has a "monopoly." But it's only on their own book. Nothing stops someone else from writing a competing book. It's kind of like saying a car owner buys a "monopoly" by purchasing a car. Yeah, only the owner can drive a particular car, but that's not what the word means. Yet people persist with this phony gambit.
- MereInterest 6y agotilts head You start off by saying "exactly", but then go assuming that I said the opposite of what I said. To state it clearly, copyright is a monopoly. Patents are a monopoly. That these are government-granted monopolies enforced by law, rather than a natural monopoly caused by scarce resources, does not make them any less of a monopoly. The car analogy does not apply, primarily because cars are fungible. Books are not fungible, unless they are printings of the same book. Cultural ideas are not fungible.
- devit 6y agoThat seems quite a risky strategy as well, because it could backfire: if the court declares even just that controlled digital lending is legal, more companies and bigger companies may start offering it (e.g. Google that already has the scanned books), making things worse for the publishers.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI don't think Google is actually warehousing the physical books. They worked with a lot of libraries to scan their collections, but arguably couldn't legally offer CDL.
- devit 6y agoI think they have the capital to buy enough copies of all books in existence to allow effectively unlimited lending of not recently released books.