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Within that context, the Archive has made careful efforts to ensure its uses are lawful. Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin

Within that context, the Archive has made careful efforts to ensure its uses are lawful. Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin the future of CDL by declaring a free-for-all during the pandemic. I still want to know who it was that made a decision so mind-bendingly idiotic it put the very existence of the Internet Archive itself at risk. Of course our current copyright laws are stupid! That doesn't mean you as an organization with twenty million dollars in yearly revenue get to just ignore them and trust that having the moral high ground will protect you from the lawyers of an entire industry.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin the future of CDL by declaring a free-for-all during the pandemic. You beat me to this comment. No wonder they are now being sued. That decision may send them the way of Google Books. I hope it doesn't. Maybe in twenty or forty years we will see an accepted library like Spotify's arrival 15 years after Napster. Archive didn't even have the moral high ground. Authors and publishers deserve to be remunerated for their effort and controlled lending supports that. When that's off the table you're just like libgen.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jjcon 5y ago
Agreed, I often agree with EFF and I love what IA does typically but this was a terrible terrible decision. IMO even in a world with improved copyright laws the extent of what they did shouldnt even be allowed.
jawns 5y ago
I'm an author who supports CDL, and I couldn't agree more. What surprised me the most was how many people strongly defended the IA's actions. In their heads, the IA could do no wrong. Or they failed to grasp the illogic of "public libraries are closed, so we're going to pretend we own their books and lend them out." Even here on HN, there were some people who refused to acknowledge that what the IA did was both unfair to copyright holders and a poor strategy for trying to uphold CDL over the long term.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > there were some people who refused to acknowledge that what the IA did was both unfair to copyright holder There are people here who refuse to acknowledge that what copyright holders do is unfair to everyone.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Copyright is fine. Software patents are not. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's trivially copied. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly absurd notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires that we give up our computing freedom.
      - drran 5y ago
        Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's hard to produce. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly helpful notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > data that's hard to produce Yes. All human intellectual work comes down to discovering a really big number. This labor has immense value. The data itself can be trivially copied and distributed worldwide at essentially zero cost. Society needs to find new ways to value this human intellectual labor. New ways that don't depend on forcing artificial scarcity on the result. > Not only is it an utterly helpful notion Helpful to whom? To the monopolists, sure. Meanwhile everybody else has been robbed of their fair use and public domain rights. > enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom Absolutely not. The number one reason why computers are no longer under our control is copyright. It is impossible to stop copyright infringement if we can create and run whatever software we want. They must have mechanisms that stop us from running unapproved software in order to have any hope of enforcing anything. Otherwise it's trivial for computers to share data with each other, it's as natural as a river flowing.
sundarurfriend 5y ago
CDL = ~~California Digital Library, for anyone else who's wondering~~ apparently not, see below.
- zorpner 5y ago
  It's actually Controlled Digital Lending: https://controlleddigitallending.org https://controlleddigitallending.org
  - sundarurfriend 5y ago
    Thanks. I searched 'CDL Internet archive', saw the first link was https://archive.org/details/cdl https://archive.org/details/cdl titled the California Digital Library, and assumed that was it.

unityByFreedom 5y ago

> Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin the future of CDL by declaring a free-for-all during the pandemic. You beat me to this comment. No wonder they are now being sued. That decision may send them the way of Google Books. I hope it doesn't. Maybe in twenty or forty years we will see an accepted library like Spotify's arrival 15 years after Napster. Archive didn't even have the moral high ground. Authors and publishers deserve to be remunerated for their effort and controlled lending supports that. When that's off the table you're just like libgen.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jjcon 5y ago

Agreed, I often agree with EFF and I love what IA does typically but this was a terrible terrible decision. IMO even in a world with improved copyright laws the extent of what they did shouldnt even be allowed.

jawns 5y ago

I'm an author who supports CDL, and I couldn't agree more. What surprised me the most was how many people strongly defended the IA's actions. In their heads, the IA could do no wrong. Or they failed to grasp the illogic of "public libraries are closed, so we're going to pretend we own their books and lend them out." Even here on HN, there were some people who refused to acknowledge that what the IA did was both unfair to copyright holders and a poor strategy for trying to uphold CDL over the long term.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> there were some people who refused to acknowledge that what the IA did was both unfair to copyright holder There are people here who refuse to acknowledge that what copyright holders do is unfair to everyone.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Copyright is fine. Software patents are not. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's trivially copied. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly absurd notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires that we give up our computing freedom.
    - drran 5y ago
      Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's hard to produce. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly helpful notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > data that's hard to produce Yes. All human intellectual work comes down to discovering a really big number. This labor has immense value. The data itself can be trivially copied and distributed worldwide at essentially zero cost. Society needs to find new ways to value this human intellectual labor. New ways that don't depend on forcing artificial scarcity on the result. > Not only is it an utterly helpful notion Helpful to whom? To the monopolists, sure. Meanwhile everybody else has been robbed of their fair use and public domain rights. > enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom Absolutely not. The number one reason why computers are no longer under our control is copyright. It is impossible to stop copyright infringement if we can create and run whatever software we want. They must have mechanisms that stop us from running unapproved software in order to have any hope of enforcing anything. Otherwise it's trivial for computers to share data with each other, it's as natural as a river flowing.

sundarurfriend 5y ago

CDL = ~~California Digital Library, for anyone else who's wondering~~ apparently not, see below.

zorpner 5y ago
It's actually Controlled Digital Lending: https://controlleddigitallending.org https://controlleddigitallending.org
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  Thanks. I searched 'CDL Internet archive', saw the first link was https://archive.org/details/cdl https://archive.org/details/cdl titled the California Digital Library, and assumed that was it.