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So...they didn't think the law should apply so they just decided to ignore it? What were they expecting? How can they possibly expect to win this lawsuit? I ha

• bencollier49 4y ago
  To be honest I love their computer games archive, but it boggles my mind that it's allowed to exist.
  • hungryforcodes 4y ago
    Which is where the thinking that lead to this lawsuit begins. Almost all those games are abandonware and or over 20 years old. Normal copyright should not apply there.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bencollier49 4y ago
      Well the law is written that way, and I don't think it's completely unreasonable (at least to the life of the originator). Just seems like the IA have been bold as brass here. Also, the term "abandonware" is hugely overused. There are tonnes of shareware premium versions on there where it's super easy to contact the creators. I've never failed to do so.
• metadat 4y ago
  The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders. At the end of the day, The Internet Archive has good intentions and is morally in the right. The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more. It's about selecting for the common good over the extremely low-value proposition of helping rent-seekers preserve an infinite zero-effort stream of income. TIA is one of the best things to emerge from tech, all thanks to the tireless and complete dedication of the founder: Brewster Kahle. I don't know if they still do it, but pre-pandemic they offered tours of their HQ in San Francisco. It was really cool to meet the team and see their setup, and an amazing opportunity to meet Brewster and hear the conviction in his voice as he described his vision for The Internet Archive. It's a very special thing.. imagine if it didn't exist? I am feeling tears coming just considering such a possible reality.
  • thomascgalvin 4y ago
    You're not wrong, but being morally right has nothing to do with winning a lawsuit.
    • samtho 4y ago
      Laws are only as meaningful as we allow them to be. If our elected representatives no longer represent the will of the people, they must be removed to preserve the integrity of our society. Often they are not, which is unfortunate. Just look at the body of unelected officials that, as a whole, are hell-bent at dismantling precedents in the name of constitutionalism, allowing for states to pass inane laws restricting rights under the guise of morals. There is cancer in our society and it begins with our swill laws that are selectively enforced, are never revisited, and likely do not reflect the will of the people, and ends with legislative incumbents that do not represent modern progressive values.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        I have a suspicion (shower-thought level, not held strongly) that "morality" is merely the set of rules that are beneficial for a culture. Laws are normally described like that; I would say the difference is that lawmakers are a subculture who make laws to encode what is beneficial for them, and therefore a nation's morality and laws only line up to the extent that the lawmakers represent the interests of the broader society.
  • BitwiseFool 4y ago
    If libraries hadn't already been in existence since antiquity, copyright holders would never have allowed them to exist.
    • SkyBelow 4y ago
      Libraries are government approved piracy. This can be taken as being positive about piracy or negative about libraries. I think the real question is not which way I mean it but why does the average user see one as positive and the other as a negative, thus causing the conflict when the two are linked by this statement.
• xwdv 4y ago
  Ask for forgiveness not permission if you want to innovate.
  • hvs 4y ago
    Or be sued into oblivion.
  • twblalock 4y ago
    > Ask for forgiveness not permission if you want to innovate. That only works if you are capable of handling the legal trouble that results.
    • hash07e 4y ago
      Like Uber.. Right?
      • twblalock 4y ago
        Uber still exists and that is proof that their plan worked. They didn't just break laws (and a lot of what they broke were just regulations, not "real" laws, and those regulations were often corrupt anyway): they also lobbied to get the laws/regulations changed, including through the California ballot proposition process and by directly approaching politicians in the EU, and they have won numerous lawsuits. The Internet Archive appears to have simply decided they could break copyright law, which is a very well supported area of law unlike taxi regulations, and they made no efforts to protect themselves. Pretty stupid. I certainly would not donate to an organization that might waste my donations on stupid things like this.
        • hash07e 4y ago
          Like Copyright ""laws"" that always get extended when Mickey Mouse is going to be public domains right? Feels more like an regulation that an law. Strange that you hold copyright laws so above all.
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
• misnome 4y ago
  It seems an especially dumb move because being sued was absolutely inevitable from the first announcement of this. Presumably, even if they are hoping to change law with the case - it’s putting up the rest of IA’s (almost irreplaceably invaluable) mission as a gamble on whatever chances they think they have here.
  • COGlory 4y ago
    I hadn't considered this angle, and would love to be wrong, but haven't digital books been exempt from first sale doctrine for quite some time now? I thought this case law was well established.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      I can't quote you law but my understanding is that first sale doctrine applies to physical things. So virtually lending a corresponding digital copy to a physical book seems a creative application of first sale doctrine--which may or may not be strictly legal but apparently the publishers weren't interested in pushing that.
• nemacol 4y ago
  I have it in my head that playing fast and loose with the law is just how things are done. I think the problem here is Internet Archive is not making heaps of money for shareholders and (arguably) causing these publishes to lose money. An example is Uber 'invents' smartphone taxi's and says the laws of employment and taxi's don't apply to them. They make a ton of money and here we are. Maybe I am being overly cynical.
  • vegetablepotpie 4y ago
    I think you’re right. No one, who is anyone, got to where they’re at because they followed the rules. At a certain point anyone who is successful took a risk in their past and it paid off. When you take a risk for profit, you can hire the lawyers you need to cover for the sins you committed. Most of the time it’s cheaper for parties to settle out of court and this puts you at the negotiating table and integrates your success into the existing power structures. You live long enough to become the villain. When you take a risk and innovate for the greater good, you don’t have the profit, you can’t hire the expensive attorneys to cover you, and you get eaten alive by the parties you offended. You die the hero, which is why very few do this.
• coldpie 4y ago
  Put yourself in their shoes at the beginning of the pandemic. Libraries close, schools close, students have to stay home from classes, physical production and shipping slows down or stops, people are losing their livelihoods, and no one knows how this is going to shake out. Meanwhile you're sitting on a massive wealth of human knowledge, and you're also a bit of an idealist and you recognize the vast harm our 1970s-era infinite-copyright policy has had over the past 50 years on our collective education and culture. Maybe there will be consequences down the road, but today, right now, you can help make peoples' days and futures a little less shitty. I dunno, man. It's hard for me to imagine being in that position and not pressing the button. I imagine the archive (and their lawyers) went into the decision with eyes fully open. I doubt they had zero contingency plans for the worst case.
• CamperBob2 4y ago
  So...they didn't think the law should apply so they just decided to ignore it? (Shrug) That's why we're not stuck with a 55 MPH national highway speed limit, here in the US. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
• eikenberry 4y ago
  I'm sure they expected it and have a plan. Copyright as a lot of flexibility in the wording around it's laws and this could be deemed fair use. Previously the flexibility has been used by the copyright industry to increase their rent seeking but it doesn't have to always go that way.
• fipar 4y ago
  I agree with your “You can’t just decide to take the law into your own hand” when doing so hurts or damages someone else. So I would agree with you not being able to hold someone detained in an unofficial jail just because they stole from you, or not being able to physically hurt someone that hurt you unless it’s self defense (so you do that to stop them from hurting you as they’re doing that). However, in cases like this, where you feel that the law is somehow unfair and needs to change, and you breaking it doesn’t actually hurt anyone, it feels like civil disobedience to me. So sure, there are consequences and you need to be ready to face them, but one possible outcome is your case helping change the law after all. A lot of progress has been made in democracies with that method. Just think that if people would never take the law in their hands some countries would still have legal slaves, or legal segregation.
• ProAm 4y ago
  > You can't just decide to take the law into your own hand. See Uber, Lyft, AirBNB..... Just get big enough and buy enough politicians that it's not going to be a problem.
  • inlined 4y ago
    But the copyright holders own the politicians here, not the non profit.
• mherdeg 4y ago
  > So...they didn't think the law should apply so they just decided to ignore it? > What were they expecting? This concisely describes how I felt about Sci-Hub the first few times I read about the project. There are some differences, e.g. the Internet Archive chooses to operate within US jurisdiction.
• molticrystal 4y ago
  They didn't ignore it, they are very familiar with the terms. What they can do depends on if the government ends up classifying them as a warez site or a library/archive. And, if they are a library/archive, if their actions can be considered part of the copyright exceptions. The publishers lawyers will argue they are just a warez site, and use everything in their power to do such, jurisdiction, case law, confusing terms and obfuscation, etc.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    >if they are a library/archive, if their actions can be considered part of the copyright exceptions. Libraries/archives actually have fairly limited exceptions. And the category isn't even especially clearly defined. It's definitely not an anything goes get out of jail free card.
• dxuh 4y ago
  I thought about this in the past and I think a reasonable expectation is for this to go to court some day and drive it all the way up to the respective supreme court and make a significant change in copyright law. It's practically the only way to execute on their given, important mission. Whether it's reasonable is a different matter, but now they have a real chance to make a even bigger impact than they already have.
• gojomo 4y ago
  Lots of laws were ignored or creatively re-interpreted, by plenty of people & entities, during the unprecedented pandemic health emergency of early 2020. Many emergency actions taken by elected leaders have been later found illegal by courts. But if there was no malice or net harm from such technical violations – or indeed if the breaches effectively prevented greater harms – society and the courts will often find such "law-breaking" to be forgivable or even praise-worthy. For example, you are allowed to break trespassing laws to save a life, and in other situations of private or public necessity. With regard to reading & education in early 2020, publicly-funded schools & libraries that were supposed to be operating were closed with little warning, for a potentially indefinite amount of time. Millions of purchased books that were supposed to be circulating sat idle in locked buildings. A crucial cultural & civilizational function was stopped dead in its tracks. Against that, the Internet Archive rapidly deployed a novel technological workaround to re-enable some (but not all) of the pandemic-impaired booklending/reading activity. It did so in a way that had no more effect on the publishers' economic prospects than normal-times library operations, and was arguably within the 'fair use' & format-shifting rights well-established for book owners & libraries in the United States. So I think IA expects to "win" the lawsuit because they did a good deed for the world's readers, as a temporary & reasonable adaptation to an extraordinary emergency situation, that caused negligible harms to the publisher plaintiffs.
• Sakos 4y ago
  This is like arguing that Rosa Parks shouldn't have sat where she did. It's because of people like her that the laws could be overturned. I'm concerned that you're more willing to follow the law to the letter even if it's clearly immoral and catastrophic for our culture long-term.
• ASalazarMX 4y ago
  > So...they didn't think the law should apply so they just decided to ignore it? Of course not! The IA lacks enough money or donations to crooked politicians to get away with that. Strict adherence to the laws is for common folks, so they should have complied.
• Kye 4y ago
  Law is what's written by lawyers who realized getting elected paid off law school faster and by what's decided in courts. Courts are there to decide who and what law should apply to. You don't get a robust fair use test[1] or libraries[2] without someone testing the law in court. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_procedure_and_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_procedu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus