63 ms·

Judge decides against Internet Archive

1116 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

14 4y ago
Meanwhile I can go to any torrent site and download a couple hundred thousand books with ease.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  You can always get something, but most people don't have the knowledge of how to go about it without asking someone for guidance first.
  - SL61 4y ago
    I would agree with this if the issue were movies or games, but most people know that you can Google "[book title] pdf" and get a free copy. The small file sizes mean that piracy sites don't need to rely on torrents and can just offer a direct download. I frequently see piracy sites in search results just from searching the title of a book. The barrier to pirating a book is extremely low.
- totetsu 4y ago
  Last time I looked at the most seeded ebook torrents I found a bunch or alt right stuff…
antibasilisk 4y ago
wow that's wild opens libgen, piratebay and scihub
- whatshisface 4y ago
  "I don't care how bad the laws are because I'll break them," is how people think in collapsing societies.
Thorentis 4y ago
I think most people here saw this coming. Unfortunately this isn't a question of whether the law is good, it's a question of whether IA broke the current laws we have. IA can and should lobby for copyright law to change. But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  You have it backwards, breaking it widely and repeatedly will do more good than harm.
- alexfromapex 4y ago
  The system shouldn't require lobbying to get results that benefit the greater good
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > system shouldn't require lobbying to get results that benefit the greater good It does when there is disagreement over what constitutes the greater good.
    - bcrosby95 4y ago
      This made me chuckle pretty hard. When lobbying enters the picture there's only a small, selective group of people that are going to constitute the greater good.
      - majormajor 4y ago
        I think you're referring to financial aspects of today's lobbying alone, but I think it's impossible to suggest you could have any sort of consideration of the greater good without taking into account different people's view on what that is, which means them trying to persuade you of it, which is the exact definition of lobbying.
        4y ago
LordDragonfang 4y ago
Here was the EFF's statement on the case when they initially agreed to represent the Internet Archive: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid, when more people were trying to use their services due to being stuck inside. Also of note is that the is only the district court. We'll have to see if the EFF appeals to the circuit next.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  This lawsuit covers the limited lending they did before COVID, but that either flew under the publishers' radar or perhaps they knew but didn't care enough to respond until IA started doing the more blatant "unrestricted lending"
- orra 4y ago
  > IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid That's the excuse the publishers are pushing, but ultimately they disagree with, and have successfully argued in court it seems, against the entire principle. Ultimately, controlled digital lending should be as lawful as format shifting an album: this is format shifting from a physical book to an ebook. > Also of note is that the is only the district court Phew?
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    But in this case, it wasn't controlled, right? Even with DRM to "expire" the lent ebook after a certain amount of time, they still ended up distributing the books without restriction on availability. I don't really care about the publishers, but I still wouldn't expect to seriously get away with arguing that I wasn't distributing copyrighted material if I started offering movies online for free in unlimited numbers... because it was just controlled lending since the movie files were set up to probably become unreadable in 3 weeks. I'm sure they have competent lawyers that would've predicted an outcome like this, which makes the decision to do it even more baffling. Especially for an organization that ought to be conservative by design, considering they want to be a very long-term archive.
sva_ 4y ago
This sucks, big time.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  It does suck, but it was self-inflicted. I love the IA, I've even done volunteer work for the Physical Archive, but the "emergency library" was mad. I can't imagine how they justified it.
  - sourcecodeplz 4y ago
    Locked inside with "nothing" to do, one guy probably got high and had this "revelation" that would "help" everyone else locked inside /s. It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels when in reality they were doing just fine flying (somewhat) under the radar. I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Because of donations, the scrutiny is 1000x more for non-profits vs regular companies.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      >It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels Considering their software archive is one of the easiest source of warez today, I'd say they have a thing for painting targets on themselves.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      > I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Why? It’s not like this really makes a difference to the other 100 different things they’re doing.
      - misnome 4y ago
        Because IA is causing a risk that the donations aren’t paying for that, but could end up right in the publishers pockets, and shutting down those 100 other projects.
kybernetikos 4y ago
Didn't google do almost exactly this with google books - making agreements with libraries and digitising their collections without paying the publishers or the authors? Maybe I misunderstood.
- sva_ 4y ago
  They didnt offer the full books afaik.
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    Ahh, you're right. They copied the full books, but they don't let the public view more than snippets unless they have rights to do so. That must be the 'transformative use'.
    - simonh 4y ago
      I think you are allowed to duplicate short extracts of works as part of fair use.
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
        It's a four factor test (but the second factor rarely counts). the purpose and character of your use the nature of the copyrighted work the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market. The court found that Google copied the entirety of the work into their search index, but that this (taking into account the strict result snippet restrictions) didn't effect the market because no one would decide they didn't need the book now they had the snippet.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > They didnt offer the full books afaik. They got sued, and the settlement didn’t allow them to offer the full books except for-purchase with a particular revenue sharing arrangement.
bawolff 4y ago
Wow, reading the article this seems like a clear cut case. Did IA really think they could win this? Edit: reading other sources, it seems like the crux of the idea is they would only lend out books where they had the same number of physical copies. I can see the reasoning for that, but it seems hard for fair use to get you there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jsheard 4y ago
  The original idea was to only lend out digital copies that are backed by a physical copy, so if challenged the Internet Archive could reasonably argue that they're protected under the same laws that physical libraries are, but when the pandemic kicked off IA launched an "emergency library" which waived the lending limits so any number of copies could be lent out regardless of how many physical copies they have. My assumption is that publishers probably weren't happy about the original model but it was legally murky enough that they didn't pursue it for risk of losing and setting the wrong (from their perspective) precedent, but the emergency library made for an extremely easy case against IA.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    The case dealt with the former. This article is the judge's ruling, the National Emergency Library is not mentioned.
    - teraflop 4y ago
      The full ruling does mention it, albeit briefly: > IA also argues that it made fair use of the Publishers’ copyrights during the National Emergency Library. The analysis above applies even more forcefully to the NEL, during which IA amplified its unauthorized lending of ebook versions of the Works in Suit by lifting the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. IA’s defense of fair use with respect to the NEL therefore also fails.
RedCondor 4y ago
America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time, unless forced to do otherwise by external circumstances. Famously it only went against segregation because "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." (Attorney General James P. McGranery) https://redsails.org/concessions/ https://redsails.org/concessions/ Fortunately this means more of an impetus for piracy in the meantime, and alternative systems in the near future.
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  > America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time Thankfully that's the best outcome. Unless you mean you support eminent domain. I'd pay hell to the country that even plans on using it against me, and I'll follow and protect others who this happens to as well. Anyone who decides they can steal my resources will have to fight for it. You do not own me.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    I might not own you, but apparently you don't own your own books as much as you might have thought. ;-)
    - latency-guy2 4y ago
      I don't own a single digital book, nor am I deluded to think that the internet was going to solve the issue of ownership in the first place. You are free to demand that publishers provide you unlimited access to their servers so you can download your books perpetually. Publishers need not give in to alternative access methods to their material. If you want to own books, have it actually in your possession, which is not the internet.
      - whatshisface 4y ago
        This article is about a court ruling restricting what the IA could do with books they physically owned.
unopened 4y ago
Aaron Swartz founding the Open Library with IA was a shining moment in web history. Sad to see giant corporations stomping on his vision of a web that offers free access to information for all.
- throwaway742 4y ago
  I miss him. He really did his best to live up the the hacker ethos. Information wants to be free.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
Yet another example that piracy is not just a superior product or about not paying for content, but is an absolute core need.
- cultureswitch 4y ago
  In the face of senseless copyright law, avoiding to fund the organizations responsible is a moral imperative, and piracy is typically the way to do that.
  - Zuiii 4y ago
    > avoiding to fund the organizations responsible is a moral imperative I never thought about it that way. I avoided getty and other stock media publishers out of principle. In their deranged quest to subjugate google, they made image search worse for me. I think it's about time I started applying this logic to other publishers as well. Copyright is completely out of control. There has to be accountability, even if it's insignificant and only on a personal level. For any authors reading this: I intend to continue paying for books and will gladly do so but only if it's to you directly. Either self-publish or put a donation link on your site. If I'm interested in your book, I will search for your personal website prior to taking any action. It's sad that it has to come down to this.
- BigCryo 4y ago
  Absolutely.. the system deserves no respect, then give it none
userbinator 4y ago
Is the Internet Archive itself going to need archived next? Or is most or all of what it has already available in the pirate libraries?
- yamrzou 4y ago
  My experience has been that many of the Internet Archive books (especially rare/old ones) are not available in pirate libraries. So this is sad news.
  - LegionMammal978 4y ago
    Personally, I've had good luck with HathiTrust Digital Library [0] for old books in the public domain. A majority of the books that I've cared to check are mirrored on both IA and HathiTrust. It has an arbitrary restriction that you can't download full PDFs, but at least the contents are all available. [0] https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
winddude 4y ago
Fuck.
eevilspock 4y ago
They need to move offshore. Iceland?
crazygringo 4y ago
Yikes. I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds. Any idea if this means IA has to shut down lending by when? Tomorrow? Next month? Any chances for appeal here? Or any chance they relocate the books division to another country or something? It's just so sad if something so valuable is forced to go "poof". A real loss.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  From the article the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books. No idea what kind of effect that will have on the rest of it though.
  - bdowling 4y ago
    > the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA. The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51. [0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
    - wahern 4y ago
      There's a good chance IA will be exempted from statutory damages. See 17 USC § 504(c)(2), > The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords The opinion (p46) defers this matter, > At this point, IA’s statutory remittance argument is premature. IA may renew the argument in connection with the formation of an appropriate judgment. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.188.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
allturtles 4y ago
A lot of people in these comments still seem confused about what has happened here. This ruling is not about the emergency library at all. It's a ruling that controlled digital lending (one physical copy backing each digital copy lent out) is illegal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- warent 4y ago
  That seems horrendous. Don't many community/government libraries do this? Seems like a huge blow to freedom of information and sharing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmix 4y ago
    Is this just ebook lending? Is that popular among local libraries? I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries. I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.
    - jhbadger 4y ago
      It's very popular among local libraries (at least in the US and UK) -- Libby/Overdrive being the main player, followed by Hoopla.
      - Mindwipe 4y ago
        It is worth noting that Libraries in the UK have to pay authors/publishers to loan out books on a royalty basis with the Public Lending Right payment of course. Even physical books.
aaron695 4y ago
What kicked this off was they lent more copies than they owned. Changing format was illegal of course under current law but publishers looked the other way. By allowimg multiple this was the only outcome. Without risk taking we wouldn't have any IA so this is all part of what they are. It's hard to know when to hold em.
FpUser 4y ago
I hope IA does not cease to exist as the result. It's value far exceeds the negatives.
chris_wot 4y ago
So basically now everyone just outright pirates the books. Great outcome for the publishers.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  Time to download my next car
duxup 4y ago
I'm bummed IA chose to pick this fight by declaring this magical COVID emergency and lending more digital copies than they owned. The outcome seemed inevitable and IMO IA has been dishonest about what the lawsuit with its own statements. It makes me wonder if there are any adults at the helm at IA and I worry about its future. IA is an amazing resource... I don't understand why they chose this hill to fight on.
- calgarymicro 4y ago
  I don't think that controlled digital lending in its entirety being ruled illegal was at all inevitable. Sure, take them to task for the 'emergency library', but the scope of this ruling seems unjust.
  - wmf 4y ago
    It's about probabilities. If they had even a 10% chance of bankrupting themselves they probably shouldn't have done it. Even if they eventually win, every dollar spent on lawyers wasn't spent on archiving.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    The ruling gave 4 obvious rebuttals to their claims.
- snapetom 4y ago
  NEL opened in March 2020. The first doc on this case was filed June 1, 2020. NEL closed down almost immediately on June 16, 2020. IA was definitely and stupidly playing with fire here. As others have said, publishers weren't happy with IA's one hardcopy, one digital loan rule, but lived with it because of the potential bad press. However, I'm willing to bet the NEL pushed them over the edge to go to war. Incredibly reckless and now we've taken a step backwards against IP abuse, IMO.
- gaganyaan 4y ago
  What's magical is the thinking involved in copyright, particularly as it involves the digital space. I 100% guarantee that if a dead tree library xeroxed their books during a national emergency, nobody would be making comments like this. Somehow, because computers are involved, magical thinking gets a pass.
nomilk 4y ago
If this results in the collapse of the Internet Archive as a whole, it will be the digital equivalent of the Notre-Dame fire; a treasure being destroyed before our very eyes.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Maybe more like the Library of Alexandria? That said, I get your point.
- misnome 4y ago
  I don’t think the owners of the Notre-Dame set the fire themselves.
ZunarJ5 4y ago
https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror Thoughts?
gigel82 4y ago
And rain is wet... I wonder why IA thought doing something obviously illegal would have any other outcome.
abetusk 4y ago
Digital copies of books are available to anyone willing to look for them, free of charge and easily downloadable. I suspect all this ruling has done, if I've understood it correctly, is make it more difficult for people wanting to download or view copies legitimately. I love the IA. I use it weekly if not daily. My bet is that they'll push back on this and other rulings and will ultimately lobby for saner laws.
kristopolous 4y ago
And the results are Capitalism 1 Expansion and the preservation of human knowledge 0
Sparkyte 4y ago
Judge has a bad history on the internet.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Well, that can be understood in several ways.
tkgally 4y ago
The Internet Archive’s initial response is here: http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/ http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/ Excerpt: “[W]e will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers. We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”
chrsjxn 4y ago
It is genuinely hard to imagine this could have gone any other way. Copying an entire work, with no changes, and then distributing the copy is pretty archetypal copyright infringement. IA's lawyers had to have known this was a long shot, right?
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  I think IA lives inside the HN/techie bubble, where you can get a lot of positive support for things that don't translate into the real world.
puppycodes 4y ago
or we could just end the idea of intellectual property and stop assuming everything needs to be tied to capital to have value
- anticensor 4y ago
  Yeah that is the problem with capitalism: they want low inherent value but disproportionally high profits.
terrycody 4y ago
What were they thinking?! What were they thinking?! What were they thinking?!
- deely3 4y ago
  IA or judges?
endisneigh 4y ago
I don’t understand why people are shocked at this outcome. Nothing was stopping IA from both reading the physical copy purchased (or potentially lending it out, physically), as well as lending out the copy that was created as a result of digitization. Losing this was inevitable. In fact, the analogies to libraries were flawed from the start. Libraries purchase a book and lend out the very book that was purchased. Clearly that’s not what’s happening with the internet archive. I’m other words: a library lends out book b. The internet archive buys book c, puts it through Digitize(), which returns book cprime and lends out cprime. However fair use would only permit lending out c, not cprime.
jmpman 4y ago
I’m of the view that the authors/publishers should have to have willingly given up their rights to allow this. When I put something down on paper and sell it, my intention isn’t to allow it to be traded every 35 seconds on the internet, it’s to have made a single copy. Now if the authors/publishers want to allow the physical copy to be lent digitally like IA is doing, I’m all for them having some lic they can sell which allows it. I expect this lic would be 100x more expensive than the simple physical copy.
- gaganyaan 4y ago
  You're part of the problem, and your view is a relic of the past. I'm glad that dinosaurs are quickly becoming curios for museums.
  - misnome 4y ago
    Exactly, authors should be glad to be paid $7.99 - once - every time they write a book, and be happy about it. Anything further is just proof of their obsolesence.
    - gaganyaan 4y ago
      I would like to watch a Star Trek episode featuring you as the misguided extremist trying to destroy replicators because they put cooks out of jobs. Give it a few years and I'll be able to prompt GPT-9 for exactly that. At any rate, the future is here. You're free to stick your head in the sand if you wish, but most of us think it's a lot of work to do all that digging, and frankly a little silly.
      - misnome 4y ago
        And if we lived in a fictional post-scarcity economy where money didn’t exist, you might have a point. Meanwhile, in the real world, people generally like to earn a living.
        4y ago
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I don't understand why users would voluntarily move away from piracy. I prefer "you can't do anything about it" to "please let us." Why the norm, base line expectation of the end user is not identity obfuscation and free access to information without hindrance I just don't get.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  You could say the same about stealing physical books.
  - alwayslikethis 4y ago
    Stealing physical books deprives the owner their right to the book. Copying a digital book only "deprives" the "owner" a right to control its distribution. It's not nearly the same thing. Whereas ownership of physical items is permanent to ensure society would function, the right to control distribution is a concession we make to authors to allow them to make a profit. In our era, this is so ridiculously abused that it is fine to take back some of it. For example, the author should be entitled to the right of controlling copying if he action intends to distribute copies. If book is out of print because the author decides it is not profitable, then the right should go back to us.
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    How many times must we have the discussion about the differences between stealing a physical item and copying a digital one?
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      It’s not the same, but the OP is talking about free access to information. So under that logic stealing the physical book is fine. Or I can amend my original comment and say stealing the physical book, creating a copy using a commodity printer and leaving the copy, while keeping the original, is fine.
      - 4y ago
sinuhe69 4y ago
I thought the IA only archives websites and digital contents, which are in danger of being lost? eBooks are seldom the only form of publishing, thus I believe there is always at least an archive copy of them. Making them accessible for all is clearly very controversial.
- sp332 4y ago
  IA has tons of stuff. Scroll down past the Wayback search on https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ to the more advanced search and you can see more categories. You can play a lot of the audio, video, and even some software right in the browser. Their physical archive is also huge. Here are some pictures from 2012 https://scldigital.wordpress.com/internet-archive-gallery/ https://scldigital.wordpress.com/internet-archive-gallery/
  - sinuhe69 4y ago
    Oh, I didn't know they even have a physical store! Thanks for pointing out. Yeah, I know they also archived digital audio and other stuffs, but never thought book archiving lies in their realm as well.
ar9av 4y ago
Whatever AI wrote that article needs an upgrade.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Intellectual property is an unnatural, made up construct that will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today. If we are going to allow it and penalize people who are doing natural human things like sharing with friends, there has to be a specific benefit to society in every instance. For example, pay taxes on copyrights and patents, increasing every year to reflect disturbance caused to society.
- PKop 4y ago
  Democracy will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today.
  - cat_plus_plus 4y ago
    Quite possibly, society doesn't sit still, but it's still an improvement from before in modern constitutional republic context. Beats going to war to change rulers.
    - PKop 4y ago
      >an improvement I'm sure some think it is. I think dictating power based on war ability makes way more sense than everyone having a say simply by virtue of breathing. Egalitarianism is not consistent with nature. But these things go in cycles, the flaws and contradictions will accumulate and the system will collapse eventually, like they all do.
      - michaelmrose 4y ago
        How do you run a society that way? Can I get a bigger house by mulching you in your own garden and telling your family to push on? Do we decide whether you can build an extension on your house by how good a shot the counties men are? Do Walmart and Cosco fight wars over the more desirable lots? This is not a serious suggestion.
        PKop 4y ago
baryphonic 4y ago
I saw this coming. A few days ago, I read that IA's lawyers argued fair use in part based on "transforming" the content by making copies at scale. I was surprised & astonished that they'd try such sophistry, since a verbatim copy isn't transformative at all. I felt IA's lawyers were grasping at straws if they were making that fair use argument. Everyone would do better to lobby Congress to change the law to allow for limited digital lending kind of like what IA did (notwithstanding the "emergency" lending).
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  > since a verbatim copy isn't transformative at all It's not a verbatim copy; the argument specifically involved converting content from one format (physical book) to another (ebook). > Everyone would do better to lobby Congress Good luck outspending the big publishers. How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney's capacity to bribe Congresscritters?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Format shifting can either be a verbatim copy (as it was in this case), or also involve editing (which this case did not.) Personal-use format shifting has sometimes been found to be fair use; but this is not that. > How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney’s capacity to bribe Congresscritters? Don’t have to bribe if you have enough people convincingly committed to vote on the issue.
  - baryphonic 4y ago
    > How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney's capacity to bribe Congresscritters? Why so cynical? Who's more captured: Congress or the IP Bar? If everyone commenting and reading about this on HN called their members of Congress within a few hours on Monday afternoon, there would be serious buzz on Capitol Hill. Several hundred to a few thousand people all calling in about a similar issue to members of both parties is noticed. Remember the "SOPA" thing Big Content tried to ram through a decade ago? It failed because dozens upon dozens of members were spooked. You know why lobbyists are listened to? They're not "bribing" members of Congress; they are simply presenting an unrebutted story. EDIT: forgot to address the "transformative" thing. Format shifting is not transformative, any more than bootlegging a movie in the theater or taking a photo of a copyrighted piece hanging in a gallery are. The meaning of the work is almost certainly identical whether it's on a physical page or on a screen.
acheron 4y ago
Nobody remembers UMG vs mp3.com? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.com,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co.... This isn't exactly the same thing, but it's close. Of course this was always going to be ruled against.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
This isn't really surprising. Judges bend over backwards to large corporate interests. It's the career safest thing for a judge to do.
lincler 4y ago
"IA argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet. But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers…." I never had enough money to get the books I wanted, sometimes getting to a library wasn't that easy. IA (and other platforms) helped me a lot. So, seeing this section is really depressing.
mjh2539 4y ago
I have a practical question. Will stuff like this: https://archive.org/details/rivernavigationi0000will https://archive.org/details/rivernavigationi0000will be going away?
thayne 4y ago
> Published works do not lose copyright protection after five years Obviously, the courts have no control over that, but copyright protection definitely lasts way too long. Five years, might be kind too short, at least for some kinds of works, but I think the longer the copyright lasts, the more harm it causes to society and the less benefit it has in protecting the interests of the creator and incentivizing more creation. > there is a “thriving ebook licensing market for libraries” in which the Publishers earn a fee whenever a library obtains one of their licensed ebooks from an aggregator like OverDrive…. This market generates at least tens of millions of dollars a year for the Publishers…. And IA supplants the Publishers’ place in this market I'm confused by this argument. If the market is thriving, then IA clearly isn't supplanting it. > IA argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet. But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers…. In other words, the court values a company, which already has plenty of money, making more money, more than "patrons who live far from physical libraries" having access to books.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fareesh 4y ago
It seems like one can just email the internet archive to have their content excluded. Was there a reason why they refused in these cases?
z0ltan 4y ago
[dead]
enriquto 4y ago
The culprits of this travesty must be named and shamed: Suing publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley. Judge: John G. Koeltl. Don't care about the judge, but there should be a massive campaign to boycott these four publishers to oblivion. What's the most harmful thing that we can do to them?
- leobg 4y ago
  Pirate the hell out of their stuff, I guess. After all, can’t borrow anymore, can we? :)
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Interesting of you to think that if these particular publishers hadn't stepped up, other publishers wouldn't have created the exact same lawsuit.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
But I can borrow ebooks from other public libraries. Is there something specific about IA or is this ruling making the concept of epub borrowing a copyright infringement (in the US)?
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  This ruling says controlled digital lending is copyright infringement. Some other libraries use controlled digital lending, but most use a different system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending
- samsonasu 4y ago
  Public libraries pay a different, greater license fee for ebooks they can lend vs physical books . The licenses also come with restrictions about number of lends, time limits, etc. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/libraries-speak-out-about-e-book-costs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/librarie...
EchoReflection 4y ago
this is very disturbing, but definitely not unexpected. surprised it took this long, actually. fortunately i think it will still be a long-ish time before the thought-police can take down all the parts of the internet that clash with the "sensibilities" of the scrooge-like, pro-paywall, pro-restriction curmudgeons in their ivory towers. https://www.alltechbuzz.net/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine-alternatives-2018/ https://www.alltechbuzz.net/best-internet-archive-wayback-ma... https://www.guru99.com/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine-alternatives.html https://www.guru99.com/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine... https://startupstash.com/internet-archive-alternatives/ https://startupstash.com/internet-archive-alternatives/ https://www.topbestalternatives.com/internet-archive/ https://www.topbestalternatives.com/internet-archive/ https://alternativeto.net/software/internet-archive/ https://alternativeto.net/software/internet-archive/ https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/best-archive-is-alternatives/ https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/best-archive-is-alternatives... i realize the last link is "alternatives to 'archive.is' " and not "alternatives to 'archive.org'/the wayback machine", but it's still pertinent/in the same ideological arena (obviously). As MLK Jr said* "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Apparently Dr. King adapted that line from Unitarian minister Theodore Parker:https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/#:~:text=Martin%20Luther%20King%20Jr.%20once%20said%2C%20%E2%80%9CLet%20us,in%20a%20collection%20of%20his%20sermons%20in%201853 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/#:~.... i've archived this* page (this ycombinator page) at: https://archive.vn/AZNoN https://archive.vn/AZNoN
interestica 4y ago
Fork Everything.
uda 4y ago
Initially I'm enraged against the publishers, the judge and the system in general as many of you, but they are not the issue, while I can't talk on behalf of IA, I don't see this as a fight against the publishers, but a fight against broken business models flourishing because and protected by broken laws meant to protect earlier broken business models The current law is broken, we know that, but most of us don't grasp broken laws as a threat until it is challenged (and we as a society usually lose), and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable This circuit should be shortened, we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society like with DMCA and PATRIOT act If anything has proven this lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws, be more involved in the legislation process and actively propose and push for fixes
- komali2 4y ago
  What actions can Americans possibly take given the captured two party system and drawing back of voting rights? Not to mention the wildly unrepresentative government, wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless, or, republicans can fail for over two decades to win a popular vote and still elect three presidents in that time. Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, and the House is similarly unrepresentative. It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?
  - ajdegol 4y ago
    Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…
  - prox 4y ago
    Getting involved, grass roots style. The feeling of powerlessness is exactly the way you become inert to do anything. “What can I do.” Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.
mdp2021 4y ago
It gives a special sensation to see the title of this extremely bad piece of news accompanied by the black margin (for the loss of Gordon Moore). As if a stronger black margin.
psnehanshu 4y ago
Can someone explain me like I am 5? What is digital lending? And please don't ask me to search Google, I am lazy.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  IA bought a book, scanned it, then lent out the scanned copy rather than the physical book.
  - psnehanshu 4y ago
    For free or for a fee?
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      Free
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      Not too lazy to reply, though.
readbeard 4y ago
If we work together, I think it would be realistic for us to attain a rollback of most recent one or two copyright term extensions by following a two-pronged strategy: (1) Show politicians on the left how copyright term extensions have largely amounted to a transfer of wealth from the public to large corporations, and (2) Show politicians on the right how rolling back to an earlier version of copyright would reduce the interference of the government in the lives of its citizens and return to a vision for IP that better adheres to that presented by the Constitution and defended by its framers, while leading to a more vibrant and competitive market for new works. Meanwhile, both groups should be assured that a release of many classic works into the public domain would be popular among the vast majority of their constituents. Who's in?
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Politicians in the US are corrupt. You need a rich person who cares about your cause to bribe them more than the rich businesses with copyrights are currently bribing them. Then the law will be changed.
  - readbeard 4y ago
    I disagree. While a rich person's backing would certainly be helpful, I think convincing a couple of politicians with platforms and some clout on each side that spearheading a joint IP reform effort would benefit their political careers would be adequate to get the ball rolling.
- zestyping 4y ago
  Both of your arguments have merit, and would be convincing if politicians on both sides were driven by logic. Sadly, I'm doubtful that many politicians on the left still have the integrity or power to act against copyright empires. It's even more obvious that politicians on the right no longer care about limited government. They are currently trying to ban books.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
retube 4y ago
I don't understand the outrage here. It sounds like a clear case of copyright infringement with IA profiting from the works of others. Can someone explain the issue?
- beej71 4y ago
  For me, the outrage is really about the fact that the greater good is clearly (IMHO) served by IA operating like they do (one simultaneous lend per held copy). So copyright law is wrong. And I know it's not the judge's place to say that. If they drop copyright to 15 years and IA stops lending books younger than that, I'd be 100% OK with that outcome, as well. But copyright terms are in the "lifetimes" range, so lending books out that are still under copyright serves the greater good. But since the odds of the US switching to the metric system are about 1000x greater than the odds of us decreasing copyright terms, I'm not holding my breath.
anothernostrich 4y ago
A judge from a dying empire doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
What's with the fbclid tacked on the courtlistener URL. C'mon. Let's just hope IA can afford to pay any judgment entered against it. If the court finds IA had no reasonable grounds to believe this was fair use, then IA has to rebut a presumption of wilful infringement. If they fail, the statutory damages could be substantial. Assume Kahle has calculated the max cost of alleged infringement of 33,000 titles and is not putting the entire archive at risk over a book scanning project.
frankfrankfrank 4y ago
Here comes the memory hole, folks. This copyright claim is just the ruse to break down the wall, with the real purpose being to lay claim to news and internet archiving so that inconvenient news and information can be more easily memory holed without archives existing. Let me put it this way, everyone should start working on decentralized archiving tools and retention of information locally about topics they are particularly interested in. I don’t say that out of the blue.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Uh, you do realize this is just about physical books, right? When I want to read the latest news I don't go to my local bookstore and grab a book on news, I get that from the internet, which the Internet Archive is perfectly able to archive, as it has nothing to do with this. Sigh.
wkat4242 4y ago
What actually happened? The article is a really confusing read. Edit: found another article that describes it much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300195
daedlanth 4y ago
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hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
More background on the case: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive
SuperSandro2000 4y ago
If you are for the people, you are always against the publishers.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
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whiddershins 4y ago
The comments on here are extremely myopic, as the meme “copyright bad” is firmly lodged in the minds of thousands or millions of people who don’t rely on it to make a living. It can’t imagine a more practical or metaphysical violation of copyright than to literally copy the pages of a book and then distribute copies of this book to however many people you feel like. I guess you could violate the rights more by taking the author’s name off of it. This mad ideology is destructive and blind. No one has a right to the product of another’s labor. A dysfunctional system doesn’t change the ethics here.
deleted 4y ago
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drawkbox 4y ago
Luckily libraries existed before copyright / IP was too top heavy otherwise they wouldn't exist. This content and products are part of culture. An online library should be allowed to exist. You can go to public libraries and in many they have ebook checkout systems. Why not Internet Archive, one of the most valuable online resources next to Wikipedia and data sources.
pontifier 4y ago
I'm a little bit worried about how this might affect Murfie. I've been an advocate for years for a model where people own physical media, and have access to the media they own in any way they see fit. The way this ruling is structured, it paves the way to make even ripping your own CDs to your MP3 player illegal. As common as it is, this right has never actually been tested in court.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  That's just sensationalism. If they wanted to go after ripping CDs, they would have gone after that when CDs actually had more than negligible sales. CDs are a dead format in 2023. Most music isn't even released on CD anymore.
  - pontifier 4y ago
    It's the way the judge references the ReDigi case that is troubling to me. It's been a while since I read it, but I thought ReDigi found that digital copies don't have the same first sale rights that physical copies do. This judge seems to think that the first sale doctrine isn't even applicable. The Google book scanning case had previously indicated that giving full copies of scanned books to the owners clearly fell under fair use in part because of the first sale doctrine. This ruling seems to ignore that. I do truly hope you're right though.
djha-skin 4y ago
Something developers don't seem to understand about the media business is just how much they care about copyright law. One huge thing that was drilled into my skull working for SlingTV: a work comprises the actual data and the medium to which it is affixed. When 11 million people used our DVRs to record the super bowl, we had to store 11 million copies on disc. Of the same exact footage. That we ourselves originally broadcast to them. Our lawyers told us not even to try messing with this. Don't try to share copies they said, we'll get sued off of our faces. So I'm not surprised that a judge ruled this way when looking at the facts. From a media person's perspective, digitally copying the work that was in print is making a second copy. Whether or not you think this is dumb, it's the reality under which we work. I've learned to be very careful about things like this.
- mysterypie 4y ago
  > we had to store 11 million copies on disc The reason you were allowed to store 11 million copies is because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled[1] in 1984 that you were permitted to make copies of TV shows to watch later on your VCR. And this was reputedly because some of the supreme court judges had VCRs — which had been spreading lightning fast at the time — and understood the concept and wanted to find or create a legal argument to permit such copying. Just imagine if VCR adoption had been slower, and that the judges had not yet tried out that newfangled invention for home recording, and they had ruled that personal copies weren't allowed. Then today, you'd have been making 11 million illegal copies. It's amusing to think about whether making a single copy available to 11 million users would have been much less legal risk in that scenario. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
  - raynr 4y ago
    To be more specific, the Betamax case is the reason a specific person can store a copy of a TV recording that they made, for timeshifting purposes, because SCOTUS held that that person's use of the recorded TV content, in that circumstance, was fair dealing with respect to the recorded TV content. And that's it. If you provide a recording service, you had better be as close as you possibly can to that fact matrix. Any hint that it's you, and not your users, who are doing the copying, would attract the wolves. Also, this focus on who is doing the copying has been looked at enough in different jurisdictions around the world that it's probably not worth the risk testing it. Germany (Save.TV, Shift.TV), Japan (Rokuraku II), Australia (Optus TV Now). Don't quote me on these, this is off the cuff.
retrocryptid 4y ago
Probably worth it to give this a scan before commenting on what the judiciary is supposed to do (or is allowed to do): https://www.loc.gov/item/90898138/ https://www.loc.gov/item/90898138/ And I was surprised to find the Wikipedia section on Judicial Review was pretty reasonable: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_S...
afrcnc 4y ago
For who is not aware, this is how America works: Corporations have more rights than you! Rich people have more rights than you!
sobkas 4y ago
Every law in USA was made with overwhelming input from lobbyists and other monied interest. What law will be passed depends on will of oligarchs not public. Every law that accidentally helps people not oligarchs can be stopped by activists judges either in state or federal courts(including Supreme Court). Because judges in the end serve corporations/oligarchs first and ideology second. The Federalist Society? This stems from the fact that politicians that choose them(and if they are elected by public they can be bought directly) were also bought.
viscountchocula 4y ago
Is there potentially room here for the Librarian of Congress to bless CDL? Or would that require an act of Congress?
navane 4y ago
It's weird how a bank can loan out 8-20 times what is deposited, but if I can lend out a single copy of a book I have? The banking system runs the backbone of the economy, but god forbid if everyone has access to all books? What if we use books as a payment method, can we then use the same leverage banks do?
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Books cannot be used to pay government taxes or settle debts which are the factors that drive the value of a currency. As a recent example Putin tried to force the EU to pay Russia for energy in rubles.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  That's not how that works. Non-central banks don't print money the way that servers send out bytes. There is also no copyright on bank notes that prohibits you from selling copies of them online. It's also not the bank's fault that you feel copyright law is unjust, it's got nothing to do with each other.
animitronix 4y ago
You know what to do boys, let's make it happen.
vuciv1 4y ago
This ruling against the Internet Archive really rubs me the wrong way. IA has been a godsend for countless students, researchers, and knowledge enthusiasts across the globe. Sure, they might've pushed the boundaries of fair use, but isn't that how progress and innovation happen? It's disheartening to see that the court sided with big publishers, who are already raking in considerable profits, instead of considering the broader implications of IA's mission to democratize access to knowledge. In a world where information is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, IA is one of the few bastions of hope for more equitable access to books and resources. I worry about the chilling effect this decision could have on other projects aiming to push the envelope in terms of digital content distribution. Are we just going to hand over our collective knowledge to the highest bidder? I get the need to protect copyright holders, but this ruling feels like a step back for the open access movement and the democratization of knowledge. We need more innovative solutions to bridge the digital divide, not less.
cosmojg 4y ago
blows the dust off a seedbox and dons an eye patch Arrr!
fear_and_coffee 4y ago
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DragonL80 4y ago
This is how copyright law is broken. It offers artists next to no protection. https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac Edit: it really only benefits large companies who have managed to exploit it.
ouraf 4y ago
I hate to be devil's advocate, but archive.org has a problem with curation of their free library. Some stuff there breaks some terms of service of the original owners, like the leaked PS2 SDK https://archive.org/details/ps2_sdks https://archive.org/details/ps2_sdks, old and irrelevant as it may be today. Or cracked games that are still availiable online https://archive.org/details/gtasa210apk https://archive.org/details/gtasa210apk I wish them to stay providing service, but maybe a quick checkup about "why is this stored here" or "isn't any other site more capable or well equipped to store and defend the right to access this content" would help giving it more of a defense against copyright holders

1116 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

14 4y ago

Meanwhile I can go to any torrent site and download a couple hundred thousand books with ease.

Sunspark 4y ago
You can always get something, but most people don't have the knowledge of how to go about it without asking someone for guidance first.
- SL61 4y ago
  I would agree with this if the issue were movies or games, but most people know that you can Google "[book title] pdf" and get a free copy. The small file sizes mean that piracy sites don't need to rely on torrents and can just offer a direct download. I frequently see piracy sites in search results just from searching the title of a book. The barrier to pirating a book is extremely low.
totetsu 4y ago
Last time I looked at the most seeded ebook torrents I found a bunch or alt right stuff…

antibasilisk 4y ago

wow that's wild opens libgen, piratebay and scihub

whatshisface 4y ago
"I don't care how bad the laws are because I'll break them," is how people think in collapsing societies.

Thorentis 4y ago

I think most people here saw this coming. Unfortunately this isn't a question of whether the law is good, it's a question of whether IA broke the current laws we have. IA can and should lobby for copyright law to change. But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
You have it backwards, breaking it widely and repeatedly will do more good than harm.
alexfromapex 4y ago
The system shouldn't require lobbying to get results that benefit the greater good
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > system shouldn't require lobbying to get results that benefit the greater good It does when there is disagreement over what constitutes the greater good.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    This made me chuckle pretty hard. When lobbying enters the picture there's only a small, selective group of people that are going to constitute the greater good.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      I think you're referring to financial aspects of today's lobbying alone, but I think it's impossible to suggest you could have any sort of consideration of the greater good without taking into account different people's view on what that is, which means them trying to persuade you of it, which is the exact definition of lobbying.
      - 4y ago

LordDragonfang 4y ago

Here was the EFF's statement on the case when they initially agreed to represent the Internet Archive: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid, when more people were trying to use their services due to being stuck inside. Also of note is that the is only the district court. We'll have to see if the EFF appeals to the circuit next.

Rebelgecko 4y ago
This lawsuit covers the limited lending they did before COVID, but that either flew under the publishers' radar or perhaps they knew but didn't care enough to respond until IA started doing the more blatant "unrestricted lending"
orra 4y ago
> IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid That's the excuse the publishers are pushing, but ultimately they disagree with, and have successfully argued in court it seems, against the entire principle. Ultimately, controlled digital lending should be as lawful as format shifting an album: this is format shifting from a physical book to an ebook. > Also of note is that the is only the district court Phew?
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  But in this case, it wasn't controlled, right? Even with DRM to "expire" the lent ebook after a certain amount of time, they still ended up distributing the books without restriction on availability. I don't really care about the publishers, but I still wouldn't expect to seriously get away with arguing that I wasn't distributing copyrighted material if I started offering movies online for free in unlimited numbers... because it was just controlled lending since the movie files were set up to probably become unreadable in 3 weeks. I'm sure they have competent lawyers that would've predicted an outcome like this, which makes the decision to do it even more baffling. Especially for an organization that ought to be conservative by design, considering they want to be a very long-term archive.

sva_ 4y ago

This sucks, big time.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
It does suck, but it was self-inflicted. I love the IA, I've even done volunteer work for the Physical Archive, but the "emergency library" was mad. I can't imagine how they justified it.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  Locked inside with "nothing" to do, one guy probably got high and had this "revelation" that would "help" everyone else locked inside /s. It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels when in reality they were doing just fine flying (somewhat) under the radar. I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Because of donations, the scrutiny is 1000x more for non-profits vs regular companies.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels Considering their software archive is one of the easiest source of warez today, I'd say they have a thing for painting targets on themselves.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Why? It’s not like this really makes a difference to the other 100 different things they’re doing.
    - misnome 4y ago
      Because IA is causing a risk that the donations aren’t paying for that, but could end up right in the publishers pockets, and shutting down those 100 other projects.

kybernetikos 4y ago

Didn't google do almost exactly this with google books - making agreements with libraries and digitising their collections without paying the publishers or the authors? Maybe I misunderstood.

sva_ 4y ago
They didnt offer the full books afaik.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  Ahh, you're right. They copied the full books, but they don't let the public view more than snippets unless they have rights to do so. That must be the 'transformative use'.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I think you are allowed to duplicate short extracts of works as part of fair use.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      It's a four factor test (but the second factor rarely counts). the purpose and character of your use the nature of the copyrighted work the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market. The court found that Google copied the entirety of the work into their search index, but that this (taking into account the strict result snippet restrictions) didn't effect the market because no one would decide they didn't need the book now they had the snippet.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > They didnt offer the full books afaik. They got sued, and the settlement didn’t allow them to offer the full books except for-purchase with a particular revenue sharing arrangement.

bawolff 4y ago

Wow, reading the article this seems like a clear cut case. Did IA really think they could win this? Edit: reading other sources, it seems like the crux of the idea is they would only lend out books where they had the same number of physical copies. I can see the reasoning for that, but it seems hard for fair use to get you there.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jsheard 4y ago
The original idea was to only lend out digital copies that are backed by a physical copy, so if challenged the Internet Archive could reasonably argue that they're protected under the same laws that physical libraries are, but when the pandemic kicked off IA launched an "emergency library" which waived the lending limits so any number of copies could be lent out regardless of how many physical copies they have. My assumption is that publishers probably weren't happy about the original model but it was legally murky enough that they didn't pursue it for risk of losing and setting the wrong (from their perspective) precedent, but the emergency library made for an extremely easy case against IA.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  The case dealt with the former. This article is the judge's ruling, the National Emergency Library is not mentioned.
  - teraflop 4y ago
    The full ruling does mention it, albeit briefly: > IA also argues that it made fair use of the Publishers’ copyrights during the National Emergency Library. The analysis above applies even more forcefully to the NEL, during which IA amplified its unauthorized lending of ebook versions of the Works in Suit by lifting the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. IA’s defense of fair use with respect to the NEL therefore also fails.

RedCondor 4y ago

America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time, unless forced to do otherwise by external circumstances. Famously it only went against segregation because "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." (Attorney General James P. McGranery) https://redsails.org/concessions/ https://redsails.org/concessions/ Fortunately this means more of an impetus for piracy in the meantime, and alternative systems in the near future.

latency-guy2 4y ago
> America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time Thankfully that's the best outcome. Unless you mean you support eminent domain. I'd pay hell to the country that even plans on using it against me, and I'll follow and protect others who this happens to as well. Anyone who decides they can steal my resources will have to fight for it. You do not own me.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  I might not own you, but apparently you don't own your own books as much as you might have thought. ;-)
  - latency-guy2 4y ago
    I don't own a single digital book, nor am I deluded to think that the internet was going to solve the issue of ownership in the first place. You are free to demand that publishers provide you unlimited access to their servers so you can download your books perpetually. Publishers need not give in to alternative access methods to their material. If you want to own books, have it actually in your possession, which is not the internet.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      This article is about a court ruling restricting what the IA could do with books they physically owned.

unopened 4y ago

Aaron Swartz founding the Open Library with IA was a shining moment in web history. Sad to see giant corporations stomping on his vision of a web that offers free access to information for all.

throwaway742 4y ago
I miss him. He really did his best to live up the the hacker ethos. Information wants to be free.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

Yet another example that piracy is not just a superior product or about not paying for content, but is an absolute core need.

cultureswitch 4y ago
In the face of senseless copyright law, avoiding to fund the organizations responsible is a moral imperative, and piracy is typically the way to do that.
- Zuiii 4y ago
  > avoiding to fund the organizations responsible is a moral imperative I never thought about it that way. I avoided getty and other stock media publishers out of principle. In their deranged quest to subjugate google, they made image search worse for me. I think it's about time I started applying this logic to other publishers as well. Copyright is completely out of control. There has to be accountability, even if it's insignificant and only on a personal level. For any authors reading this: I intend to continue paying for books and will gladly do so but only if it's to you directly. Either self-publish or put a donation link on your site. If I'm interested in your book, I will search for your personal website prior to taking any action. It's sad that it has to come down to this.
BigCryo 4y ago
Absolutely.. the system deserves no respect, then give it none

userbinator 4y ago

Is the Internet Archive itself going to need archived next? Or is most or all of what it has already available in the pirate libraries?

yamrzou 4y ago
My experience has been that many of the Internet Archive books (especially rare/old ones) are not available in pirate libraries. So this is sad news.
- LegionMammal978 4y ago
  Personally, I've had good luck with HathiTrust Digital Library [0] for old books in the public domain. A majority of the books that I've cared to check are mirrored on both IA and HathiTrust. It has an arbitrary restriction that you can't download full PDFs, but at least the contents are all available. [0] https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

winddude 4y ago

Fuck.

eevilspock 4y ago

They need to move offshore. Iceland?

crazygringo 4y ago

Yikes. I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds. Any idea if this means IA has to shut down lending by when? Tomorrow? Next month? Any chances for appeal here? Or any chance they relocate the books division to another country or something? It's just so sad if something so valuable is forced to go "poof". A real loss.

Aeolun 4y ago
From the article the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books. No idea what kind of effect that will have on the rest of it though.
- bdowling 4y ago
  > the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA. The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51. [0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
  - wahern 4y ago
    There's a good chance IA will be exempted from statutory damages. See 17 USC § 504(c)(2), > The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords The opinion (p46) defers this matter, > At this point, IA’s statutory remittance argument is premature. IA may renew the argument in connection with the formation of an appropriate judgment. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.188.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...

allturtles 4y ago

A lot of people in these comments still seem confused about what has happened here. This ruling is not about the emergency library at all. It's a ruling that controlled digital lending (one physical copy backing each digital copy lent out) is illegal.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
warent 4y ago
That seems horrendous. Don't many community/government libraries do this? Seems like a huge blow to freedom of information and sharing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dmix 4y ago
  Is this just ebook lending? Is that popular among local libraries? I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries. I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    It's very popular among local libraries (at least in the US and UK) -- Libby/Overdrive being the main player, followed by Hoopla.
    - Mindwipe 4y ago
      It is worth noting that Libraries in the UK have to pay authors/publishers to loan out books on a royalty basis with the Public Lending Right payment of course. Even physical books.

aaron695 4y ago

What kicked this off was they lent more copies than they owned. Changing format was illegal of course under current law but publishers looked the other way. By allowimg multiple this was the only outcome. Without risk taking we wouldn't have any IA so this is all part of what they are. It's hard to know when to hold em.

FpUser 4y ago

I hope IA does not cease to exist as the result. It's value far exceeds the negatives.

chris_wot 4y ago

So basically now everyone just outright pirates the books. Great outcome for the publishers.

Tao3300 4y ago
Time to download my next car

duxup 4y ago

I'm bummed IA chose to pick this fight by declaring this magical COVID emergency and lending more digital copies than they owned. The outcome seemed inevitable and IMO IA has been dishonest about what the lawsuit with its own statements. It makes me wonder if there are any adults at the helm at IA and I worry about its future. IA is an amazing resource... I don't understand why they chose this hill to fight on.

calgarymicro 4y ago
I don't think that controlled digital lending in its entirety being ruled illegal was at all inevitable. Sure, take them to task for the 'emergency library', but the scope of this ruling seems unjust.
- wmf 4y ago
  It's about probabilities. If they had even a 10% chance of bankrupting themselves they probably shouldn't have done it. Even if they eventually win, every dollar spent on lawyers wasn't spent on archiving.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  The ruling gave 4 obvious rebuttals to their claims.
snapetom 4y ago
NEL opened in March 2020. The first doc on this case was filed June 1, 2020. NEL closed down almost immediately on June 16, 2020. IA was definitely and stupidly playing with fire here. As others have said, publishers weren't happy with IA's one hardcopy, one digital loan rule, but lived with it because of the potential bad press. However, I'm willing to bet the NEL pushed them over the edge to go to war. Incredibly reckless and now we've taken a step backwards against IP abuse, IMO.
gaganyaan 4y ago
What's magical is the thinking involved in copyright, particularly as it involves the digital space. I 100% guarantee that if a dead tree library xeroxed their books during a national emergency, nobody would be making comments like this. Somehow, because computers are involved, magical thinking gets a pass.

nomilk 4y ago

If this results in the collapse of the Internet Archive as a whole, it will be the digital equivalent of the Notre-Dame fire; a treasure being destroyed before our very eyes.

Aeolun 4y ago
Maybe more like the Library of Alexandria? That said, I get your point.
misnome 4y ago
I don’t think the owners of the Notre-Dame set the fire themselves.

ZunarJ5 4y ago

https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror Thoughts?

gigel82 4y ago

And rain is wet... I wonder why IA thought doing something obviously illegal would have any other outcome.

abetusk 4y ago

Digital copies of books are available to anyone willing to look for them, free of charge and easily downloadable. I suspect all this ruling has done, if I've understood it correctly, is make it more difficult for people wanting to download or view copies legitimately. I love the IA. I use it weekly if not daily. My bet is that they'll push back on this and other rulings and will ultimately lobby for saner laws.

kristopolous 4y ago

And the results are Capitalism 1 Expansion and the preservation of human knowledge 0

Sparkyte 4y ago

Judge has a bad history on the internet.

InCityDreams 4y ago
Well, that can be understood in several ways.

tkgally 4y ago

The Internet Archive’s initial response is here: http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/ http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/ Excerpt: “[W]e will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers. We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”

chrsjxn 4y ago

It is genuinely hard to imagine this could have gone any other way. Copying an entire work, with no changes, and then distributing the copy is pretty archetypal copyright infringement. IA's lawyers had to have known this was a long shot, right?

phendrenad2 4y ago
I think IA lives inside the HN/techie bubble, where you can get a lot of positive support for things that don't translate into the real world.

puppycodes 4y ago

or we could just end the idea of intellectual property and stop assuming everything needs to be tied to capital to have value

anticensor 4y ago
Yeah that is the problem with capitalism: they want low inherent value but disproportionally high profits.

terrycody 4y ago

What were they thinking?! What were they thinking?! What were they thinking?!

deely3 4y ago
IA or judges?

endisneigh 4y ago

I don’t understand why people are shocked at this outcome. Nothing was stopping IA from both reading the physical copy purchased (or potentially lending it out, physically), as well as lending out the copy that was created as a result of digitization. Losing this was inevitable. In fact, the analogies to libraries were flawed from the start. Libraries purchase a book and lend out the very book that was purchased. Clearly that’s not what’s happening with the internet archive. I’m other words: a library lends out book b. The internet archive buys book c, puts it through Digitize(), which returns book cprime and lends out cprime. However fair use would only permit lending out c, not cprime.

jmpman 4y ago

I’m of the view that the authors/publishers should have to have willingly given up their rights to allow this. When I put something down on paper and sell it, my intention isn’t to allow it to be traded every 35 seconds on the internet, it’s to have made a single copy. Now if the authors/publishers want to allow the physical copy to be lent digitally like IA is doing, I’m all for them having some lic they can sell which allows it. I expect this lic would be 100x more expensive than the simple physical copy.

gaganyaan 4y ago
You're part of the problem, and your view is a relic of the past. I'm glad that dinosaurs are quickly becoming curios for museums.
- misnome 4y ago
  Exactly, authors should be glad to be paid $7.99 - once - every time they write a book, and be happy about it. Anything further is just proof of their obsolesence.
  - gaganyaan 4y ago
    I would like to watch a Star Trek episode featuring you as the misguided extremist trying to destroy replicators because they put cooks out of jobs. Give it a few years and I'll be able to prompt GPT-9 for exactly that. At any rate, the future is here. You're free to stick your head in the sand if you wish, but most of us think it's a lot of work to do all that digging, and frankly a little silly.
    - misnome 4y ago
      And if we lived in a fictional post-scarcity economy where money didn’t exist, you might have a point. Meanwhile, in the real world, people generally like to earn a living.
      - 4y ago

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I don't understand why users would voluntarily move away from piracy. I prefer "you can't do anything about it" to "please let us." Why the norm, base line expectation of the end user is not identity obfuscation and free access to information without hindrance I just don't get.

endisneigh 4y ago
You could say the same about stealing physical books.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Stealing physical books deprives the owner their right to the book. Copying a digital book only "deprives" the "owner" a right to control its distribution. It's not nearly the same thing. Whereas ownership of physical items is permanent to ensure society would function, the right to control distribution is a concession we make to authors to allow them to make a profit. In our era, this is so ridiculously abused that it is fine to take back some of it. For example, the author should be entitled to the right of controlling copying if he action intends to distribute copies. If book is out of print because the author decides it is not profitable, then the right should go back to us.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  How many times must we have the discussion about the differences between stealing a physical item and copying a digital one?
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    It’s not the same, but the OP is talking about free access to information. So under that logic stealing the physical book is fine. Or I can amend my original comment and say stealing the physical book, creating a copy using a commodity printer and leaving the copy, while keeping the original, is fine.
    - 4y ago

sinuhe69 4y ago

I thought the IA only archives websites and digital contents, which are in danger of being lost? eBooks are seldom the only form of publishing, thus I believe there is always at least an archive copy of them. Making them accessible for all is clearly very controversial.

sp332 4y ago
IA has tons of stuff. Scroll down past the Wayback search on https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ to the more advanced search and you can see more categories. You can play a lot of the audio, video, and even some software right in the browser. Their physical archive is also huge. Here are some pictures from 2012 https://scldigital.wordpress.com/internet-archive-gallery/ https://scldigital.wordpress.com/internet-archive-gallery/
- sinuhe69 4y ago
  Oh, I didn't know they even have a physical store! Thanks for pointing out. Yeah, I know they also archived digital audio and other stuffs, but never thought book archiving lies in their realm as well.

ar9av 4y ago

Whatever AI wrote that article needs an upgrade.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Intellectual property is an unnatural, made up construct that will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today. If we are going to allow it and penalize people who are doing natural human things like sharing with friends, there has to be a specific benefit to society in every instance. For example, pay taxes on copyrights and patents, increasing every year to reflect disturbance caused to society.

PKop 4y ago
Democracy will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  Quite possibly, society doesn't sit still, but it's still an improvement from before in modern constitutional republic context. Beats going to war to change rulers.
  - PKop 4y ago
    >an improvement I'm sure some think it is. I think dictating power based on war ability makes way more sense than everyone having a say simply by virtue of breathing. Egalitarianism is not consistent with nature. But these things go in cycles, the flaws and contradictions will accumulate and the system will collapse eventually, like they all do.
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      How do you run a society that way? Can I get a bigger house by mulching you in your own garden and telling your family to push on? Do we decide whether you can build an extension on your house by how good a shot the counties men are? Do Walmart and Cosco fight wars over the more desirable lots? This is not a serious suggestion.
      - PKop 4y ago

baryphonic 4y ago

I saw this coming. A few days ago, I read that IA's lawyers argued fair use in part based on "transforming" the content by making copies at scale. I was surprised & astonished that they'd try such sophistry, since a verbatim copy isn't transformative at all. I felt IA's lawyers were grasping at straws if they were making that fair use argument. Everyone would do better to lobby Congress to change the law to allow for limited digital lending kind of like what IA did (notwithstanding the "emergency" lending).

thebooktocome 4y ago
> since a verbatim copy isn't transformative at all It's not a verbatim copy; the argument specifically involved converting content from one format (physical book) to another (ebook). > Everyone would do better to lobby Congress Good luck outspending the big publishers. How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney's capacity to bribe Congresscritters?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Format shifting can either be a verbatim copy (as it was in this case), or also involve editing (which this case did not.) Personal-use format shifting has sometimes been found to be fair use; but this is not that. > How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney’s capacity to bribe Congresscritters? Don’t have to bribe if you have enough people convincingly committed to vote on the issue.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  > How many people who work for a living does it take to match Disney's capacity to bribe Congresscritters? Why so cynical? Who's more captured: Congress or the IP Bar? If everyone commenting and reading about this on HN called their members of Congress within a few hours on Monday afternoon, there would be serious buzz on Capitol Hill. Several hundred to a few thousand people all calling in about a similar issue to members of both parties is noticed. Remember the "SOPA" thing Big Content tried to ram through a decade ago? It failed because dozens upon dozens of members were spooked. You know why lobbyists are listened to? They're not "bribing" members of Congress; they are simply presenting an unrebutted story. EDIT: forgot to address the "transformative" thing. Format shifting is not transformative, any more than bootlegging a movie in the theater or taking a photo of a copyrighted piece hanging in a gallery are. The meaning of the work is almost certainly identical whether it's on a physical page or on a screen.

acheron 4y ago

Nobody remembers UMG vs mp3.com? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.com,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co.... This isn't exactly the same thing, but it's close. Of course this was always going to be ruled against.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

This isn't really surprising. Judges bend over backwards to large corporate interests. It's the career safest thing for a judge to do.

lincler 4y ago

"IA argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet. But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers…." I never had enough money to get the books I wanted, sometimes getting to a library wasn't that easy. IA (and other platforms) helped me a lot. So, seeing this section is really depressing.

mjh2539 4y ago

I have a practical question. Will stuff like this: https://archive.org/details/rivernavigationi0000will https://archive.org/details/rivernavigationi0000will be going away?

thayne 4y ago

> Published works do not lose copyright protection after five years Obviously, the courts have no control over that, but copyright protection definitely lasts way too long. Five years, might be kind too short, at least for some kinds of works, but I think the longer the copyright lasts, the more harm it causes to society and the less benefit it has in protecting the interests of the creator and incentivizing more creation. > there is a “thriving ebook licensing market for libraries” in which the Publishers earn a fee whenever a library obtains one of their licensed ebooks from an aggregator like OverDrive…. This market generates at least tens of millions of dollars a year for the Publishers…. And IA supplants the Publishers’ place in this market I'm confused by this argument. If the market is thriving, then IA clearly isn't supplanting it. > IA argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet. But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers…. In other words, the court values a company, which already has plenty of money, making more money, more than "patrons who live far from physical libraries" having access to books.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fareesh 4y ago

It seems like one can just email the internet archive to have their content excluded. Was there a reason why they refused in these cases?

z0ltan 4y ago

[dead]

enriquto 4y ago

The culprits of this travesty must be named and shamed: Suing publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley. Judge: John G. Koeltl. Don't care about the judge, but there should be a massive campaign to boycott these four publishers to oblivion. What's the most harmful thing that we can do to them?

leobg 4y ago
Pirate the hell out of their stuff, I guess. After all, can’t borrow anymore, can we? :)
phendrenad2 4y ago
Interesting of you to think that if these particular publishers hadn't stepped up, other publishers wouldn't have created the exact same lawsuit.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

But I can borrow ebooks from other public libraries. Is there something specific about IA or is this ruling making the concept of epub borrowing a copyright infringement (in the US)?

boomboomsubban 4y ago
This ruling says controlled digital lending is copyright infringement. Some other libraries use controlled digital lending, but most use a different system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending
samsonasu 4y ago
Public libraries pay a different, greater license fee for ebooks they can lend vs physical books . The licenses also come with restrictions about number of lends, time limits, etc. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/libraries-speak-out-about-e-book-costs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/librarie...

EchoReflection 4y ago

this is very disturbing, but definitely not unexpected. surprised it took this long, actually. fortunately i think it will still be a long-ish time before the thought-police can take down all the parts of the internet that clash with the "sensibilities" of the scrooge-like, pro-paywall, pro-restriction curmudgeons in their ivory towers. https://www.alltechbuzz.net/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine-alternatives-2018/ https://www.alltechbuzz.net/best-internet-archive-wayback-ma... https://www.guru99.com/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine-alternatives.html https://www.guru99.com/best-internet-archive-wayback-machine... https://startupstash.com/internet-archive-alternatives/ https://startupstash.com/internet-archive-alternatives/ https://www.topbestalternatives.com/internet-archive/ https://www.topbestalternatives.com/internet-archive/ https://alternativeto.net/software/internet-archive/ https://alternativeto.net/software/internet-archive/ https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/best-archive-is-alternatives/ https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/best-archive-is-alternatives... i realize the last link is "alternatives to 'archive.is' " and not "alternatives to 'archive.org'/the wayback machine", but it's still pertinent/in the same ideological arena (obviously). As MLK Jr said* "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Apparently Dr. King adapted that line from Unitarian minister Theodore Parker:https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/#:~:text=Martin%20Luther%20King%20Jr.%20once%20said%2C%20%E2%80%9CLet%20us,in%20a%20collection%20of%20his%20sermons%20in%201853 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/#:~.... i've archived this* page (this ycombinator page) at: https://archive.vn/AZNoN https://archive.vn/AZNoN

interestica 4y ago

Fork Everything.

uda 4y ago

Initially I'm enraged against the publishers, the judge and the system in general as many of you, but they are not the issue, while I can't talk on behalf of IA, I don't see this as a fight against the publishers, but a fight against broken business models flourishing because and protected by broken laws meant to protect earlier broken business models The current law is broken, we know that, but most of us don't grasp broken laws as a threat until it is challenged (and we as a society usually lose), and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable This circuit should be shortened, we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society like with DMCA and PATRIOT act If anything has proven this lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws, be more involved in the legislation process and actively propose and push for fixes

komali2 4y ago
What actions can Americans possibly take given the captured two party system and drawing back of voting rights? Not to mention the wildly unrepresentative government, wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless, or, republicans can fail for over two decades to win a popular vote and still elect three presidents in that time. Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, and the House is similarly unrepresentative. It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?
- ajdegol 4y ago
  Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…
- prox 4y ago
  Getting involved, grass roots style. The feeling of powerlessness is exactly the way you become inert to do anything. “What can I do.” Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.

mdp2021 4y ago

It gives a special sensation to see the title of this extremely bad piece of news accompanied by the black margin (for the loss of Gordon Moore). As if a stronger black margin.

psnehanshu 4y ago

Can someone explain me like I am 5? What is digital lending? And please don't ask me to search Google, I am lazy.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
IA bought a book, scanned it, then lent out the scanned copy rather than the physical book.
- psnehanshu 4y ago
  For free or for a fee?
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Free
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Not too lazy to reply, though.

readbeard 4y ago

If we work together, I think it would be realistic for us to attain a rollback of most recent one or two copyright term extensions by following a two-pronged strategy: (1) Show politicians on the left how copyright term extensions have largely amounted to a transfer of wealth from the public to large corporations, and (2) Show politicians on the right how rolling back to an earlier version of copyright would reduce the interference of the government in the lives of its citizens and return to a vision for IP that better adheres to that presented by the Constitution and defended by its framers, while leading to a more vibrant and competitive market for new works. Meanwhile, both groups should be assured that a release of many classic works into the public domain would be popular among the vast majority of their constituents. Who's in?

zarzavat 4y ago
Politicians in the US are corrupt. You need a rich person who cares about your cause to bribe them more than the rich businesses with copyrights are currently bribing them. Then the law will be changed.
- readbeard 4y ago
  I disagree. While a rich person's backing would certainly be helpful, I think convincing a couple of politicians with platforms and some clout on each side that spearheading a joint IP reform effort would benefit their political careers would be adequate to get the ball rolling.
zestyping 4y ago
Both of your arguments have merit, and would be convincing if politicians on both sides were driven by logic. Sadly, I'm doubtful that many politicians on the left still have the integrity or power to act against copyright empires. It's even more obvious that politicians on the right no longer care about limited government. They are currently trying to ban books.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

retube 4y ago

I don't understand the outrage here. It sounds like a clear case of copyright infringement with IA profiting from the works of others. Can someone explain the issue?

beej71 4y ago
For me, the outrage is really about the fact that the greater good is clearly (IMHO) served by IA operating like they do (one simultaneous lend per held copy). So copyright law is wrong. And I know it's not the judge's place to say that. If they drop copyright to 15 years and IA stops lending books younger than that, I'd be 100% OK with that outcome, as well. But copyright terms are in the "lifetimes" range, so lending books out that are still under copyright serves the greater good. But since the odds of the US switching to the metric system are about 1000x greater than the odds of us decreasing copyright terms, I'm not holding my breath.

anothernostrich 4y ago

A judge from a dying empire doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

What's with the fbclid tacked on the courtlistener URL. C'mon. Let's just hope IA can afford to pay any judgment entered against it. If the court finds IA had no reasonable grounds to believe this was fair use, then IA has to rebut a presumption of wilful infringement. If they fail, the statutory damages could be substantial. Assume Kahle has calculated the max cost of alleged infringement of 33,000 titles and is not putting the entire archive at risk over a book scanning project.

frankfrankfrank 4y ago

Here comes the memory hole, folks. This copyright claim is just the ruse to break down the wall, with the real purpose being to lay claim to news and internet archiving so that inconvenient news and information can be more easily memory holed without archives existing. Let me put it this way, everyone should start working on decentralized archiving tools and retention of information locally about topics they are particularly interested in. I don’t say that out of the blue.

phendrenad2 4y ago
Uh, you do realize this is just about physical books, right? When I want to read the latest news I don't go to my local bookstore and grab a book on news, I get that from the internet, which the Internet Archive is perfectly able to archive, as it has nothing to do with this. Sigh.

wkat4242 4y ago

What actually happened? The article is a really confusing read. Edit: found another article that describes it much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300195

daedlanth 4y ago

[dead]

hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago

More background on the case: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive

SuperSandro2000 4y ago

If you are for the people, you are always against the publishers.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

[dead]

whiddershins 4y ago

The comments on here are extremely myopic, as the meme “copyright bad” is firmly lodged in the minds of thousands or millions of people who don’t rely on it to make a living. It can’t imagine a more practical or metaphysical violation of copyright than to literally copy the pages of a book and then distribute copies of this book to however many people you feel like. I guess you could violate the rights more by taking the author’s name off of it. This mad ideology is destructive and blind. No one has a right to the product of another’s labor. A dysfunctional system doesn’t change the ethics here.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

drawkbox 4y ago

Luckily libraries existed before copyright / IP was too top heavy otherwise they wouldn't exist. This content and products are part of culture. An online library should be allowed to exist. You can go to public libraries and in many they have ebook checkout systems. Why not Internet Archive, one of the most valuable online resources next to Wikipedia and data sources.

pontifier 4y ago

I'm a little bit worried about how this might affect Murfie. I've been an advocate for years for a model where people own physical media, and have access to the media they own in any way they see fit. The way this ruling is structured, it paves the way to make even ripping your own CDs to your MP3 player illegal. As common as it is, this right has never actually been tested in court.

phendrenad2 4y ago
That's just sensationalism. If they wanted to go after ripping CDs, they would have gone after that when CDs actually had more than negligible sales. CDs are a dead format in 2023. Most music isn't even released on CD anymore.
- pontifier 4y ago
  It's the way the judge references the ReDigi case that is troubling to me. It's been a while since I read it, but I thought ReDigi found that digital copies don't have the same first sale rights that physical copies do. This judge seems to think that the first sale doctrine isn't even applicable. The Google book scanning case had previously indicated that giving full copies of scanned books to the owners clearly fell under fair use in part because of the first sale doctrine. This ruling seems to ignore that. I do truly hope you're right though.

djha-skin 4y ago

Something developers don't seem to understand about the media business is just how much they care about copyright law. One huge thing that was drilled into my skull working for SlingTV: a work comprises the actual data and the medium to which it is affixed. When 11 million people used our DVRs to record the super bowl, we had to store 11 million copies on disc. Of the same exact footage. That we ourselves originally broadcast to them. Our lawyers told us not even to try messing with this. Don't try to share copies they said, we'll get sued off of our faces. So I'm not surprised that a judge ruled this way when looking at the facts. From a media person's perspective, digitally copying the work that was in print is making a second copy. Whether or not you think this is dumb, it's the reality under which we work. I've learned to be very careful about things like this.

mysterypie 4y ago
> we had to store 11 million copies on disc The reason you were allowed to store 11 million copies is because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled[1] in 1984 that you were permitted to make copies of TV shows to watch later on your VCR. And this was reputedly because some of the supreme court judges had VCRs — which had been spreading lightning fast at the time — and understood the concept and wanted to find or create a legal argument to permit such copying. Just imagine if VCR adoption had been slower, and that the judges had not yet tried out that newfangled invention for home recording, and they had ruled that personal copies weren't allowed. Then today, you'd have been making 11 million illegal copies. It's amusing to think about whether making a single copy available to 11 million users would have been much less legal risk in that scenario. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
- raynr 4y ago
  To be more specific, the Betamax case is the reason a specific person can store a copy of a TV recording that they made, for timeshifting purposes, because SCOTUS held that that person's use of the recorded TV content, in that circumstance, was fair dealing with respect to the recorded TV content. And that's it. If you provide a recording service, you had better be as close as you possibly can to that fact matrix. Any hint that it's you, and not your users, who are doing the copying, would attract the wolves. Also, this focus on who is doing the copying has been looked at enough in different jurisdictions around the world that it's probably not worth the risk testing it. Germany (Save.TV, Shift.TV), Japan (Rokuraku II), Australia (Optus TV Now). Don't quote me on these, this is off the cuff.

retrocryptid 4y ago

Probably worth it to give this a scan before commenting on what the judiciary is supposed to do (or is allowed to do): https://www.loc.gov/item/90898138/ https://www.loc.gov/item/90898138/ And I was surprised to find the Wikipedia section on Judicial Review was pretty reasonable: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_S...

afrcnc 4y ago

For who is not aware, this is how America works: Corporations have more rights than you! Rich people have more rights than you!

sobkas 4y ago

Every law in USA was made with overwhelming input from lobbyists and other monied interest. What law will be passed depends on will of oligarchs not public. Every law that accidentally helps people not oligarchs can be stopped by activists judges either in state or federal courts(including Supreme Court). Because judges in the end serve corporations/oligarchs first and ideology second. The Federalist Society? This stems from the fact that politicians that choose them(and if they are elected by public they can be bought directly) were also bought.

viscountchocula 4y ago

Is there potentially room here for the Librarian of Congress to bless CDL? Or would that require an act of Congress?

navane 4y ago

It's weird how a bank can loan out 8-20 times what is deposited, but if I can lend out a single copy of a book I have? The banking system runs the backbone of the economy, but god forbid if everyone has access to all books? What if we use books as a payment method, can we then use the same leverage banks do?

orangepurple 4y ago
Books cannot be used to pay government taxes or settle debts which are the factors that drive the value of a currency. As a recent example Putin tried to force the EU to pay Russia for energy in rubles.
lucb1e 4y ago
That's not how that works. Non-central banks don't print money the way that servers send out bytes. There is also no copyright on bank notes that prohibits you from selling copies of them online. It's also not the bank's fault that you feel copyright law is unjust, it's got nothing to do with each other.

animitronix 4y ago

You know what to do boys, let's make it happen.

vuciv1 4y ago

This ruling against the Internet Archive really rubs me the wrong way. IA has been a godsend for countless students, researchers, and knowledge enthusiasts across the globe. Sure, they might've pushed the boundaries of fair use, but isn't that how progress and innovation happen? It's disheartening to see that the court sided with big publishers, who are already raking in considerable profits, instead of considering the broader implications of IA's mission to democratize access to knowledge. In a world where information is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, IA is one of the few bastions of hope for more equitable access to books and resources. I worry about the chilling effect this decision could have on other projects aiming to push the envelope in terms of digital content distribution. Are we just going to hand over our collective knowledge to the highest bidder? I get the need to protect copyright holders, but this ruling feels like a step back for the open access movement and the democratization of knowledge. We need more innovative solutions to bridge the digital divide, not less.

cosmojg 4y ago

blows the dust off a seedbox and dons an eye patch Arrr!

fear_and_coffee 4y ago

[dead]

DragonL80 4y ago

This is how copyright law is broken. It offers artists next to no protection. https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac Edit: it really only benefits large companies who have managed to exploit it.

ouraf 4y ago

I hate to be devil's advocate, but archive.org has a problem with curation of their free library. Some stuff there breaks some terms of service of the original owners, like the leaked PS2 SDK https://archive.org/details/ps2_sdks https://archive.org/details/ps2_sdks, old and irrelevant as it may be today. Or cracked games that are still availiable online https://archive.org/details/gtasa210apk https://archive.org/details/gtasa210apk I wish them to stay providing service, but maybe a quick checkup about "why is this stored here" or "isn't any other site more capable or well equipped to store and defend the right to access this content" would help giving it more of a defense against copyright holders