5 ms·

Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about

Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for "digital lending" during the pandemic was an essential move in the direction of ensuring that people can access this information regardless of their physical proximity and access to the base source material. I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.

misnome 4y ago
IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards. "First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.
- tristor 4y ago
  Maybe my viewpoint on this is informed by long-standing desire to basically start something like IA but in a way which is protected from the acts of nation-states. The fundamental problem with human society is that the power structures are always co-opted by elites for their own purposes rather than the purposes of society as a whole, it doesn't matter what the system of those power structures is, in all cases they get co-opted. The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.
  - misnome 4y ago
    > it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome I don't think that IA's position was morally or ethically wrong; I would wager a lot of people here would feel the same way. Unfortunately, for this case, morality and ethicality aren't the law. And the law was extremely known, and predictable in which side it would fall on here. This outcome was very, very predictable. IA gambled; possibly their existence; on astronomical odds that they could force a confrontation against the backdrop of the pandemic, and win. Maybe this was the best chance that they would ever get, in which case it was worth trying. But I don't think the anti-copyright revolution was ever going to be triggered by IA giving out free books.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws. Gene Sharp and the advocates of nonviolence have really done a number on a lot of people's heads, giving them the idea that fundamental changes can be accomplished without any disruption or conflict through manifesting a large but peaceful number of people in a symbolic location. The only thing that gets you is a management shakeup. Real revolutions are messy.
      - misnome 4y ago
        > You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws I think you misinterpreted what I wrote. If you had asked me beforehand whether this specific action would trigger a copyright revolution, I'd have said no. I'm not trying to say that they should have followed the (obvious) law, I'm theorising that perhaps IA was willing to gamble their existence that this _would_ trigger that. Sci-hub probably had a much better chance of causing change, but feels like it might also have lost that chance with the multi-year pause to appease the Indian court. Various blocks also seem to have been effective; it's hard to find a working mirror.
        Zuiii 4y ago
- sekai 4y ago
  > IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards. Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.
  - eschaton 4y ago
    That depends entirely on what kind of monetary and non-monetary damages a court may award the plaintiffs. They could easily wind up owing enough money they have to shut down, or even being shut down entirely by a court.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all. I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    "Organize" is hot air without specific plan that has a realistic chance of success. Voting for "copyleft politicians" doesn't, if only because there are so few of them, and further because a candidate has no chance of winning on this as their single issue - it's the rest of their platform that will decide the vote.
    - birdyrooster 4y ago
      How about a pirate party? I think we could find huge amounts of people sympathetic because most consumers would stand to gain materially from it. It's realpolitik and could be effective in creating a culture support for dismantling copyright. That is what was starting to happen when the MPAA and RIAA started litigating against individuals. They didn't just stop because it was ineffective at recouping losses, it was also undermining the faith people had in copyright.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        The feasibility of such a party depends greatly on the electoral system in any given country. In the USA in particular, our combination of single-member districts with FPTP means that third parties are not viable unless they run on some issue that is really resonant with most of society (to the point where it would override voting considerations on basically all other wedge issues). You have to go all the way back to mid-19th century to find a successful example. In Europe this fared better, but as we can still see, PPs enjoy limited electoral popularity even in systems where representation is truly proportional. Same basic problem here - there are way more important issues than just this one, and a party that doesn't make any stand on those other issues will only attract those few that consider its single issue that important. But then the moment it starts taking positions on other stuff, that also turns off part of the potential electorate, and shifts it closer to a more traditional "for everything good against everything bad" kind of party.
birdyrooster 4y ago
I agree we ought to reject the premise of copyright primacy over educational need for people. People with willpower are motivated to create without copyright, but without education they are stunted. Now let’s get some copyleft laws on the books. Stallman clearly has too many skeletons to lead a political campaign or he would have already done it.
carapace 4y ago
> Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, "Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive." > What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak: >> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
justin66 4y ago
> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles. People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.
- simiones 4y ago
  If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.
  - justin66 4y ago
    The IA will appeal the outcome of this case. An appeal by one side or the other was probably inevitable. I don't know as much about the law as the, ahem, "vast majority," but I wonder if the IA will, in the event of a loss, lose anything more than the ability to do something they are found to have done in violation of the law, and some legal fees. I read the decision and saw some reasons for encouragement, but hey... not a lawyer.
  - wahern 4y ago
    Libraries are given a good faith exception from statutory damages. 17 USC § 504(c)(2). I don't think any court has yet had the opportunity to interpret and apply the exception. Nonetheless, there's little reason to believe that the IA's interpretation of Fair Use wasn't in good faith. The court's recent decision deferred the question for later, but we'll find out soon enough. And then we're only just getting started--this case was always destined to be decided on appeal as it poses novel and important legal questions.
simiones 4y ago
It's really not. The copyright system essentially has two serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown notices that are too easy to abuse. But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own. We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged. I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.
  - simiones 4y ago
    If they had extended this program only to 20+ year old books (or whatever they deem fair), I would agree with you, but the sharing program included any book they had archived whatsoever, as far as I have read about this.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      Right, but I'm saying their choices and actions might have been _different_ in a world where the state of copyright law has been entirely upended. It seems crazy to me to make up a hypothetical world that is almost totally different in the key facts, then apply their choices from *this* world, and judge them for that. Their choices seem, at least to me, to be a pretty direct *response to the existing* broken copyright system. I think "it would've been a more fair choice, if they had only put books into their collection that were 20+ years old" is an entirely fair criticism. "I think the current action they took, if taken in a repaired copyright system, would be unethical, therefore this action was unethical" is a mostly irrelevant statement. It's like saying "movie ticket stand-in" anti-segregation protests were unreasonable, because in a hypothetical world where there wasn't segregation it would just prevent a fair theater from operating. It might be true, but it's not relevant because that's not the world that the protests were taking place in!
hgs3 4y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but not IA's risky approach. What did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy assumptions. I'd think a consumer revolt championed by IA would have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive, i.e. "Information wants to be free, digital lending costs nothing. Contact your congressperson about copyright reform."
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure. Copyright (and the de facto right to abuse and extend it) is an existential issue for publishers, but not for consumers. Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords. It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.
ineedasername 4y ago
>Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed. - This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn't risk their existence. Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them. None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.
matwood 4y ago
> what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing > I don't understand the backlash in the comments here I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.
- account42 4y ago
  The first mistake IA made was engaging in CDL aka DRM in the first place. They should have just focused on making things available without restrictions.

misnome 4y ago

IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards. "First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.

tristor 4y ago
Maybe my viewpoint on this is informed by long-standing desire to basically start something like IA but in a way which is protected from the acts of nation-states. The fundamental problem with human society is that the power structures are always co-opted by elites for their own purposes rather than the purposes of society as a whole, it doesn't matter what the system of those power structures is, in all cases they get co-opted. The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.
- misnome 4y ago
  > it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome I don't think that IA's position was morally or ethically wrong; I would wager a lot of people here would feel the same way. Unfortunately, for this case, morality and ethicality aren't the law. And the law was extremely known, and predictable in which side it would fall on here. This outcome was very, very predictable. IA gambled; possibly their existence; on astronomical odds that they could force a confrontation against the backdrop of the pandemic, and win. Maybe this was the best chance that they would ever get, in which case it was worth trying. But I don't think the anti-copyright revolution was ever going to be triggered by IA giving out free books.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws. Gene Sharp and the advocates of nonviolence have really done a number on a lot of people's heads, giving them the idea that fundamental changes can be accomplished without any disruption or conflict through manifesting a large but peaceful number of people in a symbolic location. The only thing that gets you is a management shakeup. Real revolutions are messy.
    - misnome 4y ago
      > You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws I think you misinterpreted what I wrote. If you had asked me beforehand whether this specific action would trigger a copyright revolution, I'd have said no. I'm not trying to say that they should have followed the (obvious) law, I'm theorising that perhaps IA was willing to gamble their existence that this _would_ trigger that. Sci-hub probably had a much better chance of causing change, but feels like it might also have lost that chance with the multi-year pause to appease the Indian court. Various blocks also seem to have been effective; it's hard to find a working mirror.
      - Zuiii 4y ago
sekai 4y ago
> IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards. Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.
- eschaton 4y ago
  That depends entirely on what kind of monetary and non-monetary damages a court may award the plaintiffs. They could easily wind up owing enough money they have to shut down, or even being shut down entirely by a court.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all. I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.

birdyrooster 4y ago
If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
- int_19h 4y ago
  "Organize" is hot air without specific plan that has a realistic chance of success. Voting for "copyleft politicians" doesn't, if only because there are so few of them, and further because a candidate has no chance of winning on this as their single issue - it's the rest of their platform that will decide the vote.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    How about a pirate party? I think we could find huge amounts of people sympathetic because most consumers would stand to gain materially from it. It's realpolitik and could be effective in creating a culture support for dismantling copyright. That is what was starting to happen when the MPAA and RIAA started litigating against individuals. They didn't just stop because it was ineffective at recouping losses, it was also undermining the faith people had in copyright.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      The feasibility of such a party depends greatly on the electoral system in any given country. In the USA in particular, our combination of single-member districts with FPTP means that third parties are not viable unless they run on some issue that is really resonant with most of society (to the point where it would override voting considerations on basically all other wedge issues). You have to go all the way back to mid-19th century to find a successful example. In Europe this fared better, but as we can still see, PPs enjoy limited electoral popularity even in systems where representation is truly proportional. Same basic problem here - there are way more important issues than just this one, and a party that doesn't make any stand on those other issues will only attract those few that consider its single issue that important. But then the moment it starts taking positions on other stuff, that also turns off part of the potential electorate, and shifts it closer to a more traditional "for everything good against everything bad" kind of party.

birdyrooster 4y ago

I agree we ought to reject the premise of copyright primacy over educational need for people. People with willpower are motivated to create without copyright, but without education they are stunted. Now let’s get some copyleft laws on the books. Stallman clearly has too many skeletons to lead a political campaign or he would have already done it.

carapace 4y ago

> Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, "Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive." > What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak: >> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

justin66 4y ago

> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles. People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.

simiones 4y ago
If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.
- justin66 4y ago
  The IA will appeal the outcome of this case. An appeal by one side or the other was probably inevitable. I don't know as much about the law as the, ahem, "vast majority," but I wonder if the IA will, in the event of a loss, lose anything more than the ability to do something they are found to have done in violation of the law, and some legal fees. I read the decision and saw some reasons for encouragement, but hey... not a lawyer.
- wahern 4y ago
  Libraries are given a good faith exception from statutory damages. 17 USC § 504(c)(2). I don't think any court has yet had the opportunity to interpret and apply the exception. Nonetheless, there's little reason to believe that the IA's interpretation of Fair Use wasn't in good faith. The court's recent decision deferred the question for later, but we'll find out soon enough. And then we're only just getting started--this case was always destined to be decided on appeal as it poses novel and important legal questions.

simiones 4y ago

It's really not. The copyright system essentially has two serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown notices that are too easy to abuse. But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own. We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).

ncallaway 4y ago
> But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged. I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.
- simiones 4y ago
  If they had extended this program only to 20+ year old books (or whatever they deem fair), I would agree with you, but the sharing program included any book they had archived whatsoever, as far as I have read about this.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    Right, but I'm saying their choices and actions might have been _different_ in a world where the state of copyright law has been entirely upended. It seems crazy to me to make up a hypothetical world that is almost totally different in the key facts, then apply their choices from *this* world, and judge them for that. Their choices seem, at least to me, to be a pretty direct *response to the existing* broken copyright system. I think "it would've been a more fair choice, if they had only put books into their collection that were 20+ years old" is an entirely fair criticism. "I think the current action they took, if taken in a repaired copyright system, would be unethical, therefore this action was unethical" is a mostly irrelevant statement. It's like saying "movie ticket stand-in" anti-segregation protests were unreasonable, because in a hypothetical world where there wasn't segregation it would just prevent a fair theater from operating. It might be true, but it's not relevant because that's not the world that the protests were taking place in!

hgs3 4y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but not IA's risky approach. What did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy assumptions. I'd think a consumer revolt championed by IA would have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive, i.e. "Information wants to be free, digital lending costs nothing. Contact your congressperson about copyright reform."

anigbrowl 4y ago
A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure. Copyright (and the de facto right to abuse and extend it) is an existential issue for publishers, but not for consumers. Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords. It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.

ineedasername 4y ago

>Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed. - This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn't risk their existence. Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them. None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.

matwood 4y ago

> what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing > I don't understand the backlash in the comments here I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.

account42 4y ago
The first mistake IA made was engaging in CDL aka DRM in the first place. They should have just focused on making things available without restrictions.