6 ms·

The Ruling That Threatens the Future of Libraries

118 points by mdp2021 4y ago

webmaven 4y ago
https://archive.md/HQy7d https://archive.md/HQy7d
WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
Public libraries have been an unparalleled good for generations. They'd never have existed at all if publishers of old had the power and political influence that modern publishers have today. Huge global publishers are thugs and modern copyright laws are their cudgel. Aaron Swartz could attest to that, if he were alive to do so.
- api 4y ago
  How many books would exist if authors were never paid? I guess a few would. There are authors with trust funds. But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard? The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution, which would if normalized end writing as a profession. Of course with AIs able to generate convincing text on demand it all might be water under the bridge now. That’s going to flood the market with noise at the very least.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    How many music bands would exist if the authors never got paid? How many games? How many pictures? How many photographs? There are thriving communities of people who do all those things without trust funds, and never getting paid for it either. Or getting paid for commissions rather than for duplication. Take a look: https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.etsy.com/ https://www.etsy.com/ Even books and stories: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/
    - api 4y ago
      > There are thriving communities of people who do all those things without trust funds, and never getting paid for it either. I know this isn’t the intent, but any time this point is made I always hear it as deeply entitled. “The slaves love what they do!” I have a generally visceral reaction to anything that argues against paying workers for their work, or that argues that we can remove systems whereby workers are paid and magic will happen. Even if the systems we have are very flawed, replacing them with nothing isn’t an improvement. I used to believe all that 90s cyber anarchist stuff. Then I watched the trajectory of the music industry. Now when I hear the old slogan “information wants to be free” I translate that mentally as “I want other peoples’ labor to be free to me.” There is no longer a music industry. There is no longer a journalism industry. Pretty soon there will no longer be a book industry. We’ve decided we don’t want to pay for those kinds of things, so I guess we won’t have them. … or more likely they will all be ad supported or funded to push some billionaire or government’s agenda. We know what that hellscape looks like.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        > I have a generally visceral reaction to anything that argues against paying workers for their work I do as well. I wonder to what degree though the publishers are still representing the interests of their authors when they go after archive.org. It would be interesting to ask some authors what their feelings are regarding publishers going after book lending, libraries, etc.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        > There is no longer a music industry. There is no longer a journalism industry. Pretty soon there will no longer be a book industry. We’ve decided we don’t want to pay for those kinds of things, so I guess we won’t have them Although, let us not forget that the context here is lending, its legitimacy and its impact to industries. Libraries - including bibliothecae, hemerothecae, discothecae, mediathecae - predate those industrial crisis: people could consult books, periodicals, records and media freely, and yet the industry was running - people bought anyway. The crisis in the music industry, in the journalism industry and in the publishing industry (etc.) are more probably related to situational factors, involving quality, competition, habit shift, infrastructure.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    Given how small the sales of a typical book are, there's a strong argument to be made that "if authors were never paid" is a fair description of current reality.
    - api 4y ago
      Things can always get worse.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Agree, but I don't see how it's the fault of archive.org.
        mdp2021 4y ago
        Put it like that: uneducated people will more easily disregard paying for content, and fighting structures that promote education will worsen that phenomenon.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It's certainly true that a lot out authors fall into one of three categories: - They're delusional about the financial rewards - It's a hobby/compulsion, they like being an author, etc. even though it pays next to nothing most of the time - It's a reputational boost for their consulting, speaking engagements, or even regular employment
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution, which would if normalized end writing as a profession It was about an alleged loss of revenues which clashes at least with the fact that libraries are a "consolidated" practice, and it ended with a judge decreeing that you cannot provide remote consultation of material just because you have the item locally. People have been buying books even when those books are freely accessible in libraries - since libraries existed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - haswell 4y ago
    > How many books would exist if authors were never paid? This sets up a logical fallacy of false dichotomy: that the existence of certain forms of lending lead to an author never getting paid. So while the answer might be that we’d have far fewer books than we have now, the premise is one that cannot be taken seriously, i.e. the reality is not one where authors never get paid. I think an interesting question to ask is: how many authors would exist if there were never libraries? Authors commonly grew up spending all of their time in libraries. It’s what sparked their love of books, and that spark eventually became more books. They’re often the first to tell us how much they value libraries and the role that they play. Yes, authors should be paid for their work. But applying binary thought to the consideration of how authors should be paid and the role of libraries is guaranteed to lead to an incomplete understanding of the situation.
    - rhapsodic 4y ago
      [dead]
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I mean the same argument could be made re: the publishers as gatekeepers. (And it's why I'm generally a proponent of self-publishing even if the quality control isn't there). For example, I can't see one of the big publishers happily publishing a treatise on how they're killing innovation. One of the little ones, certainly. (Beacon probably would). > But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard? Do we want only the voices of those who can present their work in a palatable money making way to data analysts and C-suite types to be heard?
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    > How many books would exist if authors were never paid? We may find out soon enough. Book consumption, book stores ... seem to be circling the drain. I'd love to be shown to be wrong though. If the entire publishing industry too is in descent, I suspect they will only get more obnoxious trying to cling to their last profits. Of course we'll need Archive.org even more then and after.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      At least for non-fiction, I wonder how long we'll continue to cling to the 250 page minimums that publishers clearly want. Pretty much every other type of non-fiction text (and often other media) I'm involved with has gone on a serious weight loss plan. I can't believe we'll just keep publishing multi-hundred page books on topics that often don't deserve it.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    From what I've heard, writer's income looks like a power-law distribution — you get a few lottery winners like Rowling, but most authors, even most of the ones you've heard of, earn so little from the writing that it's a second job. Even ignoring AI, the maximum possible market for writers is also quite small: If every single person buys a new book every week, even if this money is evenly distributed so that every author gets £12,000 per year (fantastic if you're living where The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is set, not so much when you're living where the series author is based), that's a maximum of about 34,667 authors worldwide, which I think is about the number of agricultural workers in just famously small and not-agricultural Singapore[0]. Personally I am of the opinion that arts should be funded mainly by government grants, though not entirely from them as free markets do at least help align production with demand. [0] take with a pinch of salt, the stats (page 72) look like they're rounded to 0.1% and I've not read the details: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2018humandevelopmentstatisticalupdatepdf.pdf https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2018humandevelop...
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >writer's income looks like a power-law distribution That's at least directionally true with most creative fields. (Leaving aside the people working for companies doing creative stuff as a day job.) The exact shape will vary of course. I suspect very few poets are making big bucks. Government grants can be problematic although probably less so at the local level (on average).
  - rainsford 4y ago
    > The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution... I'm generally not in the "information wants to be free" camp, but I don't think "unlimited digital distribution" was what IA and libraries were doing. Instead, they linked the number of digital copies to the number of physical copies they had, effectively giving them another way to loan out books they had already purchased. Publishers predictably didn't like that, because they wanted to charge libraries again for the privileged of loaning out ebook versions of the books they already had, at much less favorable terms than they had sold the physical books to libraries as far as I understand. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that authors and publishers should get paid for their work. I'm much less convinced it's a good idea that they be able to repeatedly gouge underfunded public libraries that want to embrace new ways of lending out their books.
    - Planktonne 4y ago
      > Instead, they linked the number of digital copies to the number of physical copies they had, effectively giving them another way to loan out books they had already purchased. That's what they had been doing, for years. Publishers grumbled, but didn't file lawsuits. It wasn't until the 'National Emergency Library', when IA decided to unilaterally ignore the 'controlled' part of digital lending, that the suit was filed.
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        Yes, but the lawsuit does not restrict itself to the NEL. The ruling against IA spends most of it's time establishing why Controlled Digital Lending itself is illegal, and then mentions "oh and they also didn't strictly enforce the owned-to-loaned ratio anyway." My guess is that the publishers would have sued with or without the NEL; they were just waiting to accrue as many infringements as they could in order to force a quick settlement. If you sue immediately there's less damage than if you wait so you can sue for multiple infringements over the whole statute of limitations (3 years AFAIK).
        Planktonne 4y ago
  - 35208654 4y ago
    > How many books would exist if authors were never paid? Authorship is centuries older than the modern copyright regime we suffer under. You present a false dichotomy.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Authorship prior to copyright was done via patronage by the elites in society or by the elites themselves. I don't necessarily see that as a preferable situation. Is there a different model that we could work under that allows a person to have a primarily artistic creative profession (e.g. artist, writer, photographer) and be able to make a living doing it that doesn't require the gatekeeping of government or another wealthy patron?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - katbyte 4y ago
    Lots of books (and music/plays) were written before copyright existed, so my guess is lots.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Well, we don't have to think about that counterfactual, because that's the world we already live in. Copyright functionally does not protect the rights of all artists. It only protects artists that are large and well-known enough to retain ownership over their work. The vast majority of artists are not that large. The vast majority of publishers know this, and thus they demand ownership up-front as a policy. Any contractual obligations to return ownership at the end of a publishing period will be subverted in a way that most benefits them and harms the author. If copyright were inalienable - i.e. there were legal maximums on how much you could transfer to a publisher at once, or the rights reversion regime were stronger - then maybe I'd be on the other side of this debate. As it stands copyright is just lunch money being given to bullied kids. The IA did not want unlimited distribution[0], they wanted digital first sale. Publishers have been adament that first sale ends where the bits start, and courts have almost unanimously agreed with them. Normalizing Controlled Digital Lending would not do any more "damage" to writers than physical libraries already do. Which, BTW, is not actually damage. Writers absolutely love librarians because they bring more readers into their back catalogue; publishers hate them because they represent a loss of control. Writers and publishers have different business models: a writer makes money when they sell copies of their work, but a publisher makes money when they control that work. So libraries benefit the writers at the expense of publishers. Totally agree with you on AI; the discoverability problems that self-published writers already face are getting worse with the ability to generate "genuine fake[1]" spam books. [0] The National Emergency Library stunt notwithstanding. [1] "Genuine fake" is a term for "counterfeit goods that look and function similarly to the real thing".
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "I guess a few would." The wider issue isn't over whether authors—or anyone for that matter—should or not be paid for work done (of course they should). Rather, it's over the unfair and inequitable nature of copyright law and how sleazeball publishers take undue advantage of it. We need to keep in mind how these unreasonable copyright laws came into existence. They were framed in the 1880s by Victor Hugo and cohorts at a time when the average citizen would have had no concept of what copyright actually was let alone have had any notion of violating it. Aurhors such as Hugo and cohorts were principally targeting unscrupulous publishers (usually printers) in other countries who stole works holus-bolus and published them without paying any royalties whatsoever. They were not obliged to pay as what they were doing in their own countries was perfectly legal (they weren't violating their own weak copyright laws and no local citizen's copyright had been violated). So when the Berne Copyright Convention Treaty of 1886 came into force it was essentially unknown to the average citizen, and even for the few who knew of its existence, it was essentially irrelevant. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out what wrong here, that is, at least as far as the public was concerned (of course, authors and publishers loved it and they made a killing). The lobbying for and creation of the Treaty was completely one-sided and essentially without opposition, the authors/publishers got everything they had wished for. Even by the standards of the day what publishers ended up with would have been deemed unacceptable if the then citizens had known about and understood the Treaty's wide-ranging ramifications. That the 1886 Berne Copyright Treaty started from such a high one-sided base with a small group of authors and publishers in complete control and ruling the roost has made it almost impossible to achieve meaningful copyright reform. With this small, powerful and well-funded group in control it meant that copyright was locked up and untouchable for the next one hundred years—that is until about the mid 1980s when the first 'challenges' to its rule came about with electronic data (actually, the first was a decade or so earlier when the Xerox copier became widely available). What so affonts publishers so much is that they've ruled supreme and without challenge (except for spats amongst themselves) for a century. They're not used to being challenged as with other businesses so they've never had to conduct themselves in a proper ethnical and buisness-like way (they've behaved so badly for so long they don't realize how bad their behavior is). Hence, it's little wonder they're now behaving as even bigger asholes than before electronic publishing and the internet. You also need to consider that publishers have not only been screwing the public with high prices through use of monopolistic practices but also they've screwed authors and content creators from the outset. Correct, these sleazeballs have been screwing those most rightfully deserving of royaltes for years.
- Amezarak 4y ago
  Modern public libraries are mostly just public entertainment centers for the latest movies, video games, and ghostwritten novels. In many library systems, the books that were the whole foundational reason for their existence have been pulped (literally, this is a source of income for libraries.) Even very notorious classical works are frequently available only though ILL and often not even then. I honestly don't have much sympathy for them. If the situation is that bad for classical works, the situation for works of niche technical, scientific, and local merit is even worse. The amount of works that have been irretrievably lost because they were deliberately destroyed by public librarians is enormous. They've burned through every bit of credit and faith I had for them. I do not see any value in public repositories of the latest John Grisham novels or the latest $POLITICIAN_X campaign book that will be forgotten in six months. The public should not be paying for them.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    You seem to be blaming public libraries for giving the public what they want. I agree that public consumption has been trending anti-intellectual but I don't see how libraries are to blame. Your ire should be directed at modern society. Unfortunately that's a rather broad and manifold thing to dissect to determine where the problems lie.
    - Amezarak 4y ago
      People have always loved pulp fiction. I love pulp fiction. Reading pulp fiction has always been popular. That doesn't mean it belongs in libraries. Librarians made a conscious decision to shift their focus into providing public entertainment rather than public education. We went from the libraries also providing our "pulp fiction" as an extra service(for lack of a better word) to practically only providing our pulp fiction, and focusing almost entirely on that. Even in terms of cultural trends, librarians have a shared responsibility to guide the public. And they did. These decisions are not made solely based on the least-checked-out books but also on ideological factors - what they think is good for the public. To my larger point, you cannot expect me to shed tears over publishers harming your ability to lend books because of your status as the sacred gatekeeper of public education when you've already abdicated that role. I think there is tremendous public good in free public education. I don't think there is much public good in free public entertainment.
boomboomsubban 4y ago
Some recent discussions on the topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35272708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35272708 Remember, this ruling is about controlled digital lending as a whole. The pandemic National Emergency Library was barely mentioned by the judge.
photochemsyn 4y ago
It's a bit amusing that copyright law supporters always go to the 'think of the authors who need to get paid' when at present, copyright extends to 70 years AFTER the author's death IIRC, or 95 years after date of publication if it was a contract job. In contrast, patents are only valid for 20 years after patent publication, for good reasons (a limited period encourages technological development and prevents patent squatting). Right now, we have large corporate publishers squatting on copyright to prevent dissemination of works that should really have been in the public domain decades ago. Cutting copyright periods in half (at least) makes a lot of sense.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Books can be "discovered" quite a bit later in a way that patents generally are not. That said, cutting copyright length significantly makes sense to me whatever the details.
  - hotstickyballs 4y ago
    If the motivation of copyright is to make it worthwhile to write then being discovered later isn’t really a factor
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > should really have been in the public domain decades ago A good occasion to note the parallel context of books not being reprinted. Last time I wanted to buy copies of works of a prominent author to gift them around, and was told "Impossible - out of print": weeks ago. Texts which are not protected by "pre-emptive" availability (esp. electronic) somehow disappear - Michael S. Hart (Project Gutenberg) was right.
  - retrac 4y ago
    I recently wanted to look something up related to Mesopotamia. Well into the weeds of scholarship. The only transcription of the text I wanted as far as I could determine was in a book written in the 1930s of which there are only a handful of copies. A local university library had it thankfully. The author died half a century ago. While it would technically be legal here for a library to copy one of their copies for archival purposes should it finally disintegrate, the knowledge is on the precipice of being lost. There's absolutely no justification whatsoever for that book still being under copyright. I doubt harms like that were even considered at all by my own government here in Canada when the copyright term was recently extended 20 years. For some reason when people think copyright they think pulp trash of the last few years. Maybe copyright should only be a few years then?
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
This isn't news. It's commentary on a ruling that's been discussed to death and most everyone recognizes the IA forfeit their case the moment they started the NEL.
- matwood 4y ago
  Not exactly. The NEL likely pushed publishers to file, but that wasn't what the case was about. The IA lost when they admitted they had no controls in place with library partners - meaning they were not even doing CDL as they themselves defined. And, they had a clear profit motive, the worst of which is linking to BWB (imagine if they had linked to a publishers site for the print copy instead). The IA playing fast and loose is where the fault lies. CDL implemented as defined could have been an interesting case, but that's not what this was.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "And, they had a clear profit motive," Uh?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > This isn't news // discussed to death // most everyone recognizes We are not restricted to "«news»" in that sense, and the submitted "«commentary»" also provides information that was not explicit in past sources. // And part of a matter very much alive. // The case has hit the concept of digital lending on the base of physical possession.
trinsic2 4y ago
> But with CDL, the IA does not loan out more digital or physical copies than the IA has purchased. The Internet Archive also argues that there’s no evidence this lending has affected the publishers’ profits, which the judge concluded was irrelevant to the underlying legal matter. This is true. The judge is saying that the legal matter is different from the actual possibility of harm. Has anyone considered the possibility of bringing a "suit in equity" petition against these companies to provide proof that there are profits lost and then requesting that case regarding the legal matter of copyright violation be put on hold pending the petition? Since the matter of profit loss is the center piece to the argument, why cant there be some kind of conformation of loss to make these kinds of cases lose merit?
hilbert42 4y ago
As bad as this decision is perhaps it's been necessary. We need a showdown over copyright before the public finally wakes up and realizes that existing copyright law is unfair and inequitable. It's only when complaints from the public arrive on mass at the feet of legislators will they finally take action. Hopefully, this decision will increase the likelihood of that happening. Alternatively, with such decisions continuing to maintain the status quo over copyright, and with the rage of those committed to copyright reform deepening, discontent could widen to the extent where copyright law is simply ignored altogether and that policing it becomes impossible—copyright anarchy will then reign. We are already at the beginning of the end of the copyright wars and publishers are still acting in ways that will ultimately ensure they'll end up on the losing side. As a result of this decision, don't be surprised to see a fork of the Internet Archive created in some favorable jurisdiction along the lines of Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub. If that were to happen then it would serve these miserable the publishers damn well right as they have been acting as greedy unreasonable shits for many decades.
- codecutter 4y ago
  Why does it have to be worse, before it gets better?
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    Unfortunately, it's often the way of politics, people will often put up with or tolerate a lot of abuse before they snap and go 'riot'. We've seen this often enough down the ages to know it's basically true. Also, there's another important mitigating factor hindering copyright reform. As outspoken copyright reformer Cory Doctorow points out, most people have very little interest in copyright reform as they don't see copyright issues impinging much on their daily lives. Whilst in recent decades copyright has come from a subject that the average person's knowledge of which would hardly fill a sentence to a much talked about topic (at least for a reasonable percentage of the population), the actual details of matters concerned with copyright reform are either difficult to understand or have little relevance—or both. Many know all's not well with copyright but it doesn't affect them sufficiently for them to become involved politically. Essentially, we end up with several camps—the vast majority who'd like to see 'something' done but who are not sufficiently committed to do anything about it (these are the people who've been placated by iTunes and such, as these services offer the path of least resistance). Then there are the pirates (a small but not insubstantial lot), who, almost by definition, have solved their copyright problems. Lastly, there's the tiny numbers of people lobbying seriously for change (like some of us here who are posting to these columns on HN). In opposition we have well funded Big Media and Publishing, with bags of money, they can lobby politicians very effectively, witness the power and extent of existing copyright law in almost every country not to mention WIPO, international copyright treaties, etc. In summary, we reformers are not only heavily outgunned but also we're without reinforcements. For that to change something significant has to happen to stir the wrath of the great unwashed.

118 points by mdp2021 4y ago

https://archive.md/HQy7d https://archive.md/HQy7d

Public libraries have been an unparalleled good for generations. They'd never have existed at all if publishers of old had the power and political influence that modern publishers have today. Huge global publishers are thugs and modern copyright laws are their cudgel. Aaron Swartz could attest to that, if he were alive to do so.

api 4y ago
How many books would exist if authors were never paid? I guess a few would. There are authors with trust funds. But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard? The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution, which would if normalized end writing as a profession. Of course with AIs able to generate convincing text on demand it all might be water under the bridge now. That’s going to flood the market with noise at the very least.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  How many music bands would exist if the authors never got paid? How many games? How many pictures? How many photographs? There are thriving communities of people who do all those things without trust funds, and never getting paid for it either. Or getting paid for commissions rather than for duplication. Take a look: https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/ https://www.etsy.com/ https://www.etsy.com/ Even books and stories: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/
  - api 4y ago
    > There are thriving communities of people who do all those things without trust funds, and never getting paid for it either. I know this isn’t the intent, but any time this point is made I always hear it as deeply entitled. “The slaves love what they do!” I have a generally visceral reaction to anything that argues against paying workers for their work, or that argues that we can remove systems whereby workers are paid and magic will happen. Even if the systems we have are very flawed, replacing them with nothing isn’t an improvement. I used to believe all that 90s cyber anarchist stuff. Then I watched the trajectory of the music industry. Now when I hear the old slogan “information wants to be free” I translate that mentally as “I want other peoples’ labor to be free to me.” There is no longer a music industry. There is no longer a journalism industry. Pretty soon there will no longer be a book industry. We’ve decided we don’t want to pay for those kinds of things, so I guess we won’t have them. … or more likely they will all be ad supported or funded to push some billionaire or government’s agenda. We know what that hellscape looks like.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      > I have a generally visceral reaction to anything that argues against paying workers for their work I do as well. I wonder to what degree though the publishers are still representing the interests of their authors when they go after archive.org. It would be interesting to ask some authors what their feelings are regarding publishers going after book lending, libraries, etc.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > There is no longer a music industry. There is no longer a journalism industry. Pretty soon there will no longer be a book industry. We’ve decided we don’t want to pay for those kinds of things, so I guess we won’t have them Although, let us not forget that the context here is lending, its legitimacy and its impact to industries. Libraries - including bibliothecae, hemerothecae, discothecae, mediathecae - predate those industrial crisis: people could consult books, periodicals, records and media freely, and yet the industry was running - people bought anyway. The crisis in the music industry, in the journalism industry and in the publishing industry (etc.) are more probably related to situational factors, involving quality, competition, habit shift, infrastructure.
- Kalium 4y ago
  Given how small the sales of a typical book are, there's a strong argument to be made that "if authors were never paid" is a fair description of current reality.
  - api 4y ago
    Things can always get worse.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Agree, but I don't see how it's the fault of archive.org.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        Put it like that: uneducated people will more easily disregard paying for content, and fighting structures that promote education will worsen that phenomenon.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    It's certainly true that a lot out authors fall into one of three categories: - They're delusional about the financial rewards - It's a hobby/compulsion, they like being an author, etc. even though it pays next to nothing most of the time - It's a reputational boost for their consulting, speaking engagements, or even regular employment
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution, which would if normalized end writing as a profession It was about an alleged loss of revenues which clashes at least with the fact that libraries are a "consolidated" practice, and it ended with a judge decreeing that you cannot provide remote consultation of material just because you have the item locally. People have been buying books even when those books are freely accessible in libraries - since libraries existed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- haswell 4y ago
  > How many books would exist if authors were never paid? This sets up a logical fallacy of false dichotomy: that the existence of certain forms of lending lead to an author never getting paid. So while the answer might be that we’d have far fewer books than we have now, the premise is one that cannot be taken seriously, i.e. the reality is not one where authors never get paid. I think an interesting question to ask is: how many authors would exist if there were never libraries? Authors commonly grew up spending all of their time in libraries. It’s what sparked their love of books, and that spark eventually became more books. They’re often the first to tell us how much they value libraries and the role that they play. Yes, authors should be paid for their work. But applying binary thought to the consideration of how authors should be paid and the role of libraries is guaranteed to lead to an incomplete understanding of the situation.
  - rhapsodic 4y ago
    [dead]
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I mean the same argument could be made re: the publishers as gatekeepers. (And it's why I'm generally a proponent of self-publishing even if the quality control isn't there). For example, I can't see one of the big publishers happily publishing a treatise on how they're killing innovation. One of the little ones, certainly. (Beacon probably would). > But do we want only the voices of those with trust funds to be heard? Do we want only the voices of those who can present their work in a palatable money making way to data analysts and C-suite types to be heard?
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  > How many books would exist if authors were never paid? We may find out soon enough. Book consumption, book stores ... seem to be circling the drain. I'd love to be shown to be wrong though. If the entire publishing industry too is in descent, I suspect they will only get more obnoxious trying to cling to their last profits. Of course we'll need Archive.org even more then and after.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    At least for non-fiction, I wonder how long we'll continue to cling to the 250 page minimums that publishers clearly want. Pretty much every other type of non-fiction text (and often other media) I'm involved with has gone on a serious weight loss plan. I can't believe we'll just keep publishing multi-hundred page books on topics that often don't deserve it.
- ben_w 4y ago
  From what I've heard, writer's income looks like a power-law distribution — you get a few lottery winners like Rowling, but most authors, even most of the ones you've heard of, earn so little from the writing that it's a second job. Even ignoring AI, the maximum possible market for writers is also quite small: If every single person buys a new book every week, even if this money is evenly distributed so that every author gets £12,000 per year (fantastic if you're living where The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is set, not so much when you're living where the series author is based), that's a maximum of about 34,667 authors worldwide, which I think is about the number of agricultural workers in just famously small and not-agricultural Singapore[0]. Personally I am of the opinion that arts should be funded mainly by government grants, though not entirely from them as free markets do at least help align production with demand. [0] take with a pinch of salt, the stats (page 72) look like they're rounded to 0.1% and I've not read the details: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2018humandevelopmentstatisticalupdatepdf.pdf https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/2018humandevelop...
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >writer's income looks like a power-law distribution That's at least directionally true with most creative fields. (Leaving aside the people working for companies doing creative stuff as a day job.) The exact shape will vary of course. I suspect very few poets are making big bucks. Government grants can be problematic although probably less so at the local level (on average).
- rainsford 4y ago
  > The IA lawsuit is about the IA using the pandemic as a cudgel to try to force through the idea of unlimited royalty free digital distribution... I'm generally not in the "information wants to be free" camp, but I don't think "unlimited digital distribution" was what IA and libraries were doing. Instead, they linked the number of digital copies to the number of physical copies they had, effectively giving them another way to loan out books they had already purchased. Publishers predictably didn't like that, because they wanted to charge libraries again for the privileged of loaning out ebook versions of the books they already had, at much less favorable terms than they had sold the physical books to libraries as far as I understand. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that authors and publishers should get paid for their work. I'm much less convinced it's a good idea that they be able to repeatedly gouge underfunded public libraries that want to embrace new ways of lending out their books.
  - Planktonne 4y ago
    > Instead, they linked the number of digital copies to the number of physical copies they had, effectively giving them another way to loan out books they had already purchased. That's what they had been doing, for years. Publishers grumbled, but didn't file lawsuits. It wasn't until the 'National Emergency Library', when IA decided to unilaterally ignore the 'controlled' part of digital lending, that the suit was filed.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Yes, but the lawsuit does not restrict itself to the NEL. The ruling against IA spends most of it's time establishing why Controlled Digital Lending itself is illegal, and then mentions "oh and they also didn't strictly enforce the owned-to-loaned ratio anyway." My guess is that the publishers would have sued with or without the NEL; they were just waiting to accrue as many infringements as they could in order to force a quick settlement. If you sue immediately there's less damage than if you wait so you can sue for multiple infringements over the whole statute of limitations (3 years AFAIK).
      - Planktonne 4y ago
- 35208654 4y ago
  > How many books would exist if authors were never paid? Authorship is centuries older than the modern copyright regime we suffer under. You present a false dichotomy.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Authorship prior to copyright was done via patronage by the elites in society or by the elites themselves. I don't necessarily see that as a preferable situation. Is there a different model that we could work under that allows a person to have a primarily artistic creative profession (e.g. artist, writer, photographer) and be able to make a living doing it that doesn't require the gatekeeping of government or another wealthy patron?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- katbyte 4y ago
  Lots of books (and music/plays) were written before copyright existed, so my guess is lots.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Well, we don't have to think about that counterfactual, because that's the world we already live in. Copyright functionally does not protect the rights of all artists. It only protects artists that are large and well-known enough to retain ownership over their work. The vast majority of artists are not that large. The vast majority of publishers know this, and thus they demand ownership up-front as a policy. Any contractual obligations to return ownership at the end of a publishing period will be subverted in a way that most benefits them and harms the author. If copyright were inalienable - i.e. there were legal maximums on how much you could transfer to a publisher at once, or the rights reversion regime were stronger - then maybe I'd be on the other side of this debate. As it stands copyright is just lunch money being given to bullied kids. The IA did not want unlimited distribution[0], they wanted digital first sale. Publishers have been adament that first sale ends where the bits start, and courts have almost unanimously agreed with them. Normalizing Controlled Digital Lending would not do any more "damage" to writers than physical libraries already do. Which, BTW, is not actually damage. Writers absolutely love librarians because they bring more readers into their back catalogue; publishers hate them because they represent a loss of control. Writers and publishers have different business models: a writer makes money when they sell copies of their work, but a publisher makes money when they control that work. So libraries benefit the writers at the expense of publishers. Totally agree with you on AI; the discoverability problems that self-published writers already face are getting worse with the ability to generate "genuine fake[1]" spam books. [0] The National Emergency Library stunt notwithstanding. [1] "Genuine fake" is a term for "counterfeit goods that look and function similarly to the real thing".
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "I guess a few would." The wider issue isn't over whether authors—or anyone for that matter—should or not be paid for work done (of course they should). Rather, it's over the unfair and inequitable nature of copyright law and how sleazeball publishers take undue advantage of it. We need to keep in mind how these unreasonable copyright laws came into existence. They were framed in the 1880s by Victor Hugo and cohorts at a time when the average citizen would have had no concept of what copyright actually was let alone have had any notion of violating it. Aurhors such as Hugo and cohorts were principally targeting unscrupulous publishers (usually printers) in other countries who stole works holus-bolus and published them without paying any royalties whatsoever. They were not obliged to pay as what they were doing in their own countries was perfectly legal (they weren't violating their own weak copyright laws and no local citizen's copyright had been violated). So when the Berne Copyright Convention Treaty of 1886 came into force it was essentially unknown to the average citizen, and even for the few who knew of its existence, it was essentially irrelevant. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out what wrong here, that is, at least as far as the public was concerned (of course, authors and publishers loved it and they made a killing). The lobbying for and creation of the Treaty was completely one-sided and essentially without opposition, the authors/publishers got everything they had wished for. Even by the standards of the day what publishers ended up with would have been deemed unacceptable if the then citizens had known about and understood the Treaty's wide-ranging ramifications. That the 1886 Berne Copyright Treaty started from such a high one-sided base with a small group of authors and publishers in complete control and ruling the roost has made it almost impossible to achieve meaningful copyright reform. With this small, powerful and well-funded group in control it meant that copyright was locked up and untouchable for the next one hundred years—that is until about the mid 1980s when the first 'challenges' to its rule came about with electronic data (actually, the first was a decade or so earlier when the Xerox copier became widely available). What so affonts publishers so much is that they've ruled supreme and without challenge (except for spats amongst themselves) for a century. They're not used to being challenged as with other businesses so they've never had to conduct themselves in a proper ethnical and buisness-like way (they've behaved so badly for so long they don't realize how bad their behavior is). Hence, it's little wonder they're now behaving as even bigger asholes than before electronic publishing and the internet. You also need to consider that publishers have not only been screwing the public with high prices through use of monopolistic practices but also they've screwed authors and content creators from the outset. Correct, these sleazeballs have been screwing those most rightfully deserving of royaltes for years.
Amezarak 4y ago
Modern public libraries are mostly just public entertainment centers for the latest movies, video games, and ghostwritten novels. In many library systems, the books that were the whole foundational reason for their existence have been pulped (literally, this is a source of income for libraries.) Even very notorious classical works are frequently available only though ILL and often not even then. I honestly don't have much sympathy for them. If the situation is that bad for classical works, the situation for works of niche technical, scientific, and local merit is even worse. The amount of works that have been irretrievably lost because they were deliberately destroyed by public librarians is enormous. They've burned through every bit of credit and faith I had for them. I do not see any value in public repositories of the latest John Grisham novels or the latest $POLITICIAN_X campaign book that will be forgotten in six months. The public should not be paying for them.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  You seem to be blaming public libraries for giving the public what they want. I agree that public consumption has been trending anti-intellectual but I don't see how libraries are to blame. Your ire should be directed at modern society. Unfortunately that's a rather broad and manifold thing to dissect to determine where the problems lie.
  - Amezarak 4y ago
    People have always loved pulp fiction. I love pulp fiction. Reading pulp fiction has always been popular. That doesn't mean it belongs in libraries. Librarians made a conscious decision to shift their focus into providing public entertainment rather than public education. We went from the libraries also providing our "pulp fiction" as an extra service(for lack of a better word) to practically only providing our pulp fiction, and focusing almost entirely on that. Even in terms of cultural trends, librarians have a shared responsibility to guide the public. And they did. These decisions are not made solely based on the least-checked-out books but also on ideological factors - what they think is good for the public. To my larger point, you cannot expect me to shed tears over publishers harming your ability to lend books because of your status as the sacred gatekeeper of public education when you've already abdicated that role. I think there is tremendous public good in free public education. I don't think there is much public good in free public entertainment.

boomboomsubban 4y ago

Some recent discussions on the topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35272708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35272708 Remember, this ruling is about controlled digital lending as a whole. The pandemic National Emergency Library was barely mentioned by the judge.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's a bit amusing that copyright law supporters always go to the 'think of the authors who need to get paid' when at present, copyright extends to 70 years AFTER the author's death IIRC, or 95 years after date of publication if it was a contract job. In contrast, patents are only valid for 20 years after patent publication, for good reasons (a limited period encourages technological development and prevents patent squatting). Right now, we have large corporate publishers squatting on copyright to prevent dissemination of works that should really have been in the public domain decades ago. Cutting copyright periods in half (at least) makes a lot of sense.

ghaff 4y ago
Books can be "discovered" quite a bit later in a way that patents generally are not. That said, cutting copyright length significantly makes sense to me whatever the details.
- hotstickyballs 4y ago
  If the motivation of copyright is to make it worthwhile to write then being discovered later isn’t really a factor
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
mdp2021 4y ago
> should really have been in the public domain decades ago A good occasion to note the parallel context of books not being reprinted. Last time I wanted to buy copies of works of a prominent author to gift them around, and was told "Impossible - out of print": weeks ago. Texts which are not protected by "pre-emptive" availability (esp. electronic) somehow disappear - Michael S. Hart (Project Gutenberg) was right.
- retrac 4y ago
  I recently wanted to look something up related to Mesopotamia. Well into the weeds of scholarship. The only transcription of the text I wanted as far as I could determine was in a book written in the 1930s of which there are only a handful of copies. A local university library had it thankfully. The author died half a century ago. While it would technically be legal here for a library to copy one of their copies for archival purposes should it finally disintegrate, the knowledge is on the precipice of being lost. There's absolutely no justification whatsoever for that book still being under copyright. I doubt harms like that were even considered at all by my own government here in Canada when the copyright term was recently extended 20 years. For some reason when people think copyright they think pulp trash of the last few years. Maybe copyright should only be a few years then?

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

This isn't news. It's commentary on a ruling that's been discussed to death and most everyone recognizes the IA forfeit their case the moment they started the NEL.

matwood 4y ago
Not exactly. The NEL likely pushed publishers to file, but that wasn't what the case was about. The IA lost when they admitted they had no controls in place with library partners - meaning they were not even doing CDL as they themselves defined. And, they had a clear profit motive, the worst of which is linking to BWB (imagine if they had linked to a publishers site for the print copy instead). The IA playing fast and loose is where the fault lies. CDL implemented as defined could have been an interesting case, but that's not what this was.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "And, they had a clear profit motive," Uh?
mdp2021 4y ago
> This isn't news // discussed to death // most everyone recognizes We are not restricted to "«news»" in that sense, and the submitted "«commentary»" also provides information that was not explicit in past sources. // And part of a matter very much alive. // The case has hit the concept of digital lending on the base of physical possession.

trinsic2 4y ago

> But with CDL, the IA does not loan out more digital or physical copies than the IA has purchased. The Internet Archive also argues that there’s no evidence this lending has affected the publishers’ profits, which the judge concluded was irrelevant to the underlying legal matter. This is true. The judge is saying that the legal matter is different from the actual possibility of harm. Has anyone considered the possibility of bringing a "suit in equity" petition against these companies to provide proof that there are profits lost and then requesting that case regarding the legal matter of copyright violation be put on hold pending the petition? Since the matter of profit loss is the center piece to the argument, why cant there be some kind of conformation of loss to make these kinds of cases lose merit?

hilbert42 4y ago

As bad as this decision is perhaps it's been necessary. We need a showdown over copyright before the public finally wakes up and realizes that existing copyright law is unfair and inequitable. It's only when complaints from the public arrive on mass at the feet of legislators will they finally take action. Hopefully, this decision will increase the likelihood of that happening. Alternatively, with such decisions continuing to maintain the status quo over copyright, and with the rage of those committed to copyright reform deepening, discontent could widen to the extent where copyright law is simply ignored altogether and that policing it becomes impossible—copyright anarchy will then reign. We are already at the beginning of the end of the copyright wars and publishers are still acting in ways that will ultimately ensure they'll end up on the losing side. As a result of this decision, don't be surprised to see a fork of the Internet Archive created in some favorable jurisdiction along the lines of Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub. If that were to happen then it would serve these miserable the publishers damn well right as they have been acting as greedy unreasonable shits for many decades.

codecutter 4y ago
Why does it have to be worse, before it gets better?
- hilbert42 4y ago
  Unfortunately, it's often the way of politics, people will often put up with or tolerate a lot of abuse before they snap and go 'riot'. We've seen this often enough down the ages to know it's basically true. Also, there's another important mitigating factor hindering copyright reform. As outspoken copyright reformer Cory Doctorow points out, most people have very little interest in copyright reform as they don't see copyright issues impinging much on their daily lives. Whilst in recent decades copyright has come from a subject that the average person's knowledge of which would hardly fill a sentence to a much talked about topic (at least for a reasonable percentage of the population), the actual details of matters concerned with copyright reform are either difficult to understand or have little relevance—or both. Many know all's not well with copyright but it doesn't affect them sufficiently for them to become involved politically. Essentially, we end up with several camps—the vast majority who'd like to see 'something' done but who are not sufficiently committed to do anything about it (these are the people who've been placated by iTunes and such, as these services offer the path of least resistance). Then there are the pirates (a small but not insubstantial lot), who, almost by definition, have solved their copyright problems. Lastly, there's the tiny numbers of people lobbying seriously for change (like some of us here who are posting to these columns on HN). In opposition we have well funded Big Media and Publishing, with bags of money, they can lobby politicians very effectively, witness the power and extent of existing copyright law in almost every country not to mention WIPO, international copyright treaties, etc. In summary, we reformers are not only heavily outgunned but also we're without reinforcements. For that to change something significant has to happen to stir the wrath of the great unwashed.