8 ms·

Publishers secure widespread support in copyright battle with Internet Archive

85 points by gslin 3y ago

ilamont 3y ago
The article concentrates on the briefs by RIAA, MPA, and U.S. politicians - the moneybags and perennial bad guys whom everyone loves to hate. It barely mentions the brief by authors groups and other creative organizations, from the Author's Guild to the North American Nature Photography Association. From the summary: IA has created a vast unauthorized online database of literary works that anyone in the world can access for free, which differs from the most flagrantly illegal pirate websites only by reason of its residing in a U.S. not-for-profit. ... IA’s infringements have caused and will continue to cause significant harm to Amici’s members. Many members’ works are part of the “long tail” of older published works that earn much of their revenue from licensed electronic uses rather than sales of new copies. Because authors and many other creators today generally earn so little from their writing,3 they rely on income from the long tail, and even a seemingly minor reduction in such income will materially impact the authors, visual artists, photographers, and other creators who depend on the income for survival. Further, creators and their publishers will find it more challenging, if not impossible, to bring older titles back into print, whether in physical or electronic form, if they must compete with free Open Library-generated ebooks from IA. Finally, such free Open Library-generated ebooks will also create a direct market substitute for authorized lending by libraries outside the U.S., which lending – unlike Open Library – generates royalties for creators under the public lending right recognized by most other developed countries. Source: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.223.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.609... Like many people on HN, I regularly use the wayback machine or other parts of the Internet Archive to track the history of websites or read out-of-copyright and public domain works. Sharing this information is important and should be continued. I also believe in the concept of "Fair Use" for sharing and discussing excerpts of more current works. But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized. Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped these rights and the laws of the United States. Even when it was asked to repeatedly stop, he continued. Far from this being a "crusade" against IA, it's the logical outcome of one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law and the people who work very hard to bring new books into being. The collateral damage to the many noble aspects of the Internet Archive is bad. I truly hope it survives.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized. 'Republishing' is a bad faith description here. What IA is doing is not 'republishing' but offering 'Controlled Digital Lending' with time limited lending for scanned versions of items they posses digital copies of. This is happening in the context of the same publishers refusing to sell lend-able digitial versions of books to libraries at the same price as physical books. Book lending is a concept what these publishers are actively working to eradicate and this lawsuit is an important part of that.
  - aerostable_slug 3y ago
    > 'Republishing' is a bad faith description here. What IA is doing is not 'republishing' but offering 'Controlled Digital Lending' with time limited lending for scanned versions of items they posses digital copies of. The IA does both. It's pretty easy to upload copyrighted works that aren't kept behind borrow-walls, and people do it all the time. The IA doesn't seem super motivated to change that. It would indeed be unfortunate if the baby were thrown out with the bathwater, but come on: I typed "site:archive.org cranberries" on DuckDuckGo and was directed to a downloadable track-by-track rip of the Irish band's greatest hits album. That's tough to defend with a straight face.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > It's pretty easy to upload copyrighted works that aren't kept behind borrow-walls, and people do it all the time. The IA doesn't seem super motivated to change that. Neither do most sites hosting user-submitted content. IA responds to DMCA takedowns. What are they supposed to do if you haven't issued one to them?
    - n9 3y ago
      It is basically the same with the books. The IA's book hosting system has DRM, yes, but it is Adobe's ADE which has been well and truly cracked. If you have a bit of patience and tech knowledge you can pull a full PDF of any book on IA in about 20 second's time. They could do a better job restricting access and I figure they wouldn't be in this much trouble.
tombert 3y ago
Honestly, I feel like the Internet Archive is playing with fire in a lot of stuff. I won't link it here, but last night I saw a repo that was hosting hundreds of emulator-compatible Switch games, even more recent stuff like Super Mario Wonder, that was easy to download. Also, just a ton of full TV shows are directly available to download, often direct blu-ray rips. This really has started to make the Internet Archive one of the best places to pirate media. It's starting to have a comparable selection to ThePirateBay, but without any ads for "Hot Milfs In Your Area". I love IA, but I think they really need to start cracking down on this stuff, because if they don't I think it's going to prompt even more lawsuits.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  It seems like a wonderful opportunity to talk about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence and DRM's effect on society's cultural memory. Even the most long-lived individual or most successful of corporations has a finite lifespan, and we have no societal escrow for the digital media which becomes a part of our lexicons. IA seems to be taking that roll, regardless. It would be nice if we could work out a framework within which to make it official and sanctioned. Copyright is a social construct, not a law of nature, and at least in theory we could band together and change the terms. Unfortunately, artificial scarcity is behind a lot of business plans.
  - StressedDev 3y ago
    The Switches games are all available on the Switch's store. There is no good reason to pirate them. As usual, pirates make excuses for ripping off creators.
    - timschmidt 3y ago
      Oh, you mean like the online stores for the 3DS and WiiU?
      - tombert 3y ago
beej71 3y ago
IA is worth more to humanity than these assholes will ever be.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  In that case IA can write their own books
  - DaSHacka 3y ago
    The publishers aren't writing the books either. A more apt comeback would be "then they can publish and distribute their own books", except they already do.
coderatlarge 3y ago
If society invested in a system of tubes reaching from libraries to all homes, each tube containing a sequence of small mirrors and lenses capable of bouncing an image all the way down the tube, and eventually into a home that connected its viewer to that tube; and the libraries kept the physical books they owned in small, well-lighted spaces, with page-turning robots, so that the images of the book page could be bounced through the mirror-tubes, and the readers in their homes could signal to the page-turning robots what page to flip to, would it then be ok for people in their homes to read the books physically located in the library, without paying separate remote-viewing licensing fees above and beyond the purchase price of the book? I'm a creator too and I benefit from the protection of intellectual property I create. But I also recognize that my freedom ends where others' begins and that the benefit of society overall must also be weighed, since I didn't just grow up and survive all on my own in the wilds but rather relied on all the other good people that happen to be around me...
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Bravo!
  - coderatlarge 3y ago
    Thanks - now if only someone knew a judge who could be entertained and maybe a little provoked :)
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  This is the kind of insane hypothetical that I keep returning to hacker news for, bravo!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

85 points by gslin 3y ago

The article concentrates on the briefs by RIAA, MPA, and U.S. politicians - the moneybags and perennial bad guys whom everyone loves to hate. It barely mentions the brief by authors groups and other creative organizations, from the Author's Guild to the North American Nature Photography Association. From the summary: IA has created a vast unauthorized online database of literary works that anyone in the world can access for free, which differs from the most flagrantly illegal pirate websites only by reason of its residing in a U.S. not-for-profit. ... IA’s infringements have caused and will continue to cause significant harm to Amici’s members. Many members’ works are part of the “long tail” of older published works that earn much of their revenue from licensed electronic uses rather than sales of new copies. Because authors and many other creators today generally earn so little from their writing,3 they rely on income from the long tail, and even a seemingly minor reduction in such income will materially impact the authors, visual artists, photographers, and other creators who depend on the income for survival. Further, creators and their publishers will find it more challenging, if not impossible, to bring older titles back into print, whether in physical or electronic form, if they must compete with free Open Library-generated ebooks from IA. Finally, such free Open Library-generated ebooks will also create a direct market substitute for authorized lending by libraries outside the U.S., which lending – unlike Open Library – generates royalties for creators under the public lending right recognized by most other developed countries. Source: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.223.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.609... Like many people on HN, I regularly use the wayback machine or other parts of the Internet Archive to track the history of websites or read out-of-copyright and public domain works. Sharing this information is important and should be continued. I also believe in the concept of "Fair Use" for sharing and discussing excerpts of more current works. But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized. Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped these rights and the laws of the United States. Even when it was asked to repeatedly stop, he continued. Far from this being a "crusade" against IA, it's the logical outcome of one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law and the people who work very hard to bring new books into being. The collateral damage to the many noble aspects of the Internet Archive is bad. I truly hope it survives.

shkkmo 3y ago
> But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized. 'Republishing' is a bad faith description here. What IA is doing is not 'republishing' but offering 'Controlled Digital Lending' with time limited lending for scanned versions of items they posses digital copies of. This is happening in the context of the same publishers refusing to sell lend-able digitial versions of books to libraries at the same price as physical books. Book lending is a concept what these publishers are actively working to eradicate and this lawsuit is an important part of that.
- aerostable_slug 3y ago
  > 'Republishing' is a bad faith description here. What IA is doing is not 'republishing' but offering 'Controlled Digital Lending' with time limited lending for scanned versions of items they posses digital copies of. The IA does both. It's pretty easy to upload copyrighted works that aren't kept behind borrow-walls, and people do it all the time. The IA doesn't seem super motivated to change that. It would indeed be unfortunate if the baby were thrown out with the bathwater, but come on: I typed "site:archive.org cranberries" on DuckDuckGo and was directed to a downloadable track-by-track rip of the Irish band's greatest hits album. That's tough to defend with a straight face.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > It's pretty easy to upload copyrighted works that aren't kept behind borrow-walls, and people do it all the time. The IA doesn't seem super motivated to change that. Neither do most sites hosting user-submitted content. IA responds to DMCA takedowns. What are they supposed to do if you haven't issued one to them?
  - n9 3y ago
    It is basically the same with the books. The IA's book hosting system has DRM, yes, but it is Adobe's ADE which has been well and truly cracked. If you have a bit of patience and tech knowledge you can pull a full PDF of any book on IA in about 20 second's time. They could do a better job restricting access and I figure they wouldn't be in this much trouble.

tombert 3y ago

Honestly, I feel like the Internet Archive is playing with fire in a lot of stuff. I won't link it here, but last night I saw a repo that was hosting hundreds of emulator-compatible Switch games, even more recent stuff like Super Mario Wonder, that was easy to download. Also, just a ton of full TV shows are directly available to download, often direct blu-ray rips. This really has started to make the Internet Archive one of the best places to pirate media. It's starting to have a comparable selection to ThePirateBay, but without any ads for "Hot Milfs In Your Area". I love IA, but I think they really need to start cracking down on this stuff, because if they don't I think it's going to prompt even more lawsuits.

timschmidt 3y ago
It seems like a wonderful opportunity to talk about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence and DRM's effect on society's cultural memory. Even the most long-lived individual or most successful of corporations has a finite lifespan, and we have no societal escrow for the digital media which becomes a part of our lexicons. IA seems to be taking that roll, regardless. It would be nice if we could work out a framework within which to make it official and sanctioned. Copyright is a social construct, not a law of nature, and at least in theory we could band together and change the terms. Unfortunately, artificial scarcity is behind a lot of business plans.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  The Switches games are all available on the Switch's store. There is no good reason to pirate them. As usual, pirates make excuses for ripping off creators.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    Oh, you mean like the online stores for the 3DS and WiiU?
    - tombert 3y ago

beej71 3y ago

IA is worth more to humanity than these assholes will ever be.

didntcheck 3y ago
In that case IA can write their own books
- DaSHacka 3y ago
  The publishers aren't writing the books either. A more apt comeback would be "then they can publish and distribute their own books", except they already do.

coderatlarge 3y ago

If society invested in a system of tubes reaching from libraries to all homes, each tube containing a sequence of small mirrors and lenses capable of bouncing an image all the way down the tube, and eventually into a home that connected its viewer to that tube; and the libraries kept the physical books they owned in small, well-lighted spaces, with page-turning robots, so that the images of the book page could be bounced through the mirror-tubes, and the readers in their homes could signal to the page-turning robots what page to flip to, would it then be ok for people in their homes to read the books physically located in the library, without paying separate remote-viewing licensing fees above and beyond the purchase price of the book? I'm a creator too and I benefit from the protection of intellectual property I create. But I also recognize that my freedom ends where others' begins and that the benefit of society overall must also be weighed, since I didn't just grow up and survive all on my own in the wilds but rather relied on all the other good people that happen to be around me...

Turing_Machine 3y ago
Bravo!
- coderatlarge 3y ago
  Thanks - now if only someone knew a judge who could be entertained and maybe a little provoked :)
brokenmachine 3y ago
This is the kind of insane hypothetical that I keep returning to hacker news for, bravo!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]