4 ms·

This has nothing to do with format shifting at all. The IA's normal book-lending service works that way, but the "emergency library" allowed more copies of a bo

This has nothing to do with format shifting at all. The IA's normal book-lending service works that way, but the "emergency library" allowed more copies of a book to be "borrowed" than they actually physically owned. This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 3y ago
This might kill the Internet Archive as a legal entity in the US if the outcome is particularly unfavorable, but LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away. > This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified. Agree to disagree. Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. The Internet Archive could archive and maintain these works in cold storage (both physical and digital), only to make them public again 100-200 years from now, but that would not be keeping with "Universal Access to All Knowledge." Disk and bandwidth is cheap, and the planet is big. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycle/ https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl... [2] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyright-war https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyri... (no affiliation, but a fan and a supporter, and believe in defending public goods)
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  It may indeed kill the project and it's a tragic example of play stupid games win stupid prizes. There have been enough decades of lost lawsuits now that any thinking person ought to know better than to go sticking a fork in the outlet that is distributing copyrighted materials.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldpie 3y ago
    I think you've forgotten what 2020 was like. Libraries were closed. Schools were closed. Book stores were closed. Shipping was majorly slowed. Basically all public services were inaccessible to most people. Now imagine you're the kind of person who who founds and runs The Internet Archive for 25 years, not just another HN commenter bored at work. You're sitting in front of the button to help millions of people regain access to something the pandemic took away from them. Do you push the button, or do you cower away because some rich prick might sue you later? I don't think the IA exists without the kind of person who pushes that button.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      If it turns out to have been a suicide button, then what the the IA needed most was the kind of person who would not have pushed that button.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      I don't actually care what 2020 was like because it isn't germane. No new legislation was passed meaningfully altering copyright law during that timeframe so this is absolutely a case of fuck around and find out, regardless of the optics.
      - coldpie 3y ago
        Well, I expect that rigid respect for the law is why you didn't start the Internet Archive, and also why you weren't in a position to help millions of people during one of the biggest social upheavals in the last century :)
        forgetfreeman 3y ago
        The law is the law. I don't have to respect it to grasp the concept of cause and effect. There wouldn't be much to talk about here if there wasn't a contingent whinging and ringing their hands as if any aspect of this situation was surprising or novel. Broadcast copyrighted material online without the benefits of significant opsec and you will get dragged in court, period. Hell it didn't take the recording industry 12 months to get a lock on Napster. Y'all need to quit playing like there's a victim here.
- squigz 3y ago
  Seriously, I don't understand how people can defend copyright at this point. Maybe at the beginning it was implemented properly. Maybe in theory it's a great idea. But - surprise, surprise! - it's been broken by corporations. Life + 70 years? gtfo.
  - _DeadFred_ 3y ago
    Because people like the results of copyright, IE access to large amounts of resources including books, music, movies, and software that would not exist if there were not protections to ensure that the creators received compensation for their works.
    - realusername 3y ago
      For recent or popular work maybe that kind of works yeah, for everything else though... I challenge you to find legally even early 2000s less popular movies or books, let alone older work. The current copyright system is pretty terrible at keeping track of older content and the few ones that still manage to make it through have questionable rights holders.
      - neaden 3y ago
        Yeah it's pretty easy. I just went to a list of movies from 2001 by box office, number 100 was actually a cult classic now so skip that and I see the Tailor of Panama which is a less popular movie, steaming on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Tailor-Panama-Pierce-Brosnan/dp/B000XR8ING https://www.amazon.com/Tailor-Panama-Pierce-Brosnan/dp/B000X... and i can get a copy on DVD with interlibrary loan. The Shogun miniseries from the 1980s has some renewed interest since the new version and it's not streaming, but you can purchase a DVD on a bunch of places and once again, I can get it through my library.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      Also worth mentioning that free licenses like Creative Commons, MIT, and FOSS licenses like GPL are also all copyright schemes, as unintuitive as that might seem. The removal of all copyright also means the removal of licenses that mandate free sharing and access. Two-way street, in other words.
- lofenfew 3y ago
  >Agree to disagree. >Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. This isn't a "disagreement" with the GP. Piracy is a legal concept, and they were speaking in legal terms. Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US. >LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away. Then why should internet archive, which fills a number of niches that aren't just book or document piracy, be killed off?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged. One should also have a plan if they fail.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      > When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged. Sure, but do they? They're a nonprofit, and as such depend on donations. Their donors might or might not be aligned on these two relatively orthogonal issues. I'm even sympathetic of their desire to challenge the quite absurd status quo of controlled digital lending, with bizarre skeuomorphisms such as simulating "books wearing out" after a couple of lending cycles, while at the same time being more restricted than physical books (even though I don't necessarily agree with their means of challenging it). But even for me, I think the risk is too big, and I'd feel much more comfortable with a different (maybe related/affiliated, but ultimately separated as legal entities) non-profit organization for each concern.
    - Cheer2171 3y ago
      Except the IA did not establish the NEL as an act of civil disobedience or call for changes to the unjust existing copyright laws when they did it. They instead told themselves and their patrons that there was a "national emergency" exception to copyright law, when no such exception existed. Should one have existed? Of course. But it did not at the time. The IA continued to assert that the NEL was legal within existing copyright law, not that it was a principled act of civil disobedience against an unjust law. They were trying to Jedi mind trick a "national emergency" exception to existing copyright law into existence. If you want to challenge an unjust law in a democracy, you can work within the system to change it, or you can engage in civil disobedience, publicly accept the consequences, and put your freedom on the line as a way to bring popular attention to the unjust law. That is the mechanism of civil disobedience against unjust laws. The whole point is that you must risk something in order to go around the system and challenge an unjust law. Everyone in America has at least one law they consider to be unjust, including some laws that I'm sure you believe are very just and would be very upset if others started to violate them in the name of justice. Birmingham banned Martin Luther King, Jr. from participating in public protests and a Circuit court judge signed off on it. When MLK said he would protest anyway, the whole point of the civil disobedience was that MLK would be arrested for it. He was right that the public was outraged at the enforcement of this unjust legal order and called for change. What the IA did was like if MLK put on a mask to go protest, and when the police tried to arrest him, he said that he wasn't MLK.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I don't believe in copyright at all, even in principle. The closest I can get is that it should be within the power of the state to grant temporary monopolies on things that it wants to encourage. But there is a basic conflict between freedom of expression and the fact that expressions can be copyrighted. However, the idea that IA is going to defeat a copyright industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars is laughable. If you're going to fork between government choosing to end copyright and government choosing to end the IA, the IA is 100% dead. Characterizing people who don't want the IA to risk all against copyright as copyright-supporters is not fair at all. It's like calling people Assadists who didn't want to invade Syria.
ranger_danger 3y ago
> straight-up piracy Have you seen the other 97% of the archive?
cbolton 3y ago
Given the nebulous nature of "fair use" it seems quite excessive to say there is a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
pgalvin 3y ago
The lawsuit is not limited to a ruling against the unlimited lending, but any lending whatsoever (even 1-to-1).
allturtles 3y ago
The emergency library was the trigger for the lawsuit, but the lawsuit contends that even controlled digital lending is illegal. There seems to be continued confusion on this basic issue of what is at stake in the lawsuit. > The court fully rejected the Internet Archive’s argument that fair use protected its digital lending program. Notably, it did not limit its analysis to the National Emergency Library. Instead, the court rejected fair use as it applies to controlled digital lending in general. [0] [0]: https://www.library.upenn.edu/news/hachette-v-internet-archive https://www.library.upenn.edu/news/hachette-v-internet-archi...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 3y ago

This might kill the Internet Archive as a legal entity in the US if the outcome is particularly unfavorable, but LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away. > This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified. Agree to disagree. Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. The Internet Archive could archive and maintain these works in cold storage (both physical and digital), only to make them public again 100-200 years from now, but that would not be keeping with "Universal Access to All Knowledge." Disk and bandwidth is cheap, and the planet is big. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycle/ https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl... [2] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyright-war https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyri... (no affiliation, but a fan and a supporter, and believe in defending public goods)

forgetfreeman 3y ago
It may indeed kill the project and it's a tragic example of play stupid games win stupid prizes. There have been enough decades of lost lawsuits now that any thinking person ought to know better than to go sticking a fork in the outlet that is distributing copyrighted materials.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- coldpie 3y ago
  I think you've forgotten what 2020 was like. Libraries were closed. Schools were closed. Book stores were closed. Shipping was majorly slowed. Basically all public services were inaccessible to most people. Now imagine you're the kind of person who who founds and runs The Internet Archive for 25 years, not just another HN commenter bored at work. You're sitting in front of the button to help millions of people regain access to something the pandemic took away from them. Do you push the button, or do you cower away because some rich prick might sue you later? I don't think the IA exists without the kind of person who pushes that button.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    If it turns out to have been a suicide button, then what the the IA needed most was the kind of person who would not have pushed that button.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    I don't actually care what 2020 was like because it isn't germane. No new legislation was passed meaningfully altering copyright law during that timeframe so this is absolutely a case of fuck around and find out, regardless of the optics.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Well, I expect that rigid respect for the law is why you didn't start the Internet Archive, and also why you weren't in a position to help millions of people during one of the biggest social upheavals in the last century :)
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        The law is the law. I don't have to respect it to grasp the concept of cause and effect. There wouldn't be much to talk about here if there wasn't a contingent whinging and ringing their hands as if any aspect of this situation was surprising or novel. Broadcast copyrighted material online without the benefits of significant opsec and you will get dragged in court, period. Hell it didn't take the recording industry 12 months to get a lock on Napster. Y'all need to quit playing like there's a victim here.
squigz 3y ago
Seriously, I don't understand how people can defend copyright at this point. Maybe at the beginning it was implemented properly. Maybe in theory it's a great idea. But - surprise, surprise! - it's been broken by corporations. Life + 70 years? gtfo.
- _DeadFred_ 3y ago
  Because people like the results of copyright, IE access to large amounts of resources including books, music, movies, and software that would not exist if there were not protections to ensure that the creators received compensation for their works.
  - realusername 3y ago
    For recent or popular work maybe that kind of works yeah, for everything else though... I challenge you to find legally even early 2000s less popular movies or books, let alone older work. The current copyright system is pretty terrible at keeping track of older content and the few ones that still manage to make it through have questionable rights holders.
    - neaden 3y ago
      Yeah it's pretty easy. I just went to a list of movies from 2001 by box office, number 100 was actually a cult classic now so skip that and I see the Tailor of Panama which is a less popular movie, steaming on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Tailor-Panama-Pierce-Brosnan/dp/B000XR8ING https://www.amazon.com/Tailor-Panama-Pierce-Brosnan/dp/B000X... and i can get a copy on DVD with interlibrary loan. The Shogun miniseries from the 1980s has some renewed interest since the new version and it's not streaming, but you can purchase a DVD on a bunch of places and once again, I can get it through my library.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Also worth mentioning that free licenses like Creative Commons, MIT, and FOSS licenses like GPL are also all copyright schemes, as unintuitive as that might seem. The removal of all copyright also means the removal of licenses that mandate free sharing and access. Two-way street, in other words.
lofenfew 3y ago
>Agree to disagree. >Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. This isn't a "disagreement" with the GP. Piracy is a legal concept, and they were speaking in legal terms. Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US. >LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away. Then why should internet archive, which fills a number of niches that aren't just book or document piracy, be killed off?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged. One should also have a plan if they fail.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    > When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged. Sure, but do they? They're a nonprofit, and as such depend on donations. Their donors might or might not be aligned on these two relatively orthogonal issues. I'm even sympathetic of their desire to challenge the quite absurd status quo of controlled digital lending, with bizarre skeuomorphisms such as simulating "books wearing out" after a couple of lending cycles, while at the same time being more restricted than physical books (even though I don't necessarily agree with their means of challenging it). But even for me, I think the risk is too big, and I'd feel much more comfortable with a different (maybe related/affiliated, but ultimately separated as legal entities) non-profit organization for each concern.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    Except the IA did not establish the NEL as an act of civil disobedience or call for changes to the unjust existing copyright laws when they did it. They instead told themselves and their patrons that there was a "national emergency" exception to copyright law, when no such exception existed. Should one have existed? Of course. But it did not at the time. The IA continued to assert that the NEL was legal within existing copyright law, not that it was a principled act of civil disobedience against an unjust law. They were trying to Jedi mind trick a "national emergency" exception to existing copyright law into existence. If you want to challenge an unjust law in a democracy, you can work within the system to change it, or you can engage in civil disobedience, publicly accept the consequences, and put your freedom on the line as a way to bring popular attention to the unjust law. That is the mechanism of civil disobedience against unjust laws. The whole point is that you must risk something in order to go around the system and challenge an unjust law. Everyone in America has at least one law they consider to be unjust, including some laws that I'm sure you believe are very just and would be very upset if others started to violate them in the name of justice. Birmingham banned Martin Luther King, Jr. from participating in public protests and a Circuit court judge signed off on it. When MLK said he would protest anyway, the whole point of the civil disobedience was that MLK would be arrested for it. He was right that the public was outraged at the enforcement of this unjust legal order and called for change. What the IA did was like if MLK put on a mask to go protest, and when the police tried to arrest him, he said that he wasn't MLK.
pessimizer 3y ago
I don't believe in copyright at all, even in principle. The closest I can get is that it should be within the power of the state to grant temporary monopolies on things that it wants to encourage. But there is a basic conflict between freedom of expression and the fact that expressions can be copyrighted. However, the idea that IA is going to defeat a copyright industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars is laughable. If you're going to fork between government choosing to end copyright and government choosing to end the IA, the IA is 100% dead. Characterizing people who don't want the IA to risk all against copyright as copyright-supporters is not fair at all. It's like calling people Assadists who didn't want to invade Syria.

ranger_danger 3y ago

> straight-up piracy Have you seen the other 97% of the archive?

cbolton 3y ago

Given the nebulous nature of "fair use" it seems quite excessive to say there is a 0% chance of it being legally justified.

pgalvin 3y ago

The lawsuit is not limited to a ruling against the unlimited lending, but any lending whatsoever (even 1-to-1).

allturtles 3y ago

The emergency library was the trigger for the lawsuit, but the lawsuit contends that even controlled digital lending is illegal. There seems to be continued confusion on this basic issue of what is at stake in the lawsuit. > The court fully rejected the Internet Archive’s argument that fair use protected its digital lending program. Notably, it did not limit its analysis to the National Emergency Library. Instead, the court rejected fair use as it applies to controlled digital lending in general. [0] [0]: https://www.library.upenn.edu/news/hachette-v-internet-archive https://www.library.upenn.edu/news/hachette-v-internet-archi...