6 ms·

Why are so many books listed as "Borrow Unavailable" at the Internet Archive?

67 points by FMecha 2y ago

dfxm12 2y ago
It's frustrating that there's no published date on this page. I'm just particularly curious as to if this is related to yesterday's SCOTUS opinions or something else. Granted, searching legal decisions is admittedly not a strength of mine, and this might be trivial to some. A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that a "final judgement" was made in August of last year, but also that it was appealed last year. Is this being posted now because the appeal now over?
- lolinder 2y ago
  There should be a date, but thankfully the Internet Archive also offers a helpful tool for figuring out how old a web page is and whether its content has changed: http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://help.archive.org/help/why-are-so-many-books-listed-as-borrow-unavailable-at-the-internet-archive/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://help.arch...
justin_oaks 2y ago
Am I the only one disgusted by the number of "University of ___ Press" or "___ University Press" entries in the list of publishers that got books taken down? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that universities aren't the bastions of knowledge sharing that we want them to be. I just think it's sad.
- cube00 2y ago
  Especially if any public money was used in the research or production of those books.
- araes 2y ago
  No. Unfortunately, also same ol', same ol'. Rant somewhat follows, if mildly cohesive. Elsiever's famous for acting that way. Yale, Harvard, Cambridge are known for the same. Try exploring doing anything with academic publications. Every use falls into about the same case as the archive.org case. "We own an indefinitely copyright that lasts 70 years after our institution collapses, and if you're even allowed to read the articles without paying a fortune ($50 to find it's a 2 page scam publication, $10,000 for a subscription), you may only do so for personal consumption with no distribution." https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/pricing/journals https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/pricin... The prices are funny. Ever heard of "Applied Surface Science", 0169-4332? $25,462 subscription for surfaces ... that are applied. How about "Colloids and Surfaces A", 0927-7757? $20,167 subscription to find out whether you'd ever care. Frankly, all journals with the word "surface" are expensive. Magazine prices be like "daaaamn" (Friday). To be fair though, you can learn how to anesthetize your own subjects (Advances in Anesthesia) for $282. Review completely happens in the dark if you really pay attention. Peer reviewed? Do you peer review their articles? Have you ever actually met anybody who does? They always seem to be in far away fortress schools you never meet with fancy title names like the "Dogsworth Diapers Emeritus Lifetime Chair of El Supremo Tacos." In years of academia, I think I got asked to look at a paper once for a prof. who was lazy. The only way they're a "bastion" is in the sense of a medieval fortress paywall that takes away all opportunities, does nothing with what they've hoarded, and then stacks money for score like a game mechanic. Obvious, I'm a huge fan of modern academia. Take all above as somewhat bias.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  If universities were giving away knowledge, they wouldn't have much to sell. As another example, presumptively the only purpose of museums is to preserve and share endangered things, yet they fight the hardest online to make it difficult to get anything out of them. Every museum and archive could put up torrents just like the IA and take as a duty to guide the public through these torrents, feel certain that they would be maintained forever through minimal effort, that their reach would be the widest possible, and that the insights that could be built from people studying that work would be exponential. But that would largely cut the museum out of the process, and the purpose of the museum is mainly to preserve the museum. Instead they hand write inscrutable dogshit interfaces that prioritize preventing any sort of download or mirroring over any other concern, especially searchability or organization. Museums started as wealthy individual collectors bragging with their personal collections to get clout, or as attractions in the manner of theme parks constructed to get people to pay admissions fees. We only mistake them for charities because it's easy to trick us into subsidizing them through tax. These are vehicles for people's lucrative careers. People with the kinds of institutionalized minds who can't figure out how not to work for elsevier for free. Upper middle-class people solely motivated by personal achievement. Museums are far more selfless than universities.
  - justin_oaks 2y ago
    Yes, great works of art can and should be preserved by making images and data freely available. How much of that is being done? Quite frankly, I don't know, but there are a number of museums that make their collections available to view online. Check out some of the links below. https://www.louvre.fr/en/online-tours#virtual-tours https://www.louvre.fr/en/online-tours#virtual-tours https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/online https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/online https://artsandculture.google.com/ https://artsandculture.google.com/
- hruzgar 2y ago
  Yeah this is actually crazy.
client4 2y ago
It's curious how corporations try to litigate business models that struggle to survive the Internet age, enabling places like Anna's Archive to pop-up and do more damage than simply leaving the IA alone.
- 23B1 2y ago
  The existence of the internet doesn't magically overrule the law.
  - nyc_data_geek 2y ago
    The law is a mutable, ever changing thing. New technology invariably leads to updates to the legal framework of society. Legal is not the same thing as ethical, moral, or right.
    - 23B1 2y ago
      Of course it is. The work should therefore be on changing the law, not rug-pulling authors who are the real people who get hurt by this. They don't like the big publishers either.
      - nyc_data_geek 2y ago
        Unfortunately, the reality is our legal system is largely subject to regulatory capture at this point. Moneyed interests(corporations and oligarchs) have much louder voices(deeper pockets) than the body politic as a whole, and thus the People are subject to rules made for the benefit of those interests. I don't think most authors are upset with IA or libraries, but rather a vocal minority of the same. Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run. It was a publisher who filed this lawsuit, not an author.
        23B1 2y ago
        "Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run." This is a huge, HUGE false belief amongst the technocrats who think they are on the side of the creators. I put this in the same bucket as the 'it democratizes creativity' fallacy. It might have been true right up until every techbro decided it was totally fine to scrape every bit of creativity off the web – legally and illegally – and repackage it into an AI model. The publishers are bad, agreed, but at least there's a framework for artists to make a penny for every buck. Today it's open season on every author, illustrator, photographer, and writer.
hosh 2y ago
There was a good article posted previously here on HN about the lawsuit. There is something in the current framework that allows libraries to lend out digital copies — by having purchased a physical copy. They can lend out one digital copy for each physical copy they hold. What Internet Archive did was, during Covid, opened up lending to exceed the physical copies they held. They did not ask the copyright holders when they did this. They broke the law, and their case has no legal merit. Their argument was to appeal to public opinion. The results of the lawsuit may jeopardize their main mission. I really respected the IA, but how they are going about this is dishonest.
- chx 2y ago
  Yes, the very moment they did this I was like "Why are you risking the Internet Archive with doing something this stupid?" Their argument was there are enough physical copies in shuttered libraries to cover any lending and it's not impossible they could've gotten the publishers on board if they went public with the plan first urging for swift agreement instead of going for "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission".
  - hosh 2y ago
    If the goal was to relieve the general public from being stuck inside, they did not have to go for opening everything up. There are a number of university presses listed in the lawsuit, but I doubt most people would want to slog through textbooks. They could have also added code to help people find the books they are looking for in their _local_ libraries if they reached the lending limit. That would bring more attention to the local library and what they do for their community. They could have asked the public to donate books. There may be logistics problem with sending the books over, but it can be something that raised awareness and involved the public more with what their mission. There was lots of ways to do this. Disabling the code to ignore lending limits was low effort … and frankly, not well considered.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I've never taken the internet for granted — have scraped anything and everything I have found interesting. I suggest everyone do the same. (As a bonus, you don't even need internet for the content you have backed up.)
- lelandfe 2y ago
  I.e. where one would make a bookmark, you make a copy? That's interesting. Videos and all?
  - simonblack 2y ago
    You save the actual file, not a bookmark. That also means you have the data always available, independent of whether or not you have internet access. And you save it in in a tree-structured set of folders. Like (say): Motor_vehicles -> ICE -> cars -> Mercedes_Benz -> C-Class -> Coupe -> 2002_W203 Videos, Music, photos, ebooks, etc,etc. They all can go on a "write-once, keep forever" archive-disk, that is backed-up daily using something like 'rsync' that only needs to track the changes in the archived materials.
- mcint 2y ago
  And one nice tool for scraping archives for yourself is https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ a nice frontend by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nikisweeting https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nikisweeting
  - hakunin 2y ago
    I've been using History Book app[1] (only on Apple ecosystem). The search is starting to slow down at 25k pages, hoping it can hold up. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-book-browse-search/id1619241039 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-book-browse-search/id1...
KolmogorovComp 2y ago
Is this court decision applied globally or only to US users? If the former, why?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

67 points by FMecha 2y ago

It's frustrating that there's no published date on this page. I'm just particularly curious as to if this is related to yesterday's SCOTUS opinions or something else. Granted, searching legal decisions is admittedly not a strength of mine, and this might be trivial to some. A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that a "final judgement" was made in August of last year, but also that it was appealed last year. Is this being posted now because the appeal now over?

lolinder 2y ago
There should be a date, but thankfully the Internet Archive also offers a helpful tool for figuring out how old a web page is and whether its content has changed: http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://help.archive.org/help/why-are-so-many-books-listed-as-borrow-unavailable-at-the-internet-archive/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://help.arch...

justin_oaks 2y ago

Am I the only one disgusted by the number of "University of ___ Press" or "___ University Press" entries in the list of publishers that got books taken down? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that universities aren't the bastions of knowledge sharing that we want them to be. I just think it's sad.

cube00 2y ago
Especially if any public money was used in the research or production of those books.
araes 2y ago
No. Unfortunately, also same ol', same ol'. Rant somewhat follows, if mildly cohesive. Elsiever's famous for acting that way. Yale, Harvard, Cambridge are known for the same. Try exploring doing anything with academic publications. Every use falls into about the same case as the archive.org case. "We own an indefinitely copyright that lasts 70 years after our institution collapses, and if you're even allowed to read the articles without paying a fortune ($50 to find it's a 2 page scam publication, $10,000 for a subscription), you may only do so for personal consumption with no distribution." https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/pricing/journals https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/pricin... The prices are funny. Ever heard of "Applied Surface Science", 0169-4332? $25,462 subscription for surfaces ... that are applied. How about "Colloids and Surfaces A", 0927-7757? $20,167 subscription to find out whether you'd ever care. Frankly, all journals with the word "surface" are expensive. Magazine prices be like "daaaamn" (Friday). To be fair though, you can learn how to anesthetize your own subjects (Advances in Anesthesia) for $282. Review completely happens in the dark if you really pay attention. Peer reviewed? Do you peer review their articles? Have you ever actually met anybody who does? They always seem to be in far away fortress schools you never meet with fancy title names like the "Dogsworth Diapers Emeritus Lifetime Chair of El Supremo Tacos." In years of academia, I think I got asked to look at a paper once for a prof. who was lazy. The only way they're a "bastion" is in the sense of a medieval fortress paywall that takes away all opportunities, does nothing with what they've hoarded, and then stacks money for score like a game mechanic. Obvious, I'm a huge fan of modern academia. Take all above as somewhat bias.
pessimizer 2y ago
If universities were giving away knowledge, they wouldn't have much to sell. As another example, presumptively the only purpose of museums is to preserve and share endangered things, yet they fight the hardest online to make it difficult to get anything out of them. Every museum and archive could put up torrents just like the IA and take as a duty to guide the public through these torrents, feel certain that they would be maintained forever through minimal effort, that their reach would be the widest possible, and that the insights that could be built from people studying that work would be exponential. But that would largely cut the museum out of the process, and the purpose of the museum is mainly to preserve the museum. Instead they hand write inscrutable dogshit interfaces that prioritize preventing any sort of download or mirroring over any other concern, especially searchability or organization. Museums started as wealthy individual collectors bragging with their personal collections to get clout, or as attractions in the manner of theme parks constructed to get people to pay admissions fees. We only mistake them for charities because it's easy to trick us into subsidizing them through tax. These are vehicles for people's lucrative careers. People with the kinds of institutionalized minds who can't figure out how not to work for elsevier for free. Upper middle-class people solely motivated by personal achievement. Museums are far more selfless than universities.
- justin_oaks 2y ago
  Yes, great works of art can and should be preserved by making images and data freely available. How much of that is being done? Quite frankly, I don't know, but there are a number of museums that make their collections available to view online. Check out some of the links below. https://www.louvre.fr/en/online-tours#virtual-tours https://www.louvre.fr/en/online-tours#virtual-tours https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/online https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/online https://artsandculture.google.com/ https://artsandculture.google.com/
hruzgar 2y ago
Yeah this is actually crazy.

client4 2y ago

It's curious how corporations try to litigate business models that struggle to survive the Internet age, enabling places like Anna's Archive to pop-up and do more damage than simply leaving the IA alone.

23B1 2y ago
The existence of the internet doesn't magically overrule the law.
- nyc_data_geek 2y ago
  The law is a mutable, ever changing thing. New technology invariably leads to updates to the legal framework of society. Legal is not the same thing as ethical, moral, or right.
  - 23B1 2y ago
    Of course it is. The work should therefore be on changing the law, not rug-pulling authors who are the real people who get hurt by this. They don't like the big publishers either.
    - nyc_data_geek 2y ago
      Unfortunately, the reality is our legal system is largely subject to regulatory capture at this point. Moneyed interests(corporations and oligarchs) have much louder voices(deeper pockets) than the body politic as a whole, and thus the People are subject to rules made for the benefit of those interests. I don't think most authors are upset with IA or libraries, but rather a vocal minority of the same. Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run. It was a publisher who filed this lawsuit, not an author.
      - 23B1 2y ago
        "Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run." This is a huge, HUGE false belief amongst the technocrats who think they are on the side of the creators. I put this in the same bucket as the 'it democratizes creativity' fallacy. It might have been true right up until every techbro decided it was totally fine to scrape every bit of creativity off the web – legally and illegally – and repackage it into an AI model. The publishers are bad, agreed, but at least there's a framework for artists to make a penny for every buck. Today it's open season on every author, illustrator, photographer, and writer.

hosh 2y ago

There was a good article posted previously here on HN about the lawsuit. There is something in the current framework that allows libraries to lend out digital copies — by having purchased a physical copy. They can lend out one digital copy for each physical copy they hold. What Internet Archive did was, during Covid, opened up lending to exceed the physical copies they held. They did not ask the copyright holders when they did this. They broke the law, and their case has no legal merit. Their argument was to appeal to public opinion. The results of the lawsuit may jeopardize their main mission. I really respected the IA, but how they are going about this is dishonest.

chx 2y ago
Yes, the very moment they did this I was like "Why are you risking the Internet Archive with doing something this stupid?" Their argument was there are enough physical copies in shuttered libraries to cover any lending and it's not impossible they could've gotten the publishers on board if they went public with the plan first urging for swift agreement instead of going for "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission".
- hosh 2y ago
  If the goal was to relieve the general public from being stuck inside, they did not have to go for opening everything up. There are a number of university presses listed in the lawsuit, but I doubt most people would want to slog through textbooks. They could have also added code to help people find the books they are looking for in their _local_ libraries if they reached the lending limit. That would bring more attention to the local library and what they do for their community. They could have asked the public to donate books. There may be logistics problem with sending the books over, but it can be something that raised awareness and involved the public more with what their mission. There was lots of ways to do this. Disabling the code to ignore lending limits was low effort … and frankly, not well considered.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I've never taken the internet for granted — have scraped anything and everything I have found interesting. I suggest everyone do the same. (As a bonus, you don't even need internet for the content you have backed up.)

lelandfe 2y ago
I.e. where one would make a bookmark, you make a copy? That's interesting. Videos and all?
- simonblack 2y ago
  You save the actual file, not a bookmark. That also means you have the data always available, independent of whether or not you have internet access. And you save it in in a tree-structured set of folders. Like (say): Motor_vehicles -> ICE -> cars -> Mercedes_Benz -> C-Class -> Coupe -> 2002_W203 Videos, Music, photos, ebooks, etc,etc. They all can go on a "write-once, keep forever" archive-disk, that is backed-up daily using something like 'rsync' that only needs to track the changes in the archived materials.
mcint 2y ago
And one nice tool for scraping archives for yourself is https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ a nice frontend by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nikisweeting https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nikisweeting
- hakunin 2y ago
  I've been using History Book app[1] (only on Apple ecosystem). The search is starting to slow down at 25k pages, hoping it can hold up. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-book-browse-search/id1619241039 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-book-browse-search/id1...

KolmogorovComp 2y ago

Is this court decision applied globally or only to US users? If the former, why?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]