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Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
- TylerE 2y agoThey should fire what even nitwit thought this obviously illegal plan was a good idea in the first place. The fallout will likely tank the entire archive in the long term.
- ranger_danger 2y ago90% of the "archive" is just mass piracy anyway
- crest 2y ago>95% of the Internet Archive is a useful service to society even if it pisses of a few companies. It should be legal even if they sometimes act as "holy fools".
- cft 2y agoPiracy means that something was taken by force from someone. What was it that was taken that's no longer there?
- ranger_danger 2y agothat is not what software piracy means...
- account42 2y agoLegally speaking, software piracy does not exist.
- a1o 2y agoIt was through lending, this was due to a change of policy of lending during COVID-19 to ease access
- TylerE 2y agoIt lending done flagrantly in violation of the licensing. They were taking a copy licensed to be lent ONCE and giving it to thousands of people at once.
- wrs 2y agoYou’re confusing the COVID “emergency lending” period (which was highly dubious, I agree) with their normal lending system. They track borrows against physical copies of the books stored in their warehouse. Typically you can only borrow a book for one hour before having to renew in the viewer.
- badlibrarian 2y agoUnder discovery in the case it turned out that nope, they weren't doing that right either.
- wrs 2y agoTrue, but the judge's conclusion was "Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio . . . would not excuse IA’s reproduction of the Works in Suit." So even if they had done it right, this wouldn't have gone their way.
- ladidahh 2y agotheir lending scheme is timed by hour with the option to renew with some restraints, it is not lending to thousands at once
- TylerE 2y agoThen why did they just get their ass royally handed to them in court?
- dylan604 2y agoYeah, it's like these people are Google to be able to get away with this. If you're going to do it, it better be for a self benefiting reason, and damn well better not be for the good of all man kind. This is capitalist society and not some sort of benevolent society. What kind of moron would think that would ever be a good idea? /s
- riffic 2y agoI love how the Hacker ethos has shifted from information wants to be free[0] to this sort of predictable HN (the H stands for Hacker doesn't it) reply. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free EDIT: looks like the "this is the law" crowd is out in full force on this summer Friday night. All the cool people are doing something else, elsewhere obviously.
- TylerE 2y agoIt’s somewhat hypocritical to believe otherwise when one’s employment (or if that offends you, the effectiveness of copyleft licenses) depends on the existence of intellectual property. That sort of nuance tends to be lost on the “information wants to be free” crowd.
- selestify 2y agoIf society wanted to, it could most certainly choose to allow for the copying of any bits you are in possession of, while also forcing you to distribute additional bits in certain circumstances.
- prmoustache 2y agoArchive.org looks a bit like astalavista these days.
- andybak 2y agoI've no idea what you're trying to say.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 2y agoLikely a reference to an old search engine (altavista), which of course sucked next to google. Yet, it ironically gave better results than Google does today.
- prmoustache 2y agoAstalavista was the main warez search engine in the pre-google era and it was a play of words with altavista which was the most popular search engine at the time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
- Anamon 2y agoIt wasn't a play on AltaVista -- Astalavista was actually older than AltaVista! It says so in the Wikipedia article you link to. I also only learned this mindblowing fact a few weeks ago.
- metadat 2y agoRecently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084 (4 days ago, 48 comments)
- jesprenj 2y agoIs there a communuty project that maintains a copy of the 500k books? Is there a libgen torrent or anna's archive torrent?
- artninja1988 2y agoI would bet that most of the archive books are already on Libgen, yes
- crazygringo 2y agoThey're not. IA is mostly full-color scans of old library books. I've never come across an IA scan on Libgen. Libgen is mostly EPUB's, native PDF's, and the occasional black-and-white high-contrast PDF scan.
- mike_d 2y agohttps://libgen.is/repository_torrent/ https://libgen.is/repository_torrent/ If you are upset about this, commit to seeding as many of these as you can until the IA service is restored.
- crazygringo 2y agoThose are torrents for LibGen, not IA, correct? Very different sets of books. I don't see how this will help. LibGen isn't going away, not that I'm aware of.
- sixtyfourbits 2y agohttps://annas-archive.org/datasets/ia https://annas-archive.org/datasets/ia
- jesprenj 2y agoGreat, thank you!
- pessimizer 2y agoWith this judgement, does this force them to write a tool that determines whether a book is in print or not? Are there any good webservices, or will they just have to scrape Amazon, etc.? I've noticed a lot of their lending library is definitely out of print; is "out-of-print and public domain" just the ars writer's interpretation of the judgement? If it isn't, a tighter awareness of what is in print and out of print might be able to cut into those 500K, if at all possible. If lending is out, best to be aggressive with what's left.
- WillAdams 2y ago[flagged]
- selestify 2y agoDo you have any data to back that up? Wouldn’t something being highly pirated indicate that there’s a lot of interest in a reprint?
- WillAdams 2y agoWhen _Traditional Archery from Six Continents_ went out of print, the price quickly got to 4 digits (feedback loop from Amazon pricing algorithms), so I put up the money for a second print run --- before I picked up the printed copies someone put up an illicit, unauthorized PDF copy --- it took several years for me to sell out the print run and get my living room closet back.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoThere is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process. A legally unencumbered free library of all books for all people would be the greatest achievement in all of human history. We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors. We must build alternatives to for-profit publishing, and the only resilient and widely acceptable system I can imagine is one where every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival. In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will. It would take great effort to build such a system, but open source and digital repositories of machine designs would ensure that efforts are not duplicated. The effort would still be substantial, but what hangs in the balance is the opportunity to assure the freedom of all people and the creation of the most significant repository of knowledge humanity has ever conceived of. If we succeed it will be our greatest achievement as a species.
- MattGaiser 2y ago[flagged]
- r0s 2y agoMany many authors publish work freely, now more than ever. Without monetary reward. Here's a tiny tip of the massive iceberg https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/30/10-free-literary-magazines/ https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/30/10-free-literar...
- 2y ago
- chx 2y agoOh this appeal to the public, pithy empty words about openness and shit. Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk. They said, there are enough physical books in closed libraries to cover their lending. That's not how this works. They should've asked the publishers for permission first if necessary putting pressure on them via public. This is not a case of it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission because they must have known they won't be forgiven for this. I can't even. I am not saying this is by any means moral or right. I am saying: this is the law. They actually got relatively lucky for not being fined to oblivion for this.
- misnome 2y agoYes - if the only penalty is having to remove the books, then this should be considered a win for IA. This dumb move was an existential risk putting all their other work in danger.
- 999900000999 2y agoThe best part had to be the whole moral grandstanding they had when doing it. Controlled digital lending was tolerated. It was never legal. I can't buy a bunch of DVDs and start a streaming service even if a each copy can only be watched by a single person at a time. It really sucks since they do a lot of good work aside from this.
- vessenes 2y agoNitpick - I think if your DVD streaming service is free and single-person only, then you probably can - it would qualify under space or time shifting concepts. I don't think you have the right to monetize a DVD you purchase in general in the US, though.
- 999900000999 2y agoI imagine if it was like... You vessenes have an account, you can buy DVDs that I store for you, and you can view these DVDs using my service. Even then odds are I'd get sued for copyright infringement.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Actual article: https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/let-readers-read/ https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/let-readers-read/ Some more discussion, including some IA folks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084
- zouhair 2y agoThis is why Piracy is good for humanity.
- gwright 2y agoDoes your theory apply to the content consumed during the training of LLMs? If not why not? Where should we draw the line regarding intellectual property rights?
- thedevilslawyer 2y ago1. Absolutely. 2. Information and knowledge is for all. 3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.
- Zuiii 2y ago> The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age. I'd vote for politicians who push for laws like this. Sadly none do.
- CaptainFever 2y agoRelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technolibertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technolibertarianism
- account42 2y agoAt least here the pirate party focuses more on green and far left politics than digital freedom these days.
- 2y ago
- hbbio 2y agoLooks like the publishers are doing their best for libgen/ipfs to succeed. Makes you wonder: Do they even have data on their business growth factors? I don't but I'd guess that: 1. nobody is printing downloaded books 2. instead, people like me _buy_ printed books after browsing through them online
- crazygringo 2y agoThey're actually pretty different sets of books. LibGen/IPFS is heavily biased toward books from the past ~3 decades, especially books that are cracked EPUB's and PDF's. IA seems to be much more scans of library books from ~1930-1980, many of which are out of print and probably only available to you via interlibrary loan, which you might wait a month for. IA is a huge boon for academic research when you need to go back to midcentury books. I don't know which 500K the IA is being required to remove, but I'm very worried.
- hbbio 2y agoExtremely grateful for IA indeed, and as you say they have more scans that for sure are super useful for research, LLM training, etc. Like this: https://archive.org/details/landau-and-lifshitz-physics-textbooks-series/Vol%201%20-%20Landau%2C%20Lifshitz%20-%20Mechanics%20%283rd%20ed%2C%201976%29/ https://archive.org/details/landau-and-lifshitz-physics-text... Where LibGen only has the first volume in French and Portuguese only...
- kjkjadksj 2y agoEven being good for it I can’t stand how most books are like $19.99, knowing I can find it in very good condition on ebay for $6 and get it from the library for free. If they want to sell a lot more books out of the little shops at the airports or wherevers left that books are sold today, make them cheap enough to be a spontaneous purchase again. I have some old paper backs that were like 99 cents new.
- wesselbindt 2y ago[flagged]
- throw10920 2y agoAny evidence that the majority of the books were fiction and political non-fiction that present near-zero value to "humanity"? Almost the entire list of "banned" books that they listed that they had to take down[1] are clearly not a "net loss for humanity" when you have to pay for them or get a loan at a physical library. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6SeGMCA7Mg2s-N4xbGKIQrG3XI9l0NuZz-AxQ-9TyjkKz28JP6UpsxKX_YSOreDtOG7mWMUD2/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true&pli=1 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6S...
- Mindwipe 2y agoSo, when is the IA's incredibly inept board going to stand down, before their stupidity burns down the entire project?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoCopyright lasts too damn long.
- DamnInteresting 2y agoI am an author who relies on copyright for part of my living, yet I agree that copyright protection lasts too long. I feel like it should protect the work for a reasonable time--say 20 years--after which one must pay an initially modest but exponentially increasing fee to renew the copyright every X years. Big players like Disney could afford to keep their stuff out of the public domain for a while, but not forever. And many deceased artists' work would slip into the public domain when their estate could no longer afford the renewal fee.
- joquarky 2y agoThis is an excellent solution. We also need to dial back the domain of conditional restrictions that authors can place on works that they release to the public. I'm tired of watching old shows that have had music redubbed because of the labyrinthian copyright conditions that inherently arise in composite works.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SanjayMehta 2y agoWhy does Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (for example) show up in their 1300 banned books list? It’s not under copyright and is available on Gutenberg. Is this some legal angle I’m missing which benefits the plaintiffs in some way?
- Kye 2y agoA republication of something in the public domain can be copyrighted.
- Dalewyn 2y agoNot sure why this is being downvoted because it is correct. The product of public domain materials can be copyrighted. For example, if someone were to publish a new book of Tom Sawyer whose text is in the public domain, that book can be copyrighted. Everyone can still publish their own new books of Tom Sawyer using the public domain materials, but noone can copy that book of Tom Sawyer.
- gravescale 2y agoSpecifically, any new creative input to the book is copyrighted. Usually, this is things like new prefaces or forewords and new illustrations or cover art.
- Kye 2y agoYep. It's one of the more important parts of copyright! Nobody will ever hear about most stuff in the public domain. Letting people benefit from hauling it out of obscurity with updates is good for the commons. Disney took it to an extreme, but I probably never would have heard of the stories they pulled from if someone didn't make hit cartoon movies based on them.
- mhh__ 2y agoIs there some technicality whereby one could still hold rights to illustrations and the colour of the bindings and so on.
- troad 2y agoShould it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly. Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date. I wish a fraction of the people who are upset about this would actually commit a portion of their time to lobbying and organising for copyright reform. Copyright terms are too damn long, by half a century and then some. This isn't some iron law of nature, this could easily be changed if there were enough of a push for it.
- iandanforth 2y agoAre you a lawyer? Can you point to the relevant statutes? I don't ask this flippantly as there exist many forms (private / public / academic) of library which allow for both physical and digital lending of owned assets and are not subject to lawsuits like this. It's not at all obvious that IA's interpretation of the law is in error.
- repiret 2y agoAre you aware of a form of library subject to US law that lends copyrighted digital assets without either a license from the copyright holder or legal trouble from the copyright holder?
- badlibrarian 2y agoYou really don't need to be a lawyer to understand the extent to which Internet Archive really screwed up here. For starters they lost on Summary Judgment, which means they couldn't come up with a single issue of fact that the judge thought deserved a trial. Read the Order, the Judge obviously has it straight. Then check archive.org's Form 990s and see how little money they run on, how much they pissed away on legal fees so far, and also infer the amount they had to pay in damages, which was obviously very tiny. You are welcome to argue it as a matter of culture (and I'm inclined to agree and cheer you on) but from a legal perspective, Brewster should be removed and they need to find competent people to put on the board because they really did put the entire organization at risk over an idiotic decision. And the ramifications continue. Internet Archive's "we own a copy of a book, we scan it and loan out one digital copy" policy was already on shaky ground. When Covid hit and everyone lost their minds, letting homeless people sleep on the stairs of their building apparently wasn't enough so they just turned into The Pirate Bay and loaned out infinite copies of everything. In discovery for the case, it turned out they weren't even tracking the "we own one copy" part to begin with correctly. None of this should be surprising to anyone who actually attempts to use the site. The whole thing is duct tape and string. They have a tiny budget and the do amazing things with it, but it really deserves to be treated like a business and not be run like an art project. If they wanna stick your neck out and push for CDL reform, great. Just do it under a different LLC so you don't tank the 50 other important things you've got going on. And it's time for Brewster to move on. In any other non-profit he'd be gone by now.
- roody15 2y agoI hope they do a data dump or leak of the archive before they comply. It’s a shame to lose so many actually scanned hardcover books.
- badlibrarian 2y agoThe books are still there, and if you're disabled you can even read them. They don't delete anything, even when they say they do. They "dark" it and let it sit, waiting for changes in the law, or for it to fall out of copyright, or some admin on an information-wants-to-be-free bender to push a button assuming nobody will notice.
- liendolucas 2y agoWhat I will never understand is why this is needed at all. The books that I do find interesting I buy them. Sure, you can bypass paper by having ebooks. But is it really a replacement for a printed book? There is nothing like a printed book. No power needed, nor devices needed, you can go back to any page, any chapter instantly and if you have stomach even write on them. On the other side having the possibility to just quickly browse through a digital file to check if that title is of your interest or if it will serve you well if a technical book is invaluable. I have literally saved myself hours and money from not purchasing titles that turned out to be not of my interest. Imagine paying ridiculous amounts of money for technical books that then you find out the way a topic is approached is not really for you. Go ahead and check prices of for example Springer, Wiley, Addison Wesley books. And if out of print you pay a leg for a second hand one, effectively limiting access to knowledge only to people with big pockets.
- tombert 2y agoMeh, I have a lot of trouble reading small print. I'm not dyslexic (I've been tested), but my brain just doesn't like small text, I have trouble parsing it and retaining stuff I'm reading. I might just be dumb, but sadly I cannot change my brain so thems the breaks. Something I really like about ebooks and e-ink displays is that I can set the font as big as I want and it updates instantly. I read a lot better, and as a result I enjoy it a lot more. For me, the Kindle was kind of revelatory. I borrow books from my library, which allows me to read the Kindle version, and I don't need to pay anything (outside of my taxes, I suppose).
- liendolucas 2y agoE-readers for me are one of the best gadgets ever invented. Prices though are still high compared to few years ago. I own a Kobo Aura H20 and almost every time take it with me, possibly the best purchase I ever made. They are great for reading regular books, but I repeteadly find online that in general technical books still do not render properly and a lot of people complain after purchasing them.
- DamnInteresting 2y ago
- slackfan 2y agoThanks, Chuck Wendig!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MountainArras 2y ago[dead]
- poikroequ 2y ago> "I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston. This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA. It's not like these publishers are losing any money from books that literally nobody can purchase.
- vineyardmike 2y ago> Copyright should be "use it or lose it." Which is basically how trademarks are. So we even already have a system in place to manage something like this.
- CSMastermind 2y ago>If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions. And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
- cwillu 2y agoAuthors should have that inalienable right, and it should not transferable via contract or any other means. Publishers, on the other hand, should have no such rights: they own the presses, their inalienable right should be to refrain from using them.
- CSMastermind 2y ago
- xvilka 2y agoIt's a digital equivalent of burning books. Those publishers have the same tactics as Nazi.
- rml 2y ago> And even when IA temporarily stopped limiting the number of loans to provide emergency access to books during the pandemic—which could be considered a proxy for publishers' fear that IA's lending could pose a greater threat if it became much more widespread—IA's expert "found no evidence of market harm." I feel that IA erred very badly in lifting the one-to-one correspondence that is at the heart of "controlled digital lending" (https://controlleddigitallending.org https://controlleddigitallending.org). It is frankly annoying that they did that, and then still purport to be doing CDL, even though the CDL website clearly states the 1:1 "owned-to-loaned" ratio is a key part of the CDL platform. For the record I'm extremely pro CDL, but I feel the IA did not do any favors to the CDL movement with this boneheaded "activist" implementation of CDL
- account42 2y agoThe main error here was embracing DRM in the first place.
- nanovision 2y agoThis is sad. If this was indeed copyright infringement, what was the rationale behind the Internet Archive initially adding these books? The Internet Archive has never been a pirate site, so there must have been some logic or justification for indexing these books.
- CSMastermind 2y ago> what was the rationale behind the Internet Archive initially adding these books They believed they had the legal right to distribute the books. You can read the whitepaper about it here: https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/ https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/
- Ekaros 2y agoIt is a pirate site... I think in the end they are just enabled data hoarders who will hoard nearly everything... Including stuff nearly everyone would consider as piracy.
- Zuiii 2y agoThis will backfire against publishers so hard. Now everyone has to resort to piracy.
- joquarky 2y agoThe increased uncertainty to retain access to obscure and out of print works does seem to give one a desire to begin digital hoarding.
- m3kw9 2y agoArichive the internet archive, hopefully someone there has done it
- sourcecodeplz 2y agoWhatever, there are so many things on IA, that a "couple of books" will not make much difference to the experience. Besides, if you're an avid reader, you will find the books somewhere else also for free.
- interloxia 2y agoMy daughter's favourites list has shrunk by 50 books, about 10%. We read a few every day. It's a great source of English books for us. Our city library is good, but it doesn't have thousands of picture books. Libby has about 15 books. We borrow them often enough that it gives the error message that they are unavailable to borrow :/
- Hnrobert42 2y agoSeems like the “Borrow Unavailable” message should be replaced with “Borrow prohibited by publisher.”
- account42 2y agoOr with a magnet URI.
- deknos 2y agoThis is outrageous. it's difficult not to start hating this cannibalism-capitalism.
- healthyusa 2y agoPossible to set up a server somewhere out there? Just host? What’s stopping that from happening?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fagrobot 2y ago[dead]
- evah 2y agoRobert Miller, global director of books for the internet archive, stated in a documentary in 2013 that there had been an estimated 100 million books published in the world, that the archive had an initial target of 10 million, and that their book warehouse had space for 3 million. Based on those figures, 500k is a rather large number. Maybe some of those 500k are duplicate scans? [1] https://archive.org/details/archive_documentary_internet_archive_sequence https://archive.org/details/archive_documentary_internet_arc...
- Mr_Minderbinder 2y agoDuring the early Covid period there was a general sense that “the rules don’t apply” or “the rules are insufficient” for this crisis and therefore can be safely ignored when they conflict with Covid counter-measures. Even those in authority were breaking some laws to respond to it. In addition any action that could be perceived as “combating Covid” was seen as an automatic good. Combine all that with the extreme fear and uncertainty and you have the perfect environment to make a stupid move. The IA should just admit the “emergency library” was a mistake, move on and stop wasting money and risking the entire project on this.
- rldjbpin 2y agoas sad as this ruling is, simultaneously i see a wave of authors who have made their works freely available online, while selling hardcopies. this too from major technical publishers. see for instance ISLR (https://www.statlearning.com/ https://www.statlearning.com/). speaking from a myopic view, in an age where source code can be freely distributed while maintaining ownership and rights*, why do literature have so much gatekeeping digitally? while the authors that make their digital versions freely available bestow some trust on the other end (please don't print our work and sell it), simultaneously they can often benefit during the editorial process (many books are available this way before final publishing). moreover, if you write a work of fiction, nobody can run and create a movie based on it just because you can read the book for free. this was a good opportunity to set precedence, but it has gone the other direction.
- deadlast2 2y agoWhy cant another country that des not have copyrite laws host this.