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> In his many interviews with U.S. media, he portrays the court cases and legal judgements as a crusade against the Internet Archive and all librarians. It's no

> In his many interviews with U.S. media, he portrays the court cases and legal judgements as a crusade against the Internet Archive and all librarians. It's not. 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. If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. They hit and they missed. Claiming Brewster Kahle is against "the people who work very hard to bring new books into being" is unfair. The copyright goalposts have moved so far past where they were originally, the people who work very hard can be dead for decades and their works still in copyright, and by the time they are dead for 70 years, the copyright will probably be extended again.

tptacek 2y ago
The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create. The infinitesimal odds IA seemed to have at winning this case have to be weighed against the precedent they have created that may bind on future controlled digital lending cases with better facts. What IA did here wasn't costless.
- creer 2y ago
  > future controlled digital lending cases with better facts. Was anyone else doing anything? Or standing ready to do anything?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I don't know, but anybody who wasn't doing anything and wasn't standing to do anything was more valuable to digital rights than the people who appealed this case to the 2nd Circuit, in that none of them actually damaged digital rights.
    - creer 2y ago
      I don't know. From the point of view of the appeal and mechanical precedent specifically, maybe, maybe not. At first read, the decision rationale seems somewhat measured and interesting - it doesn't just say "Declined". And meanwhile, IA kept the issue present and discussed and with some attempt at doing something different - even in the appeal.
      - immibis 2y ago
        It was ruled illegal when they did it with DVDs
    - stavros 2y ago
      Sure, but that's judging in hindsight. Then again, everyone here was saying how dumb a move this was before the trial even started, so... The payoff for winning would have been massive, but if the IA shuts down because of this, so will the cost for losing.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        Yes, it is. But back to the point I made originally: this case had an infinitesimal chance of success. You can come up with a worse fact pattern for fair use, but you have to work at it. Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers? That was simply never going to be determined to be "fair use". IA isn't going to shut down over this, I don't think. I don't think they'll pay any damages at all, since there's a statute that suggests damages be remitted for nonprofits. Again: the real damage is a 2nd Cir. precedent that 1:1 CDL fails the fair use test. That's going to hurt other people. This happens often enough that there's a saying about it: "bad facts make bad law."
        ricardobeat 2y ago
        > Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers For some reason this was acceptable in physical form for hundreds of years. CDL is just making it more convenient for our modern reality.
        mkesper 2y ago
        With physical copies only one reader can read it at any time. With digital copies in principle everyone can read it even in 100 years from now going back to one original copy.
        trustno2 2y ago
        No it's not. Libraries don't make copies. They lend you the actual books. Copyright is literally right to copy. Scanning the book and doing something with, such as lending it forward, is copying. (The covid thing strengthens the case of the book guys - the CDL suddenly let anyone get anything because Archive decided to change the rules unilaterally)
    - mindslight 2y ago
      Aereo had much more favorable facts and yet was still decided in favor of copyright maximalism, so it's probably a moot point. Ultimately, the digital rights we have are the ones we take.
- matwood 2y ago
  > The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create. Not really. This put a huge chilling effect on real attempts at CDL, which IA was not.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I think we agree.
    - matwood 2y ago
      Yes we do. I misread your comment that this case was somehow a good thing.
  - polynomial 2y ago
    That's what matwood is saying.
    - pests 2y ago
      You are replying to matwood.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        Well then he definitely agrees.
        wazdra 2y ago
        I think we can all agree to disagree
- polynomial 2y ago
  Fantastic point.
- bubblethink 2y ago
  I don't think losing controlled digital lending is such a big loss. It was a clever workaround on shaky ground that only survived for the same reason that you stated - no one wants to create precedent. On principle, this was a shot worth taking. I can see a parallel with scihub, where they have actually brought about a cultural change in scientific publishing. Libraries aren't agreeing to closed publishing, ACM is going open access, etc.
- account42 2y ago
  If the precedent is that caving into DRM demands doesn't save you from greedy publishers then it's a good precedent to set. This interested in preservation and access to information are better off putting their efforts into skirting unjust and societally harmful laws than trying to work within them.
doublescoop 2y ago
This wasn't a case of the estates of dead authors trying to hold onto rights. Working authors were actively being harmed by the activities of the IA through the CDL. Working authors were met with refusals to meet to discuss this issue. I don't think that characterization of Kahle is unfair at all. His position was unreasonable, determined to be illegal, and damaging to people who depend on copyright to license their work.
- cmiles74 2y ago
  How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out. I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - colejohnson66 2y ago
    Maybe not the CDL, but the "national emergency library" that ignored the one-book-per-person limit definitely went too far.
    - cmiles74 2y ago
      This particular ruling deals with the CDL.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        It deals with both, right? Publishers sued over the NEL.
        cmiles74 2y ago
        Copying text out of the PDF from my phone is not fun! The gist is that since the CDL isn't okay then they don't really need to deal with NEL as it's predicated on the legality of the CDL (pages 15-16). The NEL gets a couple of sentences, the bulk of the ruling is about the CDL
pessimizer 2y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 2y ago
  How would an executive order reverse an appeals court finding? This wasn't a regulatory case.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  > Liberals were spoiled by the Warren Court[...] No, you're going to have to convince people, you can't just wave your degrees and resume around. Maybe this was true in the 1950s and 60s, but a lot of things enshrined by judicial or executive fiat already have democratic support. ex: https://xkcd.com/1431/ https://xkcd.com/1431/ Tearing them down is just an exercise in vetocracy. I'm not entirely sure how this relates to copyright, though - an aspect of law whose main impact on the average person is YouTube or Facebook saying "no, you can't put 50 year old pop songs on your uploads". Here, the problem isn't a majority opposition that needs to be convinced, it's a majority that doesn't care, or doesn't know how to fight in favor of reform. IA won't be gone because libraries have limitations on copyright damages. In fact, they already paid damages in a settlement with the publishers in the lawsuit. The only reason why there even is an appeal being talked about is because IA and the publishers both agreed to keep the case live through the appeals court.
xhkkffbf 2y ago
[flagged]
- elaus 2y ago
  This court ruling was (also) about "CDL" (controlled digital lending), i.e. lending ONE digital copy of a book for each physical book in a library's possession – and only while the physical copy was not lent. This is as far away from "giving away infinite copies to anyone" as it could be.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    While I agree with your point, there is some nuance because transfers can be nearly instantaneous. Physical books have to be transported to and from the library. CDL is as if we all lived in the same library and could shelve/swap books with anyone at any moment and only have to wait when there is a queue.
    - dark-star 2y ago
      That's what the internet does: it makes things that took days or weeks before (nearly-)instantaneous. If I have 100$, I can lend them to someone (via paypal or whatever), and when I get them back, I can immediately give them out again. I don't have to wait for them to physically go to my place (or a bank) and return cash. If your whole defense hinges on "borrowing books has to have an inherent delay of X hours/days/weeks before they can be given out again", that's a very weak point in today's day and age. It's like saying "sending mails is bad because it is nearly instantaneous, and you don't have to wait for the postman to deliver your letter".
      - paulryanrogers 2y ago
        As an author it means my book is less likely to be purchased directly by impatient library patrons.
        2y ago
zajio1am 2y ago
> The copyright goalposts have moved so far past where they were originally, the people who work very hard can be dead for decades and their works still in copyright, and by the time they are dead for 70 years Note that copyright lasting 50 years after the author's death was already in Berne Convention from 1886. Some (but not all) of these extensions in US were just adaptation of older weaker US copyright to international conventions.
- account42 2y ago
  Those "international conventions" were still established by lobbying from the US copyright industry. International treaties are a great backdoor for laws that a government wants to pass but which are unpopular with the population.
Spooky23 2y ago
You’re taking an extreme and ultimately wrong position. The the name of this nonsense, the Internet Archive damaged itself, perhaps mortally and damaged the concepts it stands for. Archives should be run by boards of archivists and librarians, not reckless activists.
- tptacek 2y ago
  People keep saying this, but it's unclear that there will be significant damages assessed in this case. 17 USC 504(c)(2) suggests damages will be waived as IA is recognized as a nonprofit and its copying was noncommercial. Likely the real damage here will be to legal precedent.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Fair, and I hope you’re right.
- gojomo 2y ago
  This histrionic concern trolling about "mortally…damaged" is nutty, given that IA already settled the damages portion with the plaintiffs over a year ago for what seems to be some symbolic amount: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203774 Perhaps diligent but conservative government archives should be run by your gray ideal of "boards of archivists and librarians". But the Internet Archive was founded to be an activist organization, in deed and legal strategy. When you start, fund, or staff an archive, you can run it as risk-averse as you'd like.
api 2y ago
[flagged]
- mumblemumble 2y ago
  Or at least that's what it amounts to in the information age. When you get down to it, this is just not a good sphere for deontological ethics.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Labor should not be free, but it should also not serve to establish rent to be paid in perpetuity. > Mass indirect piracy via AI being used to flood the Kindle market with slop is bad enough. That just amplified the problem that already existed before LLMs - human-written slop already flooded the Kindle market, and has been flooding paper book market too - and yes, "ending book writing as a profession" is likely the only way for good literature to be made again and be read.
  - api 2y ago
    This is the fallacy of using the pathological case to argue against the normal case. Copyright is in need of reform but without it there is no intellectual labor, or at least no compensation for it. In the Information Age where everything else is increasingly automated, this eventually converges with all labor being uncompensated since all labor is eventually intellectual in nature if we are sufficiently advanced.
    - kiba 2y ago
      I question the assertion that copyright is necessary for compensating intellectual labor. For example, there will always be a need and demand for technical documentation, engineering, legal writing, etc, all of which will and must exists without copyright. A lawyer's product is specific to his client, and bridge engineers' output are a correctly designed bridge. You can extend it to musicians and artists. A musician get paid to play gigs at wedding, or artists being commissioned to create works for their patrons. Copyright enables certain business models and change the quantity and quality of the work available, for ill or good but it isn't strictly necessary and may even be detrimental.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
I wouldn't have hailed them as a hero. While copyright law in the US is insane, what they were doing is equally wrong. I don't want either extreme to prevail.
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  i just want to clarify what you think would be so wrong with a service where you can find a book title, check out a scan of that book -- which has a corresponding physical copy in the real world, a one-to-one mapping to a physical book that is taken out of circulation -- and read it, while others cannot (because only one person can read that scan at a time), and then when you're finished, leave it for another person to read next. And if that's wrong, is me lending a book to a friend wrong?
  - mlyle 2y ago
    The thing that's a little tricky here, is in practice you can pretty easily keep a copy of that scan. It makes subsequent infringement a whole lot easier than checking out the book from a library or borrowing a physical book from a friend, because the thing that's an impediment to casual copying (scanning) has already been done.
mardifoufs 2y ago
Except that IA is a non profit with a specific set of goals. Not only that but by the very nature of said goals (amongst others, preservation and archival of knowledge), they have to be even more prudent and have stability as one of their most important goals imo. Like, every goal they have becomes completely impossible to achieve without a very stable, long term outlook. "Hitting and missing" is usually fine, but it's an attitude that is more reminiscent of wallstreetbets than a serious knowledge repository that aims to preserve everything they can for at least a few generations. To push the wallstreetbets analogy further, a hedge fund that bets on something risky and loses big is fine. But you don't just "hit and miss" at a large scale when you are in charge of trillions in retirement/pension funds. It just should not be part of the thought process in the first place, it's the completely wrong mindset. Not that there's no room for activism , but it should be delegated to someone else or by supporting another group or organization that could take the fight and have much less to lose.
- protocolture 2y ago
  The Internet Archive should probably have, granting access to the data in the archive, as a core goal and calling that activism is bizarre to me.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    I don't think it's quite that simple. I can't just scrape nytimes.com and re-host it on my own website legally - that's clear copyright infringement. Google news quoting article excerpts was legally controversial, as was their book search function, and their archive option. I always assumed website owners were just sorta turning a blind eye to archive.org because (a) it's slow and (b) it doesn't get indexed in google
    - xhkkffbf 2y ago
      I'm very happy about this decision about CDL and I'm glad that the IA got smacked for being so obnoxious and anti-artist. But I'm also willing to turn a blind eye to the archive and the way back machine because they're useful and not really competition.
lolinder 2y ago
I agree with you about copyright, but the fact is that the IA never had a chance and we knew it years ago. The top comment on HN a week after their launch of the EL is critical [0], right at the moment when HN would be most expected to rally to their defense. By the time the lawsuit was actually starting to take shape most commenters had become very concerned for the fate of the IA [1]. This is on a forum that reliably champions freedom of information, but most of us knew even at the time that what they'd done was extremely unlikely to pass muster. The IA was never going to be hailed as a cultural hero because they stood no chance, and they are too valuable for other, unrelated reasons to make themselves a martyr. This never should have happened under the same legal entity as the web archive. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182
- vesinisa 2y ago
  Ditto. Worth also noting is that IA lost the case by summary judgement. This usually means that the legal matter was so clear that the judge didn't even see a reason to start a trial. This judgement has now been confirmed on appeal. Just about any lawyer could have probably told them this was the inevitable outcome had they listened. I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. Hard to think I would ever donate to them again unless there's a change in leadership after this fiasco.
  - the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
    I think one has to be honest and realize that the desire of digital preservation stands in conflict with present day laws.
    - vesinisa 2y ago
      Yes, but this case was not about digital presevation but lending out scanned traditional books without proper controls, presented as some sort of a social welfare project. Choose your battles.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero This is ends justifying the means logic. (More accurately, it is showboating.) Let’s concede for the sake of argument what they wanted to do was unarguably good. It’s still an astronomical long shot. And one with real costs, financial and institutional. IA incurred those costs, and in the process not only destroyed the library but set a harmful precedent. They threw out the good in pursuit of perfection.
- pastage 2y ago
  I honestly think what IA did was vital for their survival. The IA can not exist without the media library. I see that many people here do not care about IA and their goal. I am not sure why that is. Maybe HN is filled with people in places were access to books is easy and think that there is an alternative. What IA did was the only sane option, I agree that it was bound to be destroyed the same way Google Books was.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Maybe because other shadow libraries exist. IA could have sneakily donated a copy of their data to one of these openly illegal ventures, instead of being illegal itself.
caseyy 2y ago
> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. You need a little bit more wisdom to change extremely entrenched laws. Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them. This was evident from the start. IA already had some disputes with rights owners for some of the content they archived. They should have progressively resolved these disputes until some pattern emerged where either mass archival of old movies, TV shows, news videos, video games, and similar was broadly acceptable, or broadly not. IA could have won this. I think most publishers were unwilling to burn money on enforcing their copyrights with products they no longer exploit. Now the org may not exist to see that day.
- haswell 2y ago
  > Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them Breaking laws and pushing to change them has been the modus operandi for some of tech’s biggest names. It’d be interesting to see how this might have played out if the IA had the resources that Uber, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, etc have at their disposal. It’s a sobering look at who actually has power to shape the legal landscape, and which direction it’s likely to be shaped in.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Big tech companies have gotten their asses handed to them in copyright cases in the past.
    - haswell 2y ago
      That's fair. Maybe a category error on my part to compare these given the victories by big tech are mostly in other areas.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    Tech companies have large legal departments which find ways to skirt around existing laws. Where these companies break laws, they almost never challenge them. When they are prosecuted for breaking laws, they draw attention to orthogonal issues in court proceedings and hearings, delay the process, and involve a lot of other legal strategies. When they are sued by competitors for infringing on other's interests by breaking laws, they counter-sue, often frivolously. They also lobby. Breaking laws and then arguing to change them when caught doesn't work and almost no one does it. The cost in money and time to get to higher courts, win (uncertain probability) and create a precedent with a legal department is 10x-1000x the cost of lobbying congress to pass a bill. The big tech corporate lawsuits that go to appeals are so expensive that one could probably straight up bribe influential politicians for less, should that be the path one wished to take. We know stories where people went to higher courts and won to create a precedent because these stories are heroic and rare. If IA had the resources of Uber it wouldn't have worked out any differently, because it doesn't for Uber when they break laws. For example, around structuring employment as b2b contracting. These companies have the resources to shape the legal landscape, but not by breaking laws and getting prosecuted for it. That would show very poor decision-making. Maybe they can become martyrs and win the court of public opinion when their actions are seen as moral. But an org like IA can do much more good than just become a martyr, so this is a very poor decision.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bawolff 2y ago
The correct way is to change laws is to lobby your elected representitive. Blatently breaking them generally doesn't work. It can when the laws are morally repungent, but the majority of the population are never going to find copyright law repungant the same way society found, say segregation, repungent. Copyright law may suck. The IA's actions were an extremely silly way to fight it, really didn't help anybody, and it was obvious from the get go that it wouldn't.
- pastage 2y ago
  IA helped a lot of people, what they did was right. Maybe not legal.
- immibis 2y ago
  Do you really think the political system is functional?
  - bawolff 2y ago
    All things are relative. I think its more functional than just assuming that a judge is going to whole-heartedly set aside the law.
SllX 2y ago
This isn’t about swinging and missing. This was a project in direct contravention of the copyright laws and agreements they have within the very jurisdiction they operate. It’s like if they saw the ball coming, and in that moment decided baseball is dumb and they they would rather be playing soccer instead so they threw the metaphorical bat down, tried to kick the ball already pitched at them and somehow broke their neck in the process. That shouldn’t have been possible.
- ilamont 2y ago
  Thank you for this analogy. Lightens up the thread and put a smile on my face.
beeboobaa3 2y ago
Not really, it's just giving more fuel to the ai bros that they get to scrape everything
abnry 2y ago
I mean, many authors do care about their copyright. So if you disregard copyright en mass, then yeah, you are against the people writing the books who care about their copyright. You could have made a fairer point if the IA only disregarded the copyright of authors who are dead or something like 10 years past publication.

tptacek 2y ago

The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create. The infinitesimal odds IA seemed to have at winning this case have to be weighed against the precedent they have created that may bind on future controlled digital lending cases with better facts. What IA did here wasn't costless.

creer 2y ago
> future controlled digital lending cases with better facts. Was anyone else doing anything? Or standing ready to do anything?
- tptacek 2y ago
  I don't know, but anybody who wasn't doing anything and wasn't standing to do anything was more valuable to digital rights than the people who appealed this case to the 2nd Circuit, in that none of them actually damaged digital rights.
  - creer 2y ago
    I don't know. From the point of view of the appeal and mechanical precedent specifically, maybe, maybe not. At first read, the decision rationale seems somewhat measured and interesting - it doesn't just say "Declined". And meanwhile, IA kept the issue present and discussed and with some attempt at doing something different - even in the appeal.
    - immibis 2y ago
      It was ruled illegal when they did it with DVDs
  - stavros 2y ago
    Sure, but that's judging in hindsight. Then again, everyone here was saying how dumb a move this was before the trial even started, so... The payoff for winning would have been massive, but if the IA shuts down because of this, so will the cost for losing.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Yes, it is. But back to the point I made originally: this case had an infinitesimal chance of success. You can come up with a worse fact pattern for fair use, but you have to work at it. Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers? That was simply never going to be determined to be "fair use". IA isn't going to shut down over this, I don't think. I don't think they'll pay any damages at all, since there's a statute that suggests damages be remitted for nonprofits. Again: the real damage is a 2nd Cir. precedent that 1:1 CDL fails the fair use test. That's going to hurt other people. This happens often enough that there's a saying about it: "bad facts make bad law."
      - ricardobeat 2y ago
        > Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers For some reason this was acceptable in physical form for hundreds of years. CDL is just making it more convenient for our modern reality.
        mkesper 2y ago
        With physical copies only one reader can read it at any time. With digital copies in principle everyone can read it even in 100 years from now going back to one original copy.
        trustno2 2y ago
        No it's not. Libraries don't make copies. They lend you the actual books. Copyright is literally right to copy. Scanning the book and doing something with, such as lending it forward, is copying. (The covid thing strengthens the case of the book guys - the CDL suddenly let anyone get anything because Archive decided to change the rules unilaterally)
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Aereo had much more favorable facts and yet was still decided in favor of copyright maximalism, so it's probably a moot point. Ultimately, the digital rights we have are the ones we take.
matwood 2y ago
> The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create. Not really. This put a huge chilling effect on real attempts at CDL, which IA was not.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I think we agree.
  - matwood 2y ago
    Yes we do. I misread your comment that this case was somehow a good thing.
- polynomial 2y ago
  That's what matwood is saying.
  - pests 2y ago
    You are replying to matwood.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Well then he definitely agrees.
      - wazdra 2y ago
        I think we can all agree to disagree
polynomial 2y ago
Fantastic point.
bubblethink 2y ago
I don't think losing controlled digital lending is such a big loss. It was a clever workaround on shaky ground that only survived for the same reason that you stated - no one wants to create precedent. On principle, this was a shot worth taking. I can see a parallel with scihub, where they have actually brought about a cultural change in scientific publishing. Libraries aren't agreeing to closed publishing, ACM is going open access, etc.
account42 2y ago
If the precedent is that caving into DRM demands doesn't save you from greedy publishers then it's a good precedent to set. This interested in preservation and access to information are better off putting their efforts into skirting unjust and societally harmful laws than trying to work within them.

doublescoop 2y ago

This wasn't a case of the estates of dead authors trying to hold onto rights. Working authors were actively being harmed by the activities of the IA through the CDL. Working authors were met with refusals to meet to discuss this issue. I don't think that characterization of Kahle is unfair at all. His position was unreasonable, determined to be illegal, and damaging to people who depend on copyright to license their work.

cmiles74 2y ago
How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out. I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- colejohnson66 2y ago
  Maybe not the CDL, but the "national emergency library" that ignored the one-book-per-person limit definitely went too far.
  - cmiles74 2y ago
    This particular ruling deals with the CDL.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      It deals with both, right? Publishers sued over the NEL.
      - cmiles74 2y ago
        Copying text out of the PDF from my phone is not fun! The gist is that since the CDL isn't okay then they don't really need to deal with NEL as it's predicated on the legality of the CDL (pages 15-16). The NEL gets a couple of sentences, the bulk of the ruling is about the CDL

pessimizer 2y ago

[flagged]

tptacek 2y ago
How would an executive order reverse an appeals court finding? This wasn't a regulatory case.
kmeisthax 2y ago
> Liberals were spoiled by the Warren Court[...] No, you're going to have to convince people, you can't just wave your degrees and resume around. Maybe this was true in the 1950s and 60s, but a lot of things enshrined by judicial or executive fiat already have democratic support. ex: https://xkcd.com/1431/ https://xkcd.com/1431/ Tearing them down is just an exercise in vetocracy. I'm not entirely sure how this relates to copyright, though - an aspect of law whose main impact on the average person is YouTube or Facebook saying "no, you can't put 50 year old pop songs on your uploads". Here, the problem isn't a majority opposition that needs to be convinced, it's a majority that doesn't care, or doesn't know how to fight in favor of reform. IA won't be gone because libraries have limitations on copyright damages. In fact, they already paid damages in a settlement with the publishers in the lawsuit. The only reason why there even is an appeal being talked about is because IA and the publishers both agreed to keep the case live through the appeals court.

xhkkffbf 2y ago

[flagged]

elaus 2y ago
This court ruling was (also) about "CDL" (controlled digital lending), i.e. lending ONE digital copy of a book for each physical book in a library's possession – and only while the physical copy was not lent. This is as far away from "giving away infinite copies to anyone" as it could be.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  While I agree with your point, there is some nuance because transfers can be nearly instantaneous. Physical books have to be transported to and from the library. CDL is as if we all lived in the same library and could shelve/swap books with anyone at any moment and only have to wait when there is a queue.
  - dark-star 2y ago
    That's what the internet does: it makes things that took days or weeks before (nearly-)instantaneous. If I have 100$, I can lend them to someone (via paypal or whatever), and when I get them back, I can immediately give them out again. I don't have to wait for them to physically go to my place (or a bank) and return cash. If your whole defense hinges on "borrowing books has to have an inherent delay of X hours/days/weeks before they can be given out again", that's a very weak point in today's day and age. It's like saying "sending mails is bad because it is nearly instantaneous, and you don't have to wait for the postman to deliver your letter".
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      As an author it means my book is less likely to be purchased directly by impatient library patrons.
      - 2y ago

zajio1am 2y ago

> The copyright goalposts have moved so far past where they were originally, the people who work very hard can be dead for decades and their works still in copyright, and by the time they are dead for 70 years Note that copyright lasting 50 years after the author's death was already in Berne Convention from 1886. Some (but not all) of these extensions in US were just adaptation of older weaker US copyright to international conventions.

account42 2y ago
Those "international conventions" were still established by lobbying from the US copyright industry. International treaties are a great backdoor for laws that a government wants to pass but which are unpopular with the population.

Spooky23 2y ago

You’re taking an extreme and ultimately wrong position. The the name of this nonsense, the Internet Archive damaged itself, perhaps mortally and damaged the concepts it stands for. Archives should be run by boards of archivists and librarians, not reckless activists.

tptacek 2y ago
People keep saying this, but it's unclear that there will be significant damages assessed in this case. 17 USC 504(c)(2) suggests damages will be waived as IA is recognized as a nonprofit and its copying was noncommercial. Likely the real damage here will be to legal precedent.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Fair, and I hope you’re right.
gojomo 2y ago
This histrionic concern trolling about "mortally…damaged" is nutty, given that IA already settled the damages portion with the plaintiffs over a year ago for what seems to be some symbolic amount: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203774 Perhaps diligent but conservative government archives should be run by your gray ideal of "boards of archivists and librarians". But the Internet Archive was founded to be an activist organization, in deed and legal strategy. When you start, fund, or staff an archive, you can run it as risk-averse as you'd like.

api 2y ago

[flagged]

mumblemumble 2y ago
Or at least that's what it amounts to in the information age. When you get down to it, this is just not a good sphere for deontological ethics.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Labor should not be free, but it should also not serve to establish rent to be paid in perpetuity. > Mass indirect piracy via AI being used to flood the Kindle market with slop is bad enough. That just amplified the problem that already existed before LLMs - human-written slop already flooded the Kindle market, and has been flooding paper book market too - and yes, "ending book writing as a profession" is likely the only way for good literature to be made again and be read.
- api 2y ago
  This is the fallacy of using the pathological case to argue against the normal case. Copyright is in need of reform but without it there is no intellectual labor, or at least no compensation for it. In the Information Age where everything else is increasingly automated, this eventually converges with all labor being uncompensated since all labor is eventually intellectual in nature if we are sufficiently advanced.
  - kiba 2y ago
    I question the assertion that copyright is necessary for compensating intellectual labor. For example, there will always be a need and demand for technical documentation, engineering, legal writing, etc, all of which will and must exists without copyright. A lawyer's product is specific to his client, and bridge engineers' output are a correctly designed bridge. You can extend it to musicians and artists. A musician get paid to play gigs at wedding, or artists being commissioned to create works for their patrons. Copyright enables certain business models and change the quantity and quality of the work available, for ill or good but it isn't strictly necessary and may even be detrimental.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

I wouldn't have hailed them as a hero. While copyright law in the US is insane, what they were doing is equally wrong. I don't want either extreme to prevail.

dannyobrien 2y ago
i just want to clarify what you think would be so wrong with a service where you can find a book title, check out a scan of that book -- which has a corresponding physical copy in the real world, a one-to-one mapping to a physical book that is taken out of circulation -- and read it, while others cannot (because only one person can read that scan at a time), and then when you're finished, leave it for another person to read next. And if that's wrong, is me lending a book to a friend wrong?
- mlyle 2y ago
  The thing that's a little tricky here, is in practice you can pretty easily keep a copy of that scan. It makes subsequent infringement a whole lot easier than checking out the book from a library or borrowing a physical book from a friend, because the thing that's an impediment to casual copying (scanning) has already been done.

mardifoufs 2y ago

Except that IA is a non profit with a specific set of goals. Not only that but by the very nature of said goals (amongst others, preservation and archival of knowledge), they have to be even more prudent and have stability as one of their most important goals imo. Like, every goal they have becomes completely impossible to achieve without a very stable, long term outlook. "Hitting and missing" is usually fine, but it's an attitude that is more reminiscent of wallstreetbets than a serious knowledge repository that aims to preserve everything they can for at least a few generations. To push the wallstreetbets analogy further, a hedge fund that bets on something risky and loses big is fine. But you don't just "hit and miss" at a large scale when you are in charge of trillions in retirement/pension funds. It just should not be part of the thought process in the first place, it's the completely wrong mindset. Not that there's no room for activism , but it should be delegated to someone else or by supporting another group or organization that could take the fight and have much less to lose.

protocolture 2y ago
The Internet Archive should probably have, granting access to the data in the archive, as a core goal and calling that activism is bizarre to me.
- michaelt 2y ago
  I don't think it's quite that simple. I can't just scrape nytimes.com and re-host it on my own website legally - that's clear copyright infringement. Google news quoting article excerpts was legally controversial, as was their book search function, and their archive option. I always assumed website owners were just sorta turning a blind eye to archive.org because (a) it's slow and (b) it doesn't get indexed in google
  - xhkkffbf 2y ago
    I'm very happy about this decision about CDL and I'm glad that the IA got smacked for being so obnoxious and anti-artist. But I'm also willing to turn a blind eye to the archive and the way back machine because they're useful and not really competition.

lolinder 2y ago

I agree with you about copyright, but the fact is that the IA never had a chance and we knew it years ago. The top comment on HN a week after their launch of the EL is critical [0], right at the moment when HN would be most expected to rally to their defense. By the time the lawsuit was actually starting to take shape most commenters had become very concerned for the fate of the IA [1]. This is on a forum that reliably champions freedom of information, but most of us knew even at the time that what they'd done was extremely unlikely to pass muster. The IA was never going to be hailed as a cultural hero because they stood no chance, and they are too valuable for other, unrelated reasons to make themselves a martyr. This never should have happened under the same legal entity as the web archive. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182

vesinisa 2y ago
Ditto. Worth also noting is that IA lost the case by summary judgement. This usually means that the legal matter was so clear that the judge didn't even see a reason to start a trial. This judgement has now been confirmed on appeal. Just about any lawyer could have probably told them this was the inevitable outcome had they listened. I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. Hard to think I would ever donate to them again unless there's a change in leadership after this fiasco.
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  I think one has to be honest and realize that the desire of digital preservation stands in conflict with present day laws.
  - vesinisa 2y ago
    Yes, but this case was not about digital presevation but lending out scanned traditional books without proper controls, presented as some sort of a social welfare project. Choose your battles.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero This is ends justifying the means logic. (More accurately, it is showboating.) Let’s concede for the sake of argument what they wanted to do was unarguably good. It’s still an astronomical long shot. And one with real costs, financial and institutional. IA incurred those costs, and in the process not only destroyed the library but set a harmful precedent. They threw out the good in pursuit of perfection.

pastage 2y ago
I honestly think what IA did was vital for their survival. The IA can not exist without the media library. I see that many people here do not care about IA and their goal. I am not sure why that is. Maybe HN is filled with people in places were access to books is easy and think that there is an alternative. What IA did was the only sane option, I agree that it was bound to be destroyed the same way Google Books was.
- immibis 2y ago
  Maybe because other shadow libraries exist. IA could have sneakily donated a copy of their data to one of these openly illegal ventures, instead of being illegal itself.

caseyy 2y ago

> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. You need a little bit more wisdom to change extremely entrenched laws. Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them. This was evident from the start. IA already had some disputes with rights owners for some of the content they archived. They should have progressively resolved these disputes until some pattern emerged where either mass archival of old movies, TV shows, news videos, video games, and similar was broadly acceptable, or broadly not. IA could have won this. I think most publishers were unwilling to burn money on enforcing their copyrights with products they no longer exploit. Now the org may not exist to see that day.

haswell 2y ago
> Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them Breaking laws and pushing to change them has been the modus operandi for some of tech’s biggest names. It’d be interesting to see how this might have played out if the IA had the resources that Uber, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, etc have at their disposal. It’s a sobering look at who actually has power to shape the legal landscape, and which direction it’s likely to be shaped in.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Big tech companies have gotten their asses handed to them in copyright cases in the past.
  - haswell 2y ago
    That's fair. Maybe a category error on my part to compare these given the victories by big tech are mostly in other areas.
- caseyy 2y ago
  Tech companies have large legal departments which find ways to skirt around existing laws. Where these companies break laws, they almost never challenge them. When they are prosecuted for breaking laws, they draw attention to orthogonal issues in court proceedings and hearings, delay the process, and involve a lot of other legal strategies. When they are sued by competitors for infringing on other's interests by breaking laws, they counter-sue, often frivolously. They also lobby. Breaking laws and then arguing to change them when caught doesn't work and almost no one does it. The cost in money and time to get to higher courts, win (uncertain probability) and create a precedent with a legal department is 10x-1000x the cost of lobbying congress to pass a bill. The big tech corporate lawsuits that go to appeals are so expensive that one could probably straight up bribe influential politicians for less, should that be the path one wished to take. We know stories where people went to higher courts and won to create a precedent because these stories are heroic and rare. If IA had the resources of Uber it wouldn't have worked out any differently, because it doesn't for Uber when they break laws. For example, around structuring employment as b2b contracting. These companies have the resources to shape the legal landscape, but not by breaking laws and getting prosecuted for it. That would show very poor decision-making. Maybe they can become martyrs and win the court of public opinion when their actions are seen as moral. But an org like IA can do much more good than just become a martyr, so this is a very poor decision.

deleted 2y ago

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bawolff 2y ago

The correct way is to change laws is to lobby your elected representitive. Blatently breaking them generally doesn't work. It can when the laws are morally repungent, but the majority of the population are never going to find copyright law repungant the same way society found, say segregation, repungent. Copyright law may suck. The IA's actions were an extremely silly way to fight it, really didn't help anybody, and it was obvious from the get go that it wouldn't.

pastage 2y ago
IA helped a lot of people, what they did was right. Maybe not legal.
immibis 2y ago
Do you really think the political system is functional?
- bawolff 2y ago
  All things are relative. I think its more functional than just assuming that a judge is going to whole-heartedly set aside the law.

SllX 2y ago

This isn’t about swinging and missing. This was a project in direct contravention of the copyright laws and agreements they have within the very jurisdiction they operate. It’s like if they saw the ball coming, and in that moment decided baseball is dumb and they they would rather be playing soccer instead so they threw the metaphorical bat down, tried to kick the ball already pitched at them and somehow broke their neck in the process. That shouldn’t have been possible.

ilamont 2y ago
Thank you for this analogy. Lightens up the thread and put a smile on my face.

beeboobaa3 2y ago

Not really, it's just giving more fuel to the ai bros that they get to scrape everything

abnry 2y ago

I mean, many authors do care about their copyright. So if you disregard copyright en mass, then yeah, you are against the people writing the books who care about their copyright. You could have made a fairer point if the IA only disregarded the copyright of authors who are dead or something like 10 years past publication.