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The $621M Legal Battle by Record Labels Against Internet Archive
- kevingadd 2y agoIt's interesting that out of the 400k+ recordings they digitized, only 4142 are claimed as infringements. And it makes sense if everything they digitized is in an old format that went out of favor by the 50s. I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright, it should all be in the public domain, or at least subject to archival even if you can't stream it online in one or two clicks.
- freejazz 2y ago> I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright In a court of law? Not seriously nor credibly. The term of a copyright is provided for by statute.
- EarlKing 2y agoPretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are. The way things should be: None of this would be a problem. The way things are: Brewster Kahle is jeopardizing the archive's mission with his cavalier attitude towards copyright that is causing the archive to lose lawsuit after lawsuit. While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing, maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not. Unfortunately, such nuanced takes seem to be lost on people who treat these issues as a form of team sports and demand you either be simply pro- or anti-.
- mmooss 2y ago> While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing ... ... you still require a winning strategy and winning execution, or you've only done harm.
- freejazz 2y ago> Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are. Well, I made my distinction, which you clearly read and were aware of but made this post anyway.
- EarlKing 2y ago.....I mean, clearly someone was confused by what you said, and I took it as an opportunity to make my own point. I don't really see a problem.
- oneplane 2y agoOn the other hand, we constructed the court of law to help society, not the other way around. Same goes for statutes.
- jacobr1 2y agoAgreed - but societal interests are a mix of the constituents within the society which can be in conflict as a well as the overall society as a whole. We want to protect the rule of law, both legal and social norms surrounding property rights, we want to enable the free expression and production of cultural goods, we want to ensure artists can profit off their work. My take is that amongst people discussing this there is a rough agreement that IP rights (both copywrite and patents) should be weakened at least in duration, but no consensus on the specifics, and their is a concentrated lobby of rights holders that wants to maintain their legal ability extract rents from their collections. We wouldn't be served well be crashing the whole system (not implying the parent comment suggested this) but that means we need to figure out how to change things at the margin within the current political climate. One compromise I've been trying to push is to require payment to continue to maintain the exclusivity. Shorten the default timeframes, but require fees to relicense the material. Perhaps we could also require that the material get sent to an archive as part of this to ensure it kept (at the right's holders expense). If the LoC isn't up to it, they could authorize third parties. Make the fees higher (and increase them over time) to disincentivize extension of everything. This tradeoff means that the biggest properties - Disney films say - do get long extensions, but that doesn't lock up everything else. Same thing with patents. Also we can get more creative with mandatory licensing. The main innovation here is to stop making the cutoff such a hard boundary which makes things more contentious.
- freejazz 2y agoI've seen you say this multiple times but it makes no sense. Disney can get copyrights as long as they want, essentially, small time authors get little to no protection? This is even more entrenched. It doesn't even make any sense in the patent context because they all have very limited terms anyway. It's like a fun armchair quarterback sort of idea, but it's not going to get you very far in an actual game.
- axus 2y agoAn American would have to argue this while running for office, and then argue it in Congress. Alternatively, get a position to exploit the "copyright exception" provisions.
- freejazz 2y agoIt's a congressional law like any other congressional law. Needs to be passed by the house and the senate.
- jacobr1 2y agoOr like most laws, an interested group find a way to get an audience with lawmakers to brief them on their concerns, help build consensus amongst their peers and staffers, and after work in non-publicized committees the main the details of the law get tacked onto some bigger bill and passed. Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.
- FactKnower69 2y ago>Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics. This must be why life keeps getting better and better for Americans each year!
- dfxm12 2y agoIt's illustrative of the fact that the RIAA would rather throw away 99% of its history than give up whatever little bit of juice is left today in the remaining 1%. It's not like they care to archive this stuff themselves; like the article says, they already needed to rely on collectors to give them recordings for a Robert Johnson re-release, and that was in the 1961. Maybe it's their legal prerogative, but I'm of the mindset that if they are doing no good, at least do no harm.
- tyrrvk 2y agoMy favorite comment from the article was from the Hollywood/media exec lamenting that what IA was doing was 'theft'. Didn't Hollywood come about from people trying to outrun Edison and his patents? The hubris is astounding.
- 8338550bff96 2y agoTime to lay RIAA to rest. A message needs to be sent: orgs that go after archival efforts like this get smote to death.
- wormius 2y agoRICO statutes! Sic em boys!
- Viliam1234 2y agoArtificial scarcity is good for business. When the old stuff disappears, the new one sells better. As an example, I recently started listening to eurobeat. I looked at Wikipedia and found that there is a CD series called "Super Eurobeat", which already published 250 volumes, containing about dozen songs each. Think about this again -- there are about 3000 songs, all of them already selected as "best of", just from one genre I previously didn't know about. Given that I don't spend much time listening to music, it might take me more than a year to listen to all of them; and after that point, I would be happy to start from the beginning again. So, from my perspective, it is not necessary to make new music, ever. And if we lived in the kind of world where copyright expires let's say after 14 years, most of that would even be legally free. And the same is probably true for most other genres. Ok, this is extreme. New things are cool. But the more you are aware of the good old things that exist, the more work it takes to impress you. You will still be impressed with great new things, but much less with average new things, especially if they are expensive. And I suspect that the average new things make the largest part of the sales.
- rwmj 2y agohttps://archive.ph/85JPm https://archive.ph/85JPm
- BarbaPeru 2y ago[flagged]
- rwmj 2y agoI just checked it again with the cache cleared and it works fine (for me). If you could be specific about what way it "does not work" ...
- IncreasePosts 2y agoI think archive.ph blocks some DNS resolvers(cloudflare, maybe others?) because the operator doesn't like how cloud flare protects user privacy.
- jjcm 2y agoRegardless of what happens here, one of the biggest losses in historical music archives was when what.cd got taken down. Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings. I wish there was some sort of law protecting this. What.cd was clearly offending copyright, with the historical value being a secondary effect, but the internet archive's intent here clearly isn't copyright violation. Intent should matter.
- rblatz 2y agoIsn't that supposed to be the role of The Library of Congress?
- dfxm12 2y ago"That" has a little wiggle room here, but the answer is still probably no regardless of what you mean. The Internet Archive's goal is to provide universal access to all knowledge. This is not the goal of the LOC.
- mrighele 2y agoI think the parent refers to this [1]: "All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law (17 USC section 407). This law requires that two copies of the best edition of every copyrightable work published in the United States be sent to the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress" I don't know how/if it works in practice, but if the copyright is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", I think that it is perfectly fine for the LOC to guarantee that when the copyright expires at least a copy is still around. This doesn't mean that it should provide universal access though, especially while the copyright is still valid. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/ https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/
- nodamage 2y ago
- linuxhansl 2y agoWork for hire copyright duration of 95 years (from publishing) or 120 years from creation is outrageous. I just donated money to the Internet Archive.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoShould the government ever enforce copyright violations? That’s kind of the status quo for the vast vast majority of infractions. Even though enforcement could be trivial.
- jacobr1 2y agoNo, not in a direct sense anyway. It should be a tort. The government should assist with enforcement of court ordered actions like seizure of property or liens for non-payment however.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago> No, not in a direct sense anyway. It should be a tort. For any particularly good reason, other than, "piracy is a cultural norm?" Kind of tautological.
- wormius 2y agoThe irony that copyright is meant to induce "creativity" now spurs on less and less by tightly controlling the flow of information/inspiration. It locks people into less and less creative avenues, doing the exact opposite. Limited to lifetime of author. Publishers and contracted "rights holders" should not be allowed to continue to pursue/extort profits after the death of the author. I am being simplistic here and recognize there's room for nuance, but it's so damn obvious we have a situation far unlike what "the founders" intended (even though I'm not a fan of a lot of said founders for many reasons - this is one I can understand and relate to).
- molave 2y agoOne step closer to me listening to public domain-only music if I could help it.
- altruios 2y agoIf I amass any kind of political power: I'd set copyright for a maximum of 5 years, patents for 10 years, trademarks for 20. It would kickstart innovation, settle fair use of training data, and protect the internet archive. On the downside: companies (not artists) would make a bit less rent-style income. So even the downside is a win, in my book.
- badlibrarian 2y agoCool, now work through the impact of 5 year copyright on open source licenses.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoIt would explode as public domain works accumulate?
- fragmede 2y agoWhy should trademarks expire? If I'm doing business as Bob's Company, and I spend 15 years building up my good name and it's known for doing quality work, why should someone be able to come in and claim that they're also Bob's Company, just because some time has passed?
- altruios 2y agoWhy should companies live forever? If they have 'personhood' then they need to die at some point... otherwise we have cancerous monstrosities we see currently. That is what happens when any component of something larger (society) lives too long, hogging resources while killing the host. 20 years for trademark is negotiable. That there needs to be an expiration date is not.
- fragmede 2y agobecause of the fraud that enables. If I'm used to getting quality widgets from bob's widget factory, I don't want to go to the store one day and buy a bob's widget and have it be something completely different.
- jrochkind1 2y ago> “For LPs and CDs, that’s exactly what we do,” he says. “Seventy-eights, we asked around, we dealt with a lot of collectors, they just said it’s not a problem.” (In an email, Kahle further notes that the Great 78 Project “predates the MMA” and that the “record labels knew about it.”) > But there’s an even more blunt, obvious way of asking this question that doesn’t require knowledge of byzantine U.S. copyright law. Why didn’t the Internet Archive just think twice before making a song like “The Frim Fram Sauce” or Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” — the most popular single of all time — available online for free? There wasn’t any concern about even a Frank Sinatra hit on 78? > For a few moments, it’s just the hearty horns of Bob Haggart and His Orchestra. “It wasn’t a problem,” Kahle says after a beat. “We talked to people, it wasn’t a problem.” Seriously? Like, why not do this in a responsible way instead of a way that is going to create bad case law?
- 8bitsrule 2y agoNext up: suing NASA for the recordings on the Voyagers' golden records? It's not as though the record labels themselves have ever shown an inclination to take on this monumental task as a way of thanking the hundreds of artists and the millions of fans that enriched them.
- pontifier 2y agoI feel like the Internet Archive and Murfie are opposite sides of the same coin with our efforts for digitization and access. But Murfie has a completely different approach from a copyright and financial perspective. So far, the Internet Archive has done more good in the short term than I have with Murfie, but I can't help but feel like their lax approach to copyright law will do more harm for us all in the long run.
- weinzierl 2y agoSometimes I imagine how historians in 1000 years will view our world of today. It is a funny thought that they might perceive our world like someone that only consumes indy art, because all commercial art will have been lost. A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever.
- left-struck 2y ago>A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever. This might be true for mass media, strong maybe, but it’s absolutely not true in general. You could use a laser cutter to cut holes in a glass or gold plate or something, if you extrapolate that to the far future you could imagine it would be something the average person could achieve in their home much like 3d printing is easily accessible now. Dvds after all are not that robust, they have long term issues.
- weinzierl 2y agoSure, technology has advanced and we certainly could make something with higher durability and redundancy. But why would we do that? My point is that the reasons for CDs and DVDs happening do not exist anymore and will never come back.