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> Dan Clancy, the Google engineering lead on the project who helped design the settlement, thinks that it was a particular brand of objector—not Google’s compet

• jamiek88 2y ago
  That pandemic library was a huge, obvious over step by him. It will have consequences far beyond the immediate lawsuit too. The very concept has basically been iced for a generation and the net is only getting more locked down not less.
  • jmb99 2y ago
    Fortunately (by some definition of fortunately), most countries don’t agree on exactly how the web should be “locked down.” This benefits at least some people (like me) who live in countries who make also no effort to restrict what can be shoved down the internet tube, including from countries that don’t particularly care about western copyright law. Would it be nice to have a fully sanctioned pandemic library-style service? Absolutely. But I have never once looked for a textbook, paper, regular book, etc online and not found a copy for free. Usually takes the same amount of time or less compared to finding a copy on Amazon (if it’s currently in print), and almost always less time using my library’s clunky online ebook platform[1]. Is that legal? Technically yes, in my country. Is it ethical? Debatable, depending on who you’re asking. But for me personally, I have found it to be getting substantially easier to find high quality copies of copyrighted anything in the past 3-5 years compared to 10-15 years ago, so I don’t necessarily agree with the blanket statement that “the net is only getting more locked down.” [1] I like to use the library as much as possible, if for nothing else than to increase usage numbers to marginally positively decrease the likelihood of finding cuts.
    • notpushkin 2y ago
      > Would it be nice to have a fully sanctioned pandemic library-style service? Absolutely. This is basically LibGen / Anna’s Archive. A bit clunky around the download process (maybe things get better if you get a paid subscription though!), but overall it works pretty well.
      • southernplaces7 2y ago
        >This is basically LibGen / Anna’s Archive. A bit clunky around the download process Not at all. You visit libgen, search for your book, find it (usually available) click one of the two available links for it, click to download, have it download. Done. It couldn't be easier.
• mastazi 2y ago
  This is an insightful comment and I thank you for sharing it but, after having looked at the brief you linked > a jealous amicus brief that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do agree with you on this part though > the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently created its e-library was not ideal.
  • lokar 2y ago
    I would say it’s much worse then “not ideal”, they may have poisoned the well for decades to come.
    • adastra22 2y ago
      Maybe permanently, as societal stances on these sorts of issues tend to solidify over time. In a couple of generations the very idea of a library may be confined to history thanks to IA :(
      • sulam 2y ago
        That is far-fetched, science fabulist style thinking. The average person on the street does not know about Brewster or the IA, but they certainly do know about their local library and would object if it was to disappear.
        • immibis 2y ago
          I expect the average person has never visited a library since school
          • rdmond 2y ago
            In fact, in the US, around half the population goes to a library at least once a year https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/libraries-2016/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/libraries-20... https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-gen-z-millennials-are-visiting-library-prefer-print-books https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-gen-z-millen...
• chambers 2y ago
  I wish the contradiction you spotted was clear on their Wikipedia page. It demonstrates how far back IA's management troubles go, and how their clean image was maybe just an image. For me, I became concerned when they fibbed about why the Internet Archive Credit Union was liquidated. IA alleged it was shut down due to onerous regulations, but the government said IA actually never lived up to their goal of allowing local, low-income folk to sign-up for their service. https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archive-federal-credit-union-pays-ncua-insured-members-shares-full https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
• pessimizer 2y ago
  Thanks for making me aware of this. This guy's heart is clearly (to me) in the right place, but his understanding of power is seriously lacking. That's probably what gave him the hubris to create Wayback and IA, but he'll be absolutely dumbstruck when they shut it down.
  • kragen 2y ago
    He won't be surprised at all. His slogan is "governments burn libraries". He's been able to forestall that for a while, and even provide public access, but permanence of the IA as an institution was never in the cards, given its subversive goal: universal access to all human knowledge. Guess where the first backup copy of the Internet Archive is located.
    • Yeul 2y ago
      Libraries are funded by the government. They've been diligently scanning books for decades but nobody has had even the slightest interest in that until their favourite hackerman showed up. Libertarian god complex is so tiresome.
      • dredmorbius 2y ago
        Some libraries are government-funded. Many are not. That ranges from the personal book collection numbering from one to many thousands in private hands, private institutional libraries (the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco is one that comes to mind, many private universities and grammar schools have their own, as do numerous corporations, some of which are catalogued by Worldcat). Preservation of Western culture, notably the Greek and Roman canons, as well as much literature and knowledge of the Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds, occurred through religious institutions. Though in some regards those were the governments of the time. Indian, Chinese, and other further East Asian collections were preserved through multiple means. Book digitisation at US academic institutions (the University of Michigan being a major contributor to both Google Books and HathiTrust) has had its own exctremely combative relationship with commercial publishers, as has the US Library of Congress, which issues US copyright in the first place. Avoid slurs, it's an HN guideline: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.
• breck 2y ago
  [flagged]
• shkkmo 2y ago
  > In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and our political process. I would argue that having a powerful, rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing such a law less likely, not more. I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we have today. The article says: > You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate. If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released, it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.
  • sulam 2y ago
    In practice that is an obvious exaggeration for the purposes of making a point. It is probably simple enough to make the change, and it’s equally easy to change it back. One configuration makes you subject to massive lawsuits and the other doesn’t.
    • xp84 2y ago
      I suspect GP means exfiltrating the archive (hence the suggestion that it will never go back in the box) rather than setting them fully readable on GBS itself. And I agree, someone should do that, because keeping books locked up that the rightsholders can’t be bothered to even attempt to make money from is asinine. Too bad our government doesn’t agree with me, so we’ll just have to wait for it to accidentally walk out the door.
• kmeisthax 2y ago
  How would a settlement with the Authors' Guild cover orphan works? If the Authors' Guild is in a position to grant a license, then it's not an orphan work. The whole orphan works problem is that for a lot of valueless works, nobody knows who owns what.
  • xp84 2y ago
    Class actions can include people just by describing who makes up the class, that’s why the parties who worked on the proposed settlement came up with the plan. This method (uniquely) allowed settling with (essentially negotiating a deal with) all those unknown parties, a feat impossible otherwise. The class as I understand it was the copyright holders of every book in a library, and if approved by the court they can all be legally said to have agreed to the settlement’s terms if they didn’t opt out. Now as with anything legal the whole thing depends on someone’s interpretation of whether it’s ok, but this was a plausible reading of Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. One could file a class action suit on behalf of everyone who ordered a strawberry shake at a McDonald’s in 2023, without ever knowing who or exactly how many they are, and if a judge certified it as a class action and McDonalds cut a deal with those representing the class, the terms would bind them all (except those who explicitly excluded themselves).
• vintermann 2y ago
  The situation with IA is one thing, but the general negative attitude of libraries and archives to public access is something I've observed too, and it's depressing. For instance, they can spend a lot of effort digitizing an archive they got from a business active from 1890 to 1970 - and then put it all in a single collection, which the public won't get access to until 2070. There's no reason to think the business handled sensitive personal information, but it's too much work to check, so they assume it did. They could classify individual documents according to whether they were actually from before 1920, but that's too much work too.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    That’s the case with so much of this sort of thing. You also see it in cases like open sourcing proprietary software. You need to pay someone competent to do a thorough audit or you end up with headlines about so and so releasing PII or otherwise confidential information.
    • notpushkin 2y ago
      I think it could be a great charity btw. Get donations from public, talk companies into releasing their old software, hire auditors for them and maybe developers to get the result running without all the proprietary third-party components.
      • ghaff 2y ago
        Personally I’d rather see maintainers getting better compensated for creating new and widely useful software in cases where they don’t have a corporate sponsor. Most abandoned proprietary software is just old.
        • notpushkin 2y ago
          I’d love that too, of course. But some old things are great for their historical value – personally, I would be thrilled to see Winamp released properly, for example.
• steeeeeve 2y ago
  There was a lot of public debate about this at the time. Kahle's argument made sense.