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I think the fear is not that there is no justice to help them. The point is that when exceptional measures are needed, you want to know how far you can go, wit

by ArnoVW 2y ago

I think the fear is not that there is no justice to help them. The point is that when exceptional measures are needed, you want to know how far you can go, without it coming back to you in the months afterwards. It's a bit like InfoSec cyber incident playbooks: if customer data is being corrupted, can the production server be shut down? how bad does it need to be before the downtime no longer outweighs the corruption? who can take the decision? If you don't spell that out in advance, you may find yourself in a situation where you lose time unnecessarily.

myself248 2y ago
Like the Internet Archive feeling that "oh shit the entire society just shut down" in the days after Covid lockdowns started, and uncapping their digital lending because they were the only "library" you could still visit. And then getting sued six ways from sunday over it, years later when the crisis mood had faded and the help-people-any-way-we-can vibes were thoroughly forgotten. Time to make sure no good deed goes unpunished! Yeah. This document makes a LOT of sense.
- grapescheesee 2y ago
  WBUR just aired an interview today with Brewster Kahle. It would be a very sad day if the Internet Archive stopped resolving, or was stopped from benefiting the common good. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-wayback-machine-copyright-lawsuit https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-way...
- sneak 2y ago
  The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. It is foolishness masquerading as virtue. I used to be a donor, but no more, as this was an unforced error. The IA is in danger because the IA management was dumb. I don’t believe in copyright, personally, and I’ve been an avid pirate of every type of media since I got on the internet at 9.6kbps, but to think that Big Content won’t sue whenever and however they can is simply naïve.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. The theory was that the courts would find it to be fair use. Which isn't a crazy theory at all because making exceptions for exceptional circumstances is exactly the sort of things courts do, and fair use is exactly the sort of thing that gives them the latitude to do it if they want to. IA's issue is that they're librarians and look at things like librarians do. If people lose access to books, is that an emergency? It could sometimes be a matter of life and death -- people need some information or something bad will happen and now they don't have access to it -- but that's kind of abstract and it's not as visceral. People understand kicking down a door to prevent someone from electrocuting themselves better than they understand that the same thing can happen if people lose access to the information needed to prevent it. So to a librarian, of course that's an emergency. And then the other side of that is, what are you balancing it against? Some temporary copies being made of books that libraries all over have already paid for and have in their collections, and only for the duration of the pandemic? That's not a ridiculous trade off, that's completely reasonable. The libraries bought the books and the patrons read them, same as it ever was. In a temporary emergency, how much does it matter that the accounting is completely perfect rather than the plausible approximation you get based on assuming that before they knew there would be a pandemic, libraries had purchased books in proportion to how much demand there would be for them? Has it even been proved that a single book was simultaneously lent out more times by IA than there were copies of it on the shelves in locked down libraries everywhere? That's not a crazy argument. The problem is, it doesn't feel like an emergency anymore. Worse, there was a lot of overreach during COVID, and many people are now of the sense that much of the response was excessive. And then you get a conflation between "shutting down every library might have been an overreaction" and "given that libraries were forcibly shut down, lending books in a different way was temporarily justifiable" and the people making the second argument get painted with the negative sentiment derived from the first by Monday morning quarterbacks.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > theory was that the courts would find it to be fair use. Which isn't a crazy theory at all If they'd been advancing a test case, they would have done what they did and then--when confronted by rightsholders--stopped while the courts deliberated. That asks the question while managing the downside. Instead, IA dialled its rhetoric to eleven, thereby turning what could have been a measured legal contest into a bet-the-farm Hail Mary.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  In any tricky situation the conditions under which you're judged are a world apart from the conditions under which you operate. Just don't be on the "losing" side.

by ArnoVW 2y ago

myself248 2y ago

Like the Internet Archive feeling that "oh shit the entire society just shut down" in the days after Covid lockdowns started, and uncapping their digital lending because they were the only "library" you could still visit. And then getting sued six ways from sunday over it, years later when the crisis mood had faded and the help-people-any-way-we-can vibes were thoroughly forgotten. Time to make sure no good deed goes unpunished! Yeah. This document makes a LOT of sense.

grapescheesee 2y ago
WBUR just aired an interview today with Brewster Kahle. It would be a very sad day if the Internet Archive stopped resolving, or was stopped from benefiting the common good. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-wayback-machine-copyright-lawsuit https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-way...
sneak 2y ago
The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. It is foolishness masquerading as virtue. I used to be a donor, but no more, as this was an unforced error. The IA is in danger because the IA management was dumb. I don’t believe in copyright, personally, and I’ve been an avid pirate of every type of media since I got on the internet at 9.6kbps, but to think that Big Content won’t sue whenever and however they can is simply naïve.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. The theory was that the courts would find it to be fair use. Which isn't a crazy theory at all because making exceptions for exceptional circumstances is exactly the sort of things courts do, and fair use is exactly the sort of thing that gives them the latitude to do it if they want to. IA's issue is that they're librarians and look at things like librarians do. If people lose access to books, is that an emergency? It could sometimes be a matter of life and death -- people need some information or something bad will happen and now they don't have access to it -- but that's kind of abstract and it's not as visceral. People understand kicking down a door to prevent someone from electrocuting themselves better than they understand that the same thing can happen if people lose access to the information needed to prevent it. So to a librarian, of course that's an emergency. And then the other side of that is, what are you balancing it against? Some temporary copies being made of books that libraries all over have already paid for and have in their collections, and only for the duration of the pandemic? That's not a ridiculous trade off, that's completely reasonable. The libraries bought the books and the patrons read them, same as it ever was. In a temporary emergency, how much does it matter that the accounting is completely perfect rather than the plausible approximation you get based on assuming that before they knew there would be a pandemic, libraries had purchased books in proportion to how much demand there would be for them? Has it even been proved that a single book was simultaneously lent out more times by IA than there were copies of it on the shelves in locked down libraries everywhere? That's not a crazy argument. The problem is, it doesn't feel like an emergency anymore. Worse, there was a lot of overreach during COVID, and many people are now of the sense that much of the response was excessive. And then you get a conflation between "shutting down every library might have been an overreaction" and "given that libraries were forcibly shut down, lending books in a different way was temporarily justifiable" and the people making the second argument get painted with the negative sentiment derived from the first by Monday morning quarterbacks.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > theory was that the courts would find it to be fair use. Which isn't a crazy theory at all If they'd been advancing a test case, they would have done what they did and then--when confronted by rightsholders--stopped while the courts deliberated. That asks the question while managing the downside. Instead, IA dialled its rhetoric to eleven, thereby turning what could have been a measured legal contest into a bet-the-farm Hail Mary.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
In any tricky situation the conditions under which you're judged are a world apart from the conditions under which you operate. Just don't be on the "losing" side.