Before the internet you would have to go to a library to read a book you didn’t want to purchase. Libraries are still a thing. You can still go there to borrow a book, read it, and return it, so that others can read it.
The only difference here is the magnitude of access, where publishers weren’t very concerned with at the local library level for token public good, but are very much now alarmed with, in that the internet can distribute content to everyone all the time, content they were very much hoping to continue to monetize.
It’s information gatekeeping, but no one is going to tell the publishing industry they might as well fold up shop and stop publishing because they can’t make any money at it any longer.
I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.
And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.
During the pandemic, Internet Archive very publicly announced they were relaxing their one physical copy per digitally loaned copy.
I think of they had maintained their 1:1 CDL method, the publishers would still be uncomfortable to be the one to sue first, especially since there was a decent argument and IA would have been pretty sympathetic.
Their pandemic policy was effectively not substantially different from a shadow library., and just set up a slam dunk case for the publishers.
This only makes me favor copyright reform more. Should really cut that down to 25 years or less; anything from before the 21st century should be public domain by now.
I’d be all for altering definitions in a way that enables them to do stuff like the controlled lending system (also just digitizing shit generally).
But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.
can anyone please point me to some piece of writing that explains how IA didn’t willfully self destruct?
everything i read about this legal action, even when I read IA’s stuff about, sounds moronic. doomed to fail and lose big for themselves and for others by setting a loser precident.
By “controlled lending system,” do you mean the library? If so, it is ridiculously expensive for them to offer ebooks and audiobooks. One ebook costs $60-100 and they can only lend the licensed copy for two years. You would think audiobooks would be more expensive to do but publishers charge roughly the same.
What Internet Archive did is digitized physical books, then loaned out their “one copy” with DRM. Their assertion is that this constitutes fair use. I don’t really think there’s any merit to that argument based on the law and the body of precedent, and fundamentally tend to dislike legislation from the bench (judges just arbitrarily reinterpreting laws). Passing new laws and restructuring how IP law works is the job of the legislature, not the judiciary.
IA then made this worse by taking the already super tenuous “fair use” argument and throwing it out the window by removing the lending limits during Covid. It was waving a red flag in front of IP holders and begging them to take aggressive action.
I think if they hadn’t abandoned the CDL modern during the pandemic, they could have kept it going indefinitely. Even if it wasn’t likely fair use, it might have been. More than that, it would have been bad press for the publisher to make the first move.
Abandoning CDL during the pandemic was just waving a red flag and giving the publishers a slam dunk case.
I think if IA had just held the line with CDL, they could have over time just effectively established a precedent. Lost opportunity.
I kind of suspect this was an attempt on the IA’s end to get parts of copyright struck down by court ruling. Laws can be clear and still found to not be in the public’s interest, or in violation of some other legal doctrine, and sometimes you’ll see groups come at them sideways.
Ownership laws are really tough ones to chip away at, and IP law in particular has been getting worse and more unassailable over time.
The constitution explicitly grants authority to regulate IP. There’s absolutely no path to a constitutional issue, and constitutional issues are the only way you get laws overturned. “Other legal doctrine” means something like violations of due process somewhere in the chain, which is a constitutional issue, or direct conflict with another law.
The only possible judicial remedy is the premise that it’s fair use, which there’s a lot of precedent that it isn’t.
Probably, but I think that every month that CDL went unchallenged was slowly building a precedent. I wonder if they had stuck to CDL if we’d still be waiting for the publishers to blink.
How is IAs approach much different to that of a regular library?
True, they were digitising physical books and lending copies. But this is not much different from how a regular library works (assuming controlled digital lending, yeah I heard aboud Covid period 😕).
I’m not an expert on American law (know nothing about it), but reading the articles and comments I thing there’s an argument to be made for IA functioning as a library.
Libraries can operate because of first sale doctrine. You can do almost whatever you want with a physical object that contains a copyrighted work.
What you can’t do is copy it. There is no possible legal way to distribute a digital copy of a work without an explicit license from the copyright holder. There isn’t even a legal concept of “owning” a digital copy. You purchase a license.
While digital lending is fun and games it wouldnt work on a scale of the Internet Archive. The wait list would be tremendous for popular books.
Go use and support your local library if possible and donate a fiver to IA for their other services they offer
But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.
Indeed. I’m a big supporter of IA’s mission, and I’m a big supporter of piracy (copyright has gone insane over the years), but this outcome was obvious from the moment IA did this and it was a mistake for them to fight this fight. They should focus on preservation. Let the EFF handle the lawsuits, and let Library Genesis handle the illegal distribution of books. Everyone focus on what they’re best at.
There’s really no credible argument that their distribution of books even might be legal.
Their only defense is fair use, and there’s no precedent for a “fair use” defense justifying copying a work wholesale for mass distribution. (Yes, “one copy at a time” to multiple people is mass distribution.) Copying a whole work has effectively only qualified as fair use when that copy is not re-distributed, and is actually for a personal backup.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
kaboom?
Before the internet you would have to go to a library to read a book you didn’t want to purchase. Libraries are still a thing. You can still go there to borrow a book, read it, and return it, so that others can read it.
The only difference here is the magnitude of access, where publishers weren’t very concerned with at the local library level for token public good, but are very much now alarmed with, in that the internet can distribute content to everyone all the time, content they were very much hoping to continue to monetize.
It’s information gatekeeping, but no one is going to tell the publishing industry they might as well fold up shop and stop publishing because they can’t make any money at it any longer.
Public libraries are under assault from every direction.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1119752817/local-libraries-have-become-a-major-political-and-cultural-battleground
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/book-bans-librarians.html (apologies for nyt link)
https://apnews.com/article/book-bans-libraries-lawsuits-fines-prison-0914fa6cbb2a99b540cbbd28a38179b4
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-want-to-defund-public-libraries-book-bans
Pretty soon you either won’t find the books, or even the libraries themselves. Piracy is the only way they are leaving to us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/book-bans-librarians.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1k0.2DLu.z4XyKBb-92s6 Here’s the gift link without the paywall. I got the sub for free because my university has one for students.
I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.
And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.
What am I not understanding?
During the pandemic, Internet Archive very publicly announced they were relaxing their one physical copy per digitally loaned copy.
I think of they had maintained their 1:1 CDL method, the publishers would still be uncomfortable to be the one to sue first, especially since there was a decent argument and IA would have been pretty sympathetic.
Their pandemic policy was effectively not substantially different from a shadow library., and just set up a slam dunk case for the publishers.
Well, that’s shit news
Definitely won’t find these books on Anna’s Archive /s
This is cool. Thank you for sharing
It’s really cool. I learned about it from the megathread: https://rentry.co/megathread-books#annas-archive
Sign the petition! Not sure if it is going to make any difference, but it just takes a couple of minutes. https://www.change.org/p/let-readers-read-an-open-letter-to-the-publishers-in-hachette-v-internet-archive
change.org doesn’t like my mail address for some reason, and they tried trick me into subscribing to their newsletter :/
Yeah I know, change.org isn’t great but what other options do we have?
Maybe filing a charge.org petition to raise an alternative service to charge.org. Maybe something in the Fediverse, even!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_petition
Sucks for Americans that Biden got rid of the option
That really sucks
has change.org ever changed anything?
Well it’s made a lot of people feel satisfied that they’ve done their bit and had their say.
removed by mod
🏴☠️
This only makes me favor copyright reform more. Should really cut that down to 25 years or less; anything from before the 21st century should be public domain by now.
How about ‘artist’s death’, full stop?
How about ‘artists natural death’, full stop?
We wouldn’t want to get any funny ideas, would we?
Much better, very good detail 😅
So fucking convenient that the AAP does not name the publishers in the law suit. Cowards the lot of them.
Modern version of barbarians burning the library of Alexandria.
Modern day book burning. Done by the writers this time.
Don’t blame the writers, some of whom are long dead, and some titles are long out of print.
Writers give publishers legitimacy. Publishers will regularly pull the writers out to trot out some “copyright is important” line.
Printers*
It would be a shame if another website pop up and uploaded these removed book to it and call it, idk, Internet Alexandria or something.
It’s great that these projects already exist
but it hurts accessibility that you need to be “in the know” to find out about it.
every media outlet has to mention WayBackMachine; it’s such a great outreach and legitimizing
I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.
Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?
And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.
Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.
Would be a shame if they decided to call it something with the letter z and the word library in it
You can’t delete what was already destroyed!
wait until you hear about libgen
I’d be all for altering definitions in a way that enables them to do stuff like the controlled lending system (also just digitizing shit generally).
But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.
same same same
can anyone please point me to some piece of writing that explains how IA didn’t willfully self destruct?
everything i read about this legal action, even when I read IA’s stuff about, sounds moronic. doomed to fail and lose big for themselves and for others by setting a loser precident.
By “controlled lending system,” do you mean the library? If so, it is ridiculously expensive for them to offer ebooks and audiobooks. One ebook costs $60-100 and they can only lend the licensed copy for two years. You would think audiobooks would be more expensive to do but publishers charge roughly the same.
What Internet Archive did is digitized physical books, then loaned out their “one copy” with DRM. Their assertion is that this constitutes fair use. I don’t really think there’s any merit to that argument based on the law and the body of precedent, and fundamentally tend to dislike legislation from the bench (judges just arbitrarily reinterpreting laws). Passing new laws and restructuring how IP law works is the job of the legislature, not the judiciary.
IA then made this worse by taking the already super tenuous “fair use” argument and throwing it out the window by removing the lending limits during Covid. It was waving a red flag in front of IP holders and begging them to take aggressive action.
I think if they hadn’t abandoned the CDL modern during the pandemic, they could have kept it going indefinitely. Even if it wasn’t likely fair use, it might have been. More than that, it would have been bad press for the publisher to make the first move.
Abandoning CDL during the pandemic was just waving a red flag and giving the publishers a slam dunk case.
I think if IA had just held the line with CDL, they could have over time just effectively established a precedent. Lost opportunity.
I kind of suspect this was an attempt on the IA’s end to get parts of copyright struck down by court ruling. Laws can be clear and still found to not be in the public’s interest, or in violation of some other legal doctrine, and sometimes you’ll see groups come at them sideways.
Ownership laws are really tough ones to chip away at, and IP law in particular has been getting worse and more unassailable over time.
The constitution explicitly grants authority to regulate IP. There’s absolutely no path to a constitutional issue, and constitutional issues are the only way you get laws overturned. “Other legal doctrine” means something like violations of due process somewhere in the chain, which is a constitutional issue, or direct conflict with another law.
The only possible judicial remedy is the premise that it’s fair use, which there’s a lot of precedent that it isn’t.
Probably, but I think that every month that CDL went unchallenged was slowly building a precedent. I wonder if they had stuck to CDL if we’d still be waiting for the publishers to blink.
How is IAs approach much different to that of a regular library?
True, they were digitising physical books and lending copies. But this is not much different from how a regular library works (assuming controlled digital lending, yeah I heard aboud Covid period 😕).
I’m not an expert on American law (know nothing about it), but reading the articles and comments I thing there’s an argument to be made for IA functioning as a library.
Because it’s a copy. It’s literally that simple.
Libraries can operate because of first sale doctrine. You can do almost whatever you want with a physical object that contains a copyrighted work.
What you can’t do is copy it. There is no possible legal way to distribute a digital copy of a work without an explicit license from the copyright holder. There isn’t even a legal concept of “owning” a digital copy. You purchase a license.
While digital lending is fun and games it wouldnt work on a scale of the Internet Archive. The wait list would be tremendous for popular books.
Go use and support your local library if possible and donate a fiver to IA for their other services they offer
Indeed. I’m a big supporter of IA’s mission, and I’m a big supporter of piracy (copyright has gone insane over the years), but this outcome was obvious from the moment IA did this and it was a mistake for them to fight this fight. They should focus on preservation. Let the EFF handle the lawsuits, and let Library Genesis handle the illegal distribution of books. Everyone focus on what they’re best at.
Their distribution of books is completely legal.
Corporations just have more money to warp the laws in their favour.
That’s why the Archive is appealing: they still believe they are right.
You just contradicted yourself in two sentences.
Oh, you believe law is fair? You sound so cute.
What did I say that implied that? I’m pointing out a contradiction in kilgore’s comment, I’m not adding anything of my own here.
There’s really no credible argument that their distribution of books even might be legal.
Their only defense is fair use, and there’s no precedent for a “fair use” defense justifying copying a work wholesale for mass distribution. (Yes, “one copy at a time” to multiple people is mass distribution.) Copying a whole work has effectively only qualified as fair use when that copy is not re-distributed, and is actually for a personal backup.
A sad day, but nothing that can’t be fixed by reuploading the files.
At least it didn’t get shut down
They’re appealing the decision so there’s still opportunity for IA to throw good money after bad on this.