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Late edit: they're really going out of their way to remove authors who don't want to be included. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1244793574073524229
I'm a little worried that "I'd like to work with them" isn't "I'd like to remove them proactively." This reads to me like a request for crowd-sourced snitch-tagging.
Why reimplement waitlists later if this is legal? Is the answer that it probably isn't legal and they're just hoping for the best here?
Companies have tried to create Just In Time (JIT) media services that return digital items to a pool when you are not actively using them. This essentially creates micro loans with a time span of minutes to hours.
I can't remember the name of the company that was attempting this but they were shutdown due to a copyright lawsuit.
EDIT: They actually mention the company in the FAQ. ReDigi lost their lawsuit [1].
[1] http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/68b0f5b0-959...
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They offer an opt-out process that suspends lending completely. If we're going to talk about the alleged illegality of a controlled process for sharing data, I'd like to start with ad-tracking, since that clearly affects a larger group of people and because its legality seems to rest on a similar premise (at least, to this layman).
> They offer an opt-out process that suspends lending completely. That's not how copyright works in the US. Maybe it should be, but it's not. The owner of a copyright gets to say how it's used, they don't merely have a right to refuse to uses if they're aware of them. There are certain exceptions, such as compulsory licensing (e.g., in the US you can get a license to cover a song at a fixed-by-law rate) and fair use,…
Are you certain you know how the law works right now?
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> I'm disappointed with Internet Archive. They're opening themselves up to a huge lawsuit, and I'd hate to see their mission derailed because of it. Not only that - if this goes to court, there's a really good chance that the concept of Controlled Digital Lending (i.e., libraries lending out scans backed one-to-one by physical books, which many libraries including Internet Archive have been doing for a long time befo…
There's a theory that IA leadership is intentionally trying to force a landmark court case: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1244257620548038656
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1244257620548038656.html?...
The premise that they would be trying to purposefully shove it into the court system to achieve a ruling one way or the other is interesting. That’s how you play hard in the paint!
Dear Internet Archive: Not only do I support the measure you have taken and feel that it falls within the bounds of pro-social fair use, but I applaud the measures you have taken that are so important in this extreme time. Furthermore, if any court finds that your action was not appropriate, I will urge my lawmakers to craft a specific exception to copyright law to support the internet archive lending at all times, n…
Declaring this "pro-social" doesn't suddenly make it legal. It's clearly not any more legal then lending out a single copy of a DVD to one million people via BitTorrent. I get that it seems generous to give away these works. But they simply weren't theirs to give away to begin with. If you want to lend out 1,000 copies of book, first you have to buy 1,000 copies of said book. I'm disappointed with Internet Archive. T…
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"Internet Archive's actions are almost certainly not lawful " This raises an even more important point: what do citizens do when laws are enacted that do not have acceptance or are not considered as legitimate by a majority of citizens? This is why enacting treaties such as the Berne Conventions (WIPO etc) are so damned dangerous. By their intrinsic nature, it's quite possible for small non-representative groups to h…
The Berne Convention only took effect in the US in 1989, well after Victor Hugo was dead and quite thoroughly decomposed. (I mention the US because the Internet Archive is in the US and subject to US law, as is the Author's Guild. The National Emergency Library is tied to the duration of the US national emergency.) The idea that the majority of people in the US are dissatisfied with the 1989 changes to US copyright l…
But I'm not within the US jurisdiction nor are many millions of others who use the Internet Archive. (Incidentally, I have been using the IA almost since its inception).
The fact that the IA is US-based and serves the world is a copyright minefield that I won't go into here. Suffice to say (as I'd imagine many in the US would do) one plays off the differences in copyright law across different jurisdictions to one's own advantage. The fallout from this incident, whatever it may be, will likely influence rules and laws in other jurisdictions but it won't be all of them. The somewhat peculiar history of US copyright law and of the US being 'out' of international affairs then aggressively back 'in' them again perplexes and annoys many outside the US (it's been essentially US corporations who have caused most of the nasty disputes over the past two or three decades).
My reference to Victor Hugo is important because he was the principle center point and figurehead at the start of modern copyright law. Whilst copyright law essentially goes back to the British Statute of Anne of 1710, it was Victor Hugo and his French colleagues that got the ball rolling which ended up with the First Berne Convention.
Hugo wasn't alone, around that time there were many others including the English duo Gilbert & Sullivan who were struggling rampant copyright piracy in the US and they went to considerable lengths to overcome the problem, the most notable of which was in 1879 when they took the Savoy Opera Company holus bolus to New York and premiered The Pirates of Penzance. This strategy was only partially successful in that US opera companies continue to pirate their works for years after that.
What makes Hugo stand out was his arrogant and aggressive dog-in-the-manger attitude. He had a superior notions of self as well as a highly tuned Francophone sense of indignity when it came to copyright breaches of his works. Berne became a crusade for Hugo, he set the aggressive embittered tone that's plagued copyright law and negotiations ever since.
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Declaring this "pro-social" doesn't suddenly make it legal. It's clearly not any more legal then lending out a single copy of a DVD to one million people via BitTorrent. I get that it seems generous to give away these works. But they simply weren't theirs to give away to begin with. If you want to lend out 1,000 copies of book, first you have to buy 1,000 copies of said book. I'm disappointed with Internet Archive. T…
> I'm disappointed with Internet Archive. They're opening themselves up to a huge lawsuit, and I'd hate to see their mission derailed because of it. Not only that - if this goes to court, there's a really good chance that the concept of Controlled Digital Lending (i.e., libraries lending out scans backed one-to-one by physical books, which many libraries including Internet Archive have been doing for a long time befo…
They gave authors the ability to opt out. From the FAQ:
"If I am an author and I do not want my book to be temporarily available during this crisis, how can I remove my book from the National Emergency Library? Authors who do not want their books in the National Emergency Library should send an email to info@archive.org with “National Emergency Library Removal Request” as the subject line. Please include each URL of the book or books you would like to have removed. Please allow up to 72 hours for processing as we are a small team."
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I'm not a publisher or an author (I'm an SRE, I've never made income from the sale of anything I have copyright from, and I've many times been on the side of fair use as a hobbyist musician) and I'm willing to make that claim. It's as straightforward, IMO, as the claim that not tipping is stealing. Yes, technically, it's merely not giving them money that they expect, it's not taking money they already have. But the p…
> I'd also like to live in a world where waitstaff didn't rely on tips to make minimum wage, let alone a living wage. I don't. You do, mostly. I believe it's just the USA where obligatory "tipping" is a thing. I learnt a bit about the history of tipping from Adam Ruins Everything S01E05 Adam Ruins Restaurants, highly recommended. Excerpt about tipping, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_vivC7c_1k (Yes, his style is a…