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Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

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Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#191

Post by Zonulet »

VonGuard wrote: post #115
ghaff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say nothing of the fact that there are about 20,000 books at Project Gutenberg and countless other (legal) short stories, books, articles, etc. around the web. (And that's before talking video and other multimedia.) It's not like there is some critical shortage of things to read online in the absence of the IA.

You're both so right. The only thing that matters is money.

I am an author and I making my living from book sales. You're right, I'm absolutely obsessed with money, in the sense that I need money to buy food and pay my electricity bill.

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#192

Post by api »

mcguire wrote: post #180
api wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right, but this doesn't solve the fundamental problem. People who do intellectual labor, such as writing books, must be paid because everyone must be paid. Nothing is free. There are two options: (1) Copyright law, which allows them to erect toll booths and charge readers and users for their work. (2) A socialist type of system where writers and other intellectual laborers are supported publicly. The…

I'd just like to jump in here to point out that most intellectual laborers in the modern world are not paid, at least in terms of a livable wage. Even those intellectual laborers who are paid specifically for intellectual labor, are not paid for writing, for example; they are paid for some other activity with writing as a required side-project.

I'm quite aware that intellectual laborers are underpaid. I'm pointing out that abolishing copyright without any replacement system would make the situation far worse, effectively eliminating many careers.

If this work didn't have much value that would be one thing, but it clearly does. Otherwise people would not be clamoring for access to it. Nobody cares if crap is freely available.

People really want this stuff. They just don't want to pay for it either directly or via any public method. Meanwhile they spend the cost of a median price book or album in 1-2 visits to Starbucks without thinking about it.

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#193

Post by dredmorbius »

sudosysgen wrote: post #120
user5994461 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libraries would be only illegal in the US though, because all these copyright issues are US specific. Archive.org might as well rebase itself somewhere else.

And the US through it's massive influence and bullying would undoubtedly force it upon other countries, as they have done countless times including in the context of copyright.

In the case of copyright, at least nominally, it's the more-restrictive (and European) Berne Convention (1886) terms which have been adopted elsewhere.

To what extent this reflects European rather than US interests I'm uncertain, though the latter certainly exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#194

Post by RNCTX »

IF you wanna be more mad than this, go look up how much the university you attended spends on subscriptions to these corporate publishers.

Fact is, the internet has made the business model of a middle man being required to deliver content obsolete.

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#195

Post by sudosysgen »

boplicity wrote: post #189
sudosysgen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone pirates my code that's not stealing, that's copyright infringement. I would love to live in a society that would recognize the post-scarcity nature of many goods nowadays and de-commodifies them, including computer programs, basic food, and in certain cases housing.

"post-scarcity" There will be no more "scarcity" when the "value" of the time required to produce these works reaches "zero." Until then, there will be plenty of scarcity. By the way, I think we would all need "immortality" in order to reach that point. So, yeah. Not going to happen.

Well, no. That is not what scarcity means. If we had an economy where you could replicate cars, food, houses, spaceships and so on for free, that would be post-scarcity, even though it takes some work for it to be engineered at the beginning.

Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#196

Post by cmroanirgo »

saagarjha wrote: post #9

> Despite the self-serving library branding of its operations, IA’s conduct bears little resemblance to the trusted role that thousands of American libraries play within their communities and as participants in the lawful copyright marketplace. IA scans books from cover to cover, posts complete digital files to its website, and solicits users to access them for free by signing up for Internet Archive Accounts. I wond…

There will always be a massive difference between physical copies and digital ones.

Of course, authors miss out on any royalties in either case, but the speed at which their income stream can dry up is oodles faster when there's a digital copy available.

Digital can be copied, replicated and redistributed very easily, but physical books require man handling to achieve the same goal.

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#197

Post by dredmorbius »

jawns wrote: post #151
sp332 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cutoff was five years. @textfiles on Twitter has offered to help authors with the process. He recommends contacting him via DM to avoid harassment from eager IA defenders.

So the Internet Archive believes that copyright protection for creative works should extend no more than five years past the date of publication? I'm all for copyright reform, but that's a preposterously short period. One hundred years ago, copyright lasted for 28 years, with the potential to renew for another 28 years. Even if you went back to that copyright term WITHOUT the renewal, five years is still less than 20…

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#198

Post by brlewis »

koolba wrote: post #148
SomewhatLikely wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first sale doctrine protects similar activities such as video rentals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Ah but you didn't buy that book. You merely accepted the EULA for a license to read the content of the pages, as written, in the order presented.

You're joking, but this is the kind of thing that becomes true when enough people think it's true. What does a reasonable person think they're getting when they buy a book? That's the implied contract.

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#199

Post by skissane »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #121
RunningDroid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Archive.org might as well rebase itself somewhere else. That would probably be extremely expensive given the fastest way to mirror the IA is with a truck full of hard drives.

It's actually relatively inexpensive to move gear via cargo container. I'd hazard you could move all 10PB of the Internet Archive for less than $25k-50k in shipping costs (~$2k per 40FT container), with labor extra for loading and unloading. (Disclaimer: I have coordinated data center migrations in a previous life) Although, it's probably more financially efficient for other nations to offer cultural grants for local…

How many backups do they have? I'd hate for the shipping container to fall off the side of the ship, bye bye all that precious data.

(Just last week some shipping containers washed ashore on a beach in my local area – they had fallen off a ship [1].)

[1] https://coastcommunitynews.com.au/central-coast/news/2020/05...

Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

#200

Post by mcguire »

Zonulet wrote: post #181
munk-a wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that role is just waiting to be taken over by a kickstarter like model though.

This exists in the UK, it's called Unbound. They've been around for ten years and they've done... fine. Some decent books. But their business model has not exactly conquered the world. As an author myself, I would never consider defecting from my "legacy" publisher to a service like that, because my publisher has been extremely valuable to me.

How valuable? 85-90% of the cover price for digital copies (35-40% for physical)?
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