Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive

Get paid before making something. Using crowd funding one might not even be obligated to deliver. A serious attempt to make something can be good enough.

There are monthly donations for those who continue to demonstrate relevant qualities. It's a bit like a job contract with a hundred or a thousand employers.

I think we will eventually figure out a system where we can collectively order a work and pay for it after delivery. Perhaps with a series of deadlines.

Strange thoughts: Books still have their value over digital media in that they are a robust storage medium and you can re-sell the copy. It should at least in theory be possible to reduce the number of copies printed to a point where value is preserved. If a book in a good state is new or not shouldn't matter to the customer.

Publisher denotes a person, who presumably has power over another person in this context. The assumption present in the definition of the term is that a content creator, artist, whatever you want to call them cannot communicate with their audience unless a person between audience and artist assumes control/ownership of its distribution. Publishing, as a verb not a noun, is another matter entirely. No one is arguing that publishing will cease to exist. Even extended in context to include marketing people, I'm sure the vast majority of people here will concede that marketing people serve a viable role in their business.

But the vocation of publishing is the only one remaining from the medieval/ancient world in which publishers demand ownership of the material being published, under highly dubious terms. We do not give ownership of car factories to car salesmen, simply because they sell cars. Nor do we give ownership of parks and streets to politicians, simply because they write laws governing their use and levy taxes to maintain them.

What stopped print publishers from selling devices like the Kindle before Amazon did? Nothing. What stopped newspaper publishers from building nationwide advertising networks before AOL and Google did? Nothing. What stopped the RIAA from building iTunes or Napster before Apple or Napster did? Nothing. What stopped the MPAA from building Netflix before Netflix did? Nothing. Mere decades ago, all of those publishing consortiums had infinitely more resources available to them to assert dominance over these new markets than those upstarts who have since supplanted them.

If your contribution to the livelihood of your own business has been a steady stream of nothings for about 30-40 years, you tend to get in fiscal trouble in this day and age...

Because the "proper context" in this case is what the publishers are filing the lawsuit about. It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with the publishers. To the publishers, unlimited simultaneous users is the same as unlimited copies. With public libraries, they paid for limited simultaneous checkouts of digital ebooks which is limited copies and that was acceptable by publishers. In contrast, IA did not pay publishers a license to make copyrighted works available to unlimited users.

The publishers didn't file lawsuits against public libraries; they filed it against IA. In your own words (since you don't object to the word "unlimited" and you thought my summary was unfair), what exactly did IA do that the publishers are filing lawsuit about?