"Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley [...] sued the organization."
Noted. I'll spend my money elsewhere.
Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
21–30 of 409 posts
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#22> In doing so, it essentially allowed for a single copy of a book to be downloaded an infinite number of times. The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
I used to work for Spotify, and pretty much everything we did with music, lyrics, or album art had to go through legal, and projects often had to get label approval. This is just how you do things when you're working with IP. It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
Interesting. Do you have any insider information regarding this?
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#23> In doing so, it essentially allowed for a single copy of a book to be downloaded an infinite number of times. The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
I used to work for Spotify, and pretty much everything we did with music, lyrics, or album art had to go through legal, and projects often had to get label approval. This is just how you do things when you're working with IP. It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
If you work for Spotify, you probably know _where_ Spotify has got its initial music collection. ;)
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#24> The Internet Archive removed waitlists for books in its "National Emergency Library" so that multiple readers could simultaneously download the same digital copy. >Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit. >The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.
I'm not sure why they thought this would be OK without getting permission from rights holders.
It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society.
The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#25Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#26The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not pu…
>I honestly don't understand why they did it.
Its right there in the article.
>In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists
Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#27I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence.
I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#28The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not pu…
> Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live
Do you have any data on that?
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#29As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs.
Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#30Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?
The legal system in most of the bigger countries is not that naive. They probably cannot do a thing with their assets when a court case is pending...