Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no controversy here though. What IA did was plainly on the "not legal" side of the line. (I mean, there are surely some people who believe otherwise, but you can find someone who believes almost anything.)
Last i checked rosa parks did something illegal too. Not all laws need to be followed. And just because some people will beleive anything doesnt make this belief any less relevant or important.
Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
181–190 of 409 posts
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#182> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license. Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?
Because an eBook is not at all like a physical book. It's more like a service that interacts with DRM to provide an illusion of physicality. Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.
I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.)
Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#183I 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…
For me, I can't help but place blame on the actual agents of its potential demise: the plaintiffs of this lawsuit
If IA shuts down it will technically be the courts fining them, but I have trouble pinning blame on the court or the injured party asking for relief. Nor can IA claim ignorance here.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#184As 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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#185I 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…
>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. Wouldn't that kill the organisation?
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#186The 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.
And they did it in the most blatantly illegal way possible, with a press release that removed any doubt as to whether the infringement was willful. Brilliant!
IA could have, for instance, reached out to local libraries to see if IA could "use" their physical copies for proxies of the digital ones IA was loaning. This would likely have been illegal, but far more palatable, justifiable, and importantly not willful infringement.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
> People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability…
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the publishers and authors when they are so over-the-top. Painting the Internet Archive as "vile" and claiming they don't provide any valuable service strikes me as so far from the truth as to be insulting. It feels like they are targeting people who don't really know much about what IA is or what they do... That makes me wonder if it's really about more than IA and the…
Whoa, you have very inflated view of how much an author makes. I follow Myke Cole on Twitter his tag line is: 9 fantasy novels, 1 sci-fi novel, 2 history books, 2 TV shows, 1 comic series, 1 day job, 0 sleep The guy has published 12 books and STILL needs a day job.
Some people on here seem to make one app and kick back for years on the earnings while others churn out one after the other unprofitable software tool.
I myself have written 3 novella, 1 book of short stories, 1 movie, 2 native apps, and 4 web apps. I can't live on the royalties from any of them but I know there are people who do less and get more.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#189I 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…
If you want to establish a legal precedent, you can't just go to a court and ask them to. Courts only hear "cases and controversies" -- to establish what the law is, you have to get somebody to sue you. The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating. But it's a…