I really don't know much about the intersection of IP and legal entities, but in the worst case scenario would IA be able to move its web captured assets to a separate company instead of tanking the whole thing? In other words, just leave the "library" division to tank and take the heat while everything else remains safe elsewhere?
Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
231–240 of 409 posts
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
>allows for unlimited unmetered lending of e-books It is metered, you can lend max 5 book for max of 1 month. >Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends Is that something positive? Should we go back to DVD because publishers would love that, or is streaming still ok?
It's an observation that points out that physical books are not being lent out hundred or thousands of times so the physical book argument (or the digitized physical book argument) don't hold water.
I never said anything about physical book's, many public-library have already e-books, like research-papers and so on.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#233The 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.
That's why they wanted to do it. It doesn't explain why they actually did it.
There's a long list of national and even worldwide problems I could solve, if only I was allowed to use other people's resources without their permission and was not required to compensate them in any way for that use.
I want to tackle all of those, but they would not get past the "ask a lawyer how much legal trouble it would be" stage, and so I do not actually do them.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That’s not a very believable scenario. First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening? Second, that’s not how precedent is established: typically a single case is hand-picked to serve as the exception to the rule taking great care to make it as palatable, appealing, and free of re…
> First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening?
You're assuming the country being closed is especially relevant. The point is rather that they had physical books and weren't physically lending them out, in which case they should be able to digitally lend them out. If you're not lending more copies than you have, how is that not a reasonable argument?
> typically a single case is hand-picked to serve as the exception to the rule taking great care to make it as palatable, appealing, and free of recriminations as possible and you take that to the courts.
It's a well-loved actual library that only wants to lend out its books, what more do you want?
And if they'd only lent out a single book, would that have gotten them into court? It had to be enough for the plaintiffs to care.
> some other website or organization should gamble their entire existence that isn’t worth as much as the Archive to get this precedent
Why? It has to be a real library. You would rather some other library take the risk, or that nobody ever do it?
> It’s not like the Archive doesn’t know what kind of people they are dealing with.
And that's the point. The people they're dealing with are the bullies and the Archive is supposed to back down? Somebody has to fight the fight.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet archive is a universal archive of the internet rather than just what is exposed trough their wayback machine. You are comparing a quantifiable well indexed archive of any online with one which is not quantifiable due to being lost to history. There are similarities between the efforts of the Library at Alexandria and the internet archive which make them comparable, so lets. >'size' is really not that imp…
1) "virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point." >>>>>>> the IA is not 'knowledge' it's 'information' and most of it is irrelevant to anything - more importantly: All of the important information in the IA is well documented elsewhere . We don't need the IA for much at all. 2) Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ... This did not happen. >>>>>>> Of course it did! Lucio Russo / "Forgott…
We can’t judge what is important and what is not. This is a job for the future historians in a millenium.
What historians really need is accounts of how regular people went about their business, without a filter applied by the one recording that account. The internet archive is an excellent resource for this, but only if it is preserved.
Previous ages failed to record what was needed to properly understand that age, not because they lacked the capacity to do so, but because they didn’t consider mundane things worth recording.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not a very believable scenario. First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening? Second, that’s not how precedent is established: typically a single case is hand-picked to serve as the exception to the rule taking great care to make it as palatable, appealing, and free of re…
> First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening? You're assuming the country being closed is especially relevant. The point is rather that they had physical books and weren't physically lending them out, in which case they should be able to digitally lend them out. If you're not…
> If you're not lending more copies than you have, how is that not a reasonable argument?
That's the crux of the problem, though. The Internet Archive originally followed that model making that very argument; that argument hasn't actually been tested in court and the legality of it isn't settled, but publishers were generally looking the other way. But in March, the IA lifted the limit, allowing an unlimited number of people to read the same book on the grounds that closing physical libraries created a national emergency.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the fallacy of assuming that people would pay for content they can't pirate.
I haven't seen any evidence that the shrinking earnings of authors are related to piracy. From what I've read, publishers are simply retaining more of the profits for themselves and, often, theorizing that piracy is somehow raising their costs yet providing little by way of documentation. https://www.statista.com/topics/3928/reading-habits-in-the-u...
It seems unlikely to me that piracy is a major factor, as headline-grabbing as it often tends to be. It's hard for me to even hazard a guess how the IA's "emergency library" would really affect things; it's not piracy in any conventional understanding of the term, but maybe that makes it more likely to cost authors potential sales, because it's so easy to read the book for free. But I want to triple underline that maybe and surround it with question marks.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you have to put up with? How do you pay people to "do work" instead of "done work"? What's that mean exactly?
All the stupid crap we've been dealing with for the past 20 years. Stupid DRM; HDCP compatibility issues; YouTube copyright strikes; this lawsuit which threatens to kill a valuable resource; $222,000 penalties against an individual for pirating 24 songs; large companies locking our shared culture away for centuries. It's trivial to think of more examples of the harmful effects of copyright. It's all caused by an old…
How is this any different than the protections for other products that you have to buy? The whole point is you need to pay for it, and the producer needs to ensure you actually did so. I understand the technical issues with DRM which can have a poor UX sometimes, but for the most part it's only a problem if you didn't actually pay for the content. The rise of Netflix and streaming services show that it's working fine for millions.
Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free. That's the fundamental issue, and I don't agree. I doubt many creators and producers would either, not without some alternative answer to monetization. Do you have a solution for that?
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#239I've got a synology NAS with at least 10TB spare capacity I could donate... If only there were a way to use it, and thousands more, to back up important projects like this in a decentralized way.
IPFS seems perfect for the purpose. Files are content-addressed and a request for a part of a file can resolve to any accessible peer that has it. A peer has it if they have pinned it or if they have accessed it themselves recently so that it is cached on their node. This way, users share the load for popular files, donating both bandwidth and storage.
Torrents also seem like a perfect way to donate bandwidth and storage, and the IA already uses those.
The only problem with these approaches or generally any distributed file store is that someone will have to share a copy, so you'll mostly be donating bandwidth by storing a redundant copy of data that they likely have to store themselves as well to guarantee accessibility.
Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First, the precedent is not worth much as all it would say is when all libraries in the whole country are closed, they can give away books for free - how often do you see that happening? You're assuming the country being closed is especially relevant. The point is rather that they had physical books and weren't physically lending them out, in which case they should be able to digitally lend them out. If you're not…
> If you're not lending more copies than you have, how is that not a reasonable argument? That's the crux of the problem, though. The Internet Archive originally followed that model making that very argument; that argument hasn't actually been tested in court and the legality of it isn't settled, but publishers were generally looking the other way. But in March, the IA lifted the limit, allowing an unlimited number o…
I somehow doubt that they actually lent books to an unlimited number of people, since an unlimited number of people don't exist. So then you get into questions like, did they actually lend out more copies than exist in all the libraries that are physically closed? Probably not, right? Probably not even close to that. So that's an interesting question on something like digital inter-library loans.
And we still haven't heard their response, only what the plaintiffs are claiming.