Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

blog.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 150 posts

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#101

Post by oska »

geofft wrote: post #8

> We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic. Did this come as a surprise? Did Internet Archive not expect publishers to sue? The Archive launched the emergency library during a global pandemic. Lots of people, myself included, said that this was a risky move because they would obviously get sued and it would put not only the Archiv…

Your last paragraph suffers from hyperbolic rhetoric and a faultful analogy (common with arguments from analogy). A librarian offering to photocopy a book for you is incurring cost of resources (the paper used for the photocopy) and giving you an inferior copy (not bound and nicely finished). Neither of those apply with a digital copy, which is essentially cost-free to make and indistinguishable from the source.

And why should a digital library have to work in the same way as a physical library? Why should we be bound by analogising the way a physical library works to how a digital library could and can work?

A library, to me, is an accessible store of published works, with some level of curation. That's it. It doesn't have to include the idea of physical access limits, artificially imposed. Indeed, one of the benefits of digitisation is escaping the limits imposed by physicality and opening new ways of doing things.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#102

Post by 6AA4FD »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #95
WalterBright wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way (an old way) is for, say a newspaper or magazine, to publish a novel as a serial. The newspaper pays the author for a few pages at a time, and the newspaper gets subscription fees and ad revenue.

Serialized novels have perverse incentives in the form of puffing up word count and frequent cliffhangers to keep readers coming back. I cannot find it at the moment but there was a fascinating article comparing excerpts from a serialized novel versus a standalone novel to illustrate these effects.

That may be, however you may be interested to learn that Ulysses was first serialised.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#103

Post by iJohnDoe »

This might be an unpopular opinion, but here goes anyways. I know there are some on HN that share this unpopular opinion.

The IA treated this situation and decision like they’ve treated all their decisions. They archive data without permission. They share this archived data without permission. They have no official instructions on how to remove data from their archive. There are some flimsy instructions about robot rules, but it’s not clear if they work.

Not everyone agrees to have their old forum posts, yahoo posts and other info from the early days of the Internet still available in an archive that’s searchable by the government, employers, etc.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#104

Post by sverhagen »

geofft wrote: post #8

> We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic. Did this come as a surprise? Did Internet Archive not expect publishers to sue? The Archive launched the emergency library during a global pandemic. Lots of people, myself included, said that this was a risky move because they would obviously get sued and it would put not only the Archiv…

I read most of the comments, but I'm still wondering if, since CDL is so similar to conventional, analogue libraries, isn't there a "right of way" type of argument to be made for CDL? Like, you didn't challenge it for decades, it's gotten an established place in society, no dice? (I'm specifically asking for CDL, not unlimited.)

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#105

Post by nordsieck »

sverhagen wrote: post #104
geofft wrote: post #8

> We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic. Did this come as a surprise? Did Internet Archive not expect publishers to sue? The Archive launched the emergency library during a global pandemic. Lots of people, myself included, said that this was a risky move because they would obviously get sued and it would put not only the Archiv…

I read most of the comments, but I'm still wondering if, since CDL is so similar to conventional, analogue libraries, isn't there a "right of way" type of argument to be made for CDL? Like, you didn't challenge it for decades, it's gotten an established place in society, no dice? (I'm specifically asking for CDL, not unlimited.)

> Like, you didn't challenge it for decades, it's gotten an established place in society, no dice?

1. After some quick searching, I don't think CDL has been ongoing for anywhere close to "decades".

2. Some IP like trademark can be lost if it isn't defended. I do not believe that is true for copyright.

3. In general, this is not the way law works. If you steal from someone for years without being caught, you don't create a right to steal from that person over time because it's "been ongoing for anywhere close to 'decades'". The lone exception that I"m aware of is land ownership - adverse possession is a thing, but it only applies to real estate and it applies to a specific piece of real estate, not a pattern of activity.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#106

Post by sjy »

ashtonkem wrote: post #86
geofft wrote: post #8

> We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic. Did this come as a surprise? Did Internet Archive not expect publishers to sue? The Archive launched the emergency library during a global pandemic. Lots of people, myself included, said that this was a risky move because they would obviously get sued and it would put not only the Archiv…

The dynamic here is exactly why a lot of fundamental questions rarely get litigated; both parties are terrified that a court case against them will create long term precedent. So they usually negotiate a compromise before the court decides.

I think this is why the debatable proposition that samples used in hip-hop and mashups need to be cleared with the copyright holder (rather than being fair use) has never been decided by the Supreme Court. Nobody ever sued Girl Talk over it, because if he fought back there was a risk that the existing pro-copyright decisions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport_Music,_Inc._v._Dime... would be overruled.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#107

Post by sjy »

geofft wrote: post #94
matheusmoreira wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been warned about repetitive ideological discussion on HN so I should probably not elaborate on the matter. I do agree with you though. These are all important points that should be addressed. I do not know the answers to these questions. I sincerely hope someone smarter than me will be able to come up with really good answers. I just think that we can't go on like this. Copyright is based on a lie: artificial s…

> In order to enforce copyright in the 21st century, computing freedom must be sacrificed. I'm not sure this is true. The publishers aren't demanding that Internet Archive add DRM to their e-books - they're demanding that Internet Archive stop distributing them entirely. I can certainly imagine a world where DRM-free e-books are the norm and unlicensed distribution is limited only by legal threat and not by technical…

> how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?

It’s not obvious to me that enforceable copyleft licences have increased the availability of free software to such an extent as to outweigh the loss of freedom effected by normal copyrights. Abolishing copyright (or less radically, rejecting the prevailing interpretation of copyright law which says that software is a “literary work”) would do more to advance the four essential software freedoms than any copyleft licence. Notably, copyright is the only thing standing in the way of freedoms 2 and 3. As for freedom 1, companies would still treat their source code as a trade secret, but without copyright they’d have no recourse against people republishing leaked source code, which could then be incorporated into free software projects.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#108

Post by Reelin »

nordsieck wrote: post #105
sverhagen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read most of the comments, but I'm still wondering if, since CDL is so similar to conventional, analogue libraries, isn't there a "right of way" type of argument to be made for CDL? Like, you didn't challenge it for decades, it's gotten an established place in society, no dice? (I'm specifically asking for CDL, not unlimited.)

> Like, you didn't challenge it for decades, it's gotten an established place in society, no dice? 1. After some quick searching, I don't think CDL has been ongoing for anywhere close to "decades". 2. Some IP like trademark can be lost if it isn't defended. I do not believe that is true for copyright. 3. In general, this is not the way law works. If you steal from someone for years without being caught, you don't cre…

> If you steal from someone for years without being caught

Wait, what? Who said anything about stealing? Publishers might try to argue piracy but CDL doesn't seem to fit that either on account of the DRM.

Honestly I'm not at all clear what a cohesive argument against CDL would look like. Given the first sale doctrine it wouldn't even surprise me if some of the current ebook pricing practices were actually illegal.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#109

Post by pabs3 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #100
geofft wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order to enforce copyright in the 21st century, computing freedom must be sacrificed. I'm not sure this is true. The publishers aren't demanding that Internet Archive add DRM to their e-books - they're demanding that Internet Archive stop distributing them entirely. I can certainly imagine a world where DRM-free e-books are the norm and unlicensed distribution is limited only by legal threat and not by technical…

> I can certainly imagine a world where DRM-free e-books are the norm and unlicensed distribution is limited only by legal threat and not by technical means. The state of YouTube proves that the copyright industry will not accept such a world. They want the technology industry to prevent copyright infringement from happening. They don't want to have to sue anyone after it has happened. Copyright infringement is wides…

The world has moved on since those days, the software development world won't revert to what is was like then, it would instead change in different ways if copyright goes away.

Re: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early

#110

Post by pabs3 »

geofft wrote: post #53
jancsika wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (or, more practically, that authors continue to author books instead of deciding to go work at a tech company or something) Have you done or read research to suggest this is something to worry about? There are other concerns certainly. But I have trouble understanding how someone who has ever visited Wikipedia or visited github could even ask this question. It sure sounds like a conceptual anachronism to me. (Thoug…

> Have you done or read research to suggest this is something to worry about? Yes, I've heard many authors saying that they're unhappy with the emergency library in particular because they are concerned they won't be able to get paid to write books if this happens. And, based on my training and experience, if someone isn't paid to do their job anymore, they'll look for another job. I'm aware of GitHub. I've published…

In case you aren't aware of it, FOSSjobs is a site where companies post jobs for working on open source. There is also a list of resources, which contains a list of a bunch of open source companies and other ways to get paid to work on open source.

https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Post reply on HN