Live data from Hacker News

EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

torrentfreak.com

31–40 of 275 posts

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet Archive's best bet is to settle and apologize very publicly. One should never apologize for civil disobedience against unjust laws.

Most people view copyright overall as a just law even if the details are argued about.

You don't know that about "most people". Most people will deliberately pirate content given the chance.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quit trolling/baiting this thread - this isn’t some big corporatist conspiracy - this is protecting creator livelihoods big and small. The vast majority of the civilized world agrees it is good to protect ‘art’ (from code to books) to keep it sustainable. Just because it can be infinitely duplicated and shared ‘freely’ does not mean it is sustainable to do so. If there is no money in art, less art will be made and mo…

This is not trolling or baiting (nor even intended to be). This is advocating for efforts, very public and visible, against broken public policy. Authors can still make a living without draconian copyright policy (life of the author + 70 years?) and suing libraries (!!!) for making content available during a pandemic. > Just because it can be infinitely duplicated and shared ‘freely’ does not mean it is sustainable t…

It is not authors doing the suing here. It is the big four publishers. All the demonising of authors over this has gotten out of hand and should just stop.

That said, please explain[] just how* an author "can still make a living" without some form of copy-protection. And please refrain from the "signing tours", "selling merch", "live readings" nonsense. Writers in particular (but the visual arts, too) simply don't, on the whole, have the skills, inclination or desire to engage in much of that. The entire reason for engaging with the conventional publishing industry is to relieve an author of the tedious burden of sourcing artwork, arranging print and distribution, marketing and sales, leaving them free to write more stories -- what they do best. Self-pub can work for some writers, but they're the ones willing to sacrifice precious writing-time time on all those peripheral activities.

Bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of writers are writing in snatched hours in the early mornings/evening, over and above a "day job" to pay the rent and put food on the table. There's not a lot of time left over in a day to also become an editor/marketer/project manager.

eta [*]: and I genuinely mean: Just HOW should public policy look in order to provide some form of artistic protection for creators? It's easy to sit around and say "copyright is broken" (and I'd largely agree!) It's less easy to say what it might/ought become.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#34
post #2

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through th…

Indeed. IA's defense is mostly about controlled digital lending, while the National Emergency Library was definitely uncontrolled digital lending, and really has no good precedent to base upon. I think it's unfortunate that this case is likely to blowback on CDL as a concept, even though the issue was uncontrolled lending.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#35
post #2

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through th…

"EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here" Are they? We can armchair critique all we want, but I find it doubtful that an organization with so much litigation and advocacy experience under their belt would naively throw away a ton of money on a losing battle.

> I find it doubtful that an organization with so much litigation and advocacy experience under their belt would naively throw away a ton of money on a losing battle.

I can come up with all sorts of reasons why the EFF might step in.

1. The IA is valuable enough that even a small increase in its chances of survival is worth spending a lot of money on

2. They don't think they can win, but they think they can mitigate the IA's losses

3. They think they can win in the media

4. They want to steer the legal arguments of IA in such a way that "controlled digital lending" has the best chance of surviving the lawsuit

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet Archive's best bet is to settle and apologize very publicly. One should never apologize for civil disobedience against unjust laws.

Most people view copyright overall as a just law even if the details are argued about.

I personally would say it's the bad side of justice - there is no downside to giving away that which is unlimited. It's mostly greed, but greed has utilitarian roots also, because encouraging piracy will discourage innovation.

It's a sad situation really: that the best solution we must adhere to is denying free resources to the masses. Not really human.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#37
post #2

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through th…

If the books were not being sold as digital copies, maybe they could invoke fair use due to the pandemic making other ways to access the books impossible.

That said, the best avenue would seem to be a PR campaign with a call for a boycott and public shaming of the publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, John Wiley & Sons, and HarperCollins) that are putting their profit ahead of public access to the books.

In fact, it seems pretty surprising that the publishers would risk such an hit to their reputation given that the Internet Archive probably doesn't have much money to give them as compensation anyway.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#38
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible that this is one outcome that the EFF is hoping for by joining this particular bit of litigation, but I just do not see it working out that well. No one, outside of a small group of techies, knows about or cares about the EFF; having the EFF formally on the IA side is not going to move the needle much in terms of PR. On the other hand, having the EFF on the opposition may galvanize the publishers to no…

In a just world the destruction of the Wayback machine should be a much bigger crime than some copyright violation. Sadly our world is not just, content conglomerates have bought themselves the most draconian laws possible to protect their profits above all other benefits to humanity. They must be stopped!

What prevents them from selling/giving the data of the wayback machine to another curator?

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#39
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible that this is one outcome that the EFF is hoping for by joining this particular bit of litigation, but I just do not see it working out that well. No one, outside of a small group of techies, knows about or cares about the EFF; having the EFF formally on the IA side is not going to move the needle much in terms of PR. On the other hand, having the EFF on the opposition may galvanize the publishers to no…

In a just world the destruction of the Wayback machine should be a much bigger crime than some copyright violation. Sadly our world is not just, content conglomerates have bought themselves the most draconian laws possible to protect their profits above all other benefits to humanity. They must be stopped!

In a just world, the management team that decided to risk the future of the Wayback machine so that they could take advantage of a global pandemic to strike a blow against copyright would go to jail. They must be stopped and prevented from doing more damage to IA!

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a just world the destruction of the Wayback machine should be a much bigger crime than some copyright violation. Sadly our world is not just, content conglomerates have bought themselves the most draconian laws possible to protect their profits above all other benefits to humanity. They must be stopped!

What prevents them from selling/giving the data of the wayback machine to another curator?

The wayback machine is an asset of the IA. The courts tend to take a dim view of obvious attempts to hide assets from judgements.
Post reply on HN