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EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

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

#91

Post by kazinator »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #82
WaltPurvis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. They're violating copyrights, i.e., stealing, and then saying "if you don't want us to steal from you, we have an opt out form you can fill out." EDIT: People are downvoting this because I equated violating copyrights to stealing, which is odd because US law explicitly defines copyright infringement as stealing property. That's not debatable; it's a simple fact. (A fact that apparently bothers s…

Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…

I think that the argument which you present works well for personal use: the book $0 monetary value to you and you don't intend to redistribute it.

However, there are people who copy without authorization and make money from it. (For instance, Google: they collect money for YouTube Premium subscriptions, in exchange for which they let people watch all sorts of illegally reproduced material without commercial interruptions.)

Now suppose the copyright holder wants $1000 for the book. Nobody is willing to pay. You make copies available for $15. A few people are found who pay you. Are you not stealing that revenue from the copyright holder? Oh, but that copyright holder didn't want the money; or else they could have sold for $15 per copy themselves. You're just getting money that they copyright holder left on the table ...

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

#92

Post by sp332 »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #77
hyko wrote: post #57

How do we back up the Internet Archive? If they lose this case then it will be like losing The Great Library of Alexandria. This is our culture. This is our heritage! Edited to add: when I say “back up”, I mean preserve the data and the archival mission (minus the legal quagmires). The technical challenges can be solved, and we should do this before it’s too late. It seems there was a previous effort, but it has lost…

Might find an answer in: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

A conversation about this is the stickied thread, in fact.

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

#93

Post by Vespasian »

mindslight wrote: post #86
Vespasian wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still wonder what their plan was in anticipation of this confrontation. Worst Case: Chirping (Not seeing this coming at all) Naive Case: "Surely they will come to recognize our 'superior' 'moral' arguments and cease their evil ways" Historically ignorant case: "The people will stand up and join us. We are invincible" (aka every rebel ever...most fail)

I don't know. There was that point right after society became aware of COVID that everyone was imagining pulling together for the common good, before the political machine grabbed the crisis and performed the all-too-American response of corporate bailouts coupled with tough luck for everyone else. I can only imagine they got caught up in that feeling, and thought everyone being stuck at home would be a good time to…

Seems plausible and I can certainly see their good intentions coupled with a general dislike for monetary cultural gatekeeping

One trait of good leadership is the ability to weigh the consequences of actions of their organisation. They failed in that regard.

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

#94

Post by ksdale »

Gaelan wrote: post #84

[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…

While I agree in principle that intellectual property is somehow fundamentally different from physical property, in the case of the "stolen" book, the creator is not worse off only if the "thief" wouldn't have purchased the book otherwise.

It's certainly true that the creator isn't out of pocket per person who reads the book, but that's not necessarily the same as "no worse off."

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

#95

Post by dangerlibrary »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #88
dangerlibrary wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…

Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...

Wow, I mean, what a counterintuitive coincidence.

Trafficking in copyrighted works constitutes theft, but a private equity firm buying a company with debt, transferring the debt onto the company's balance sheet, allowing it to go into bankruptcy because of enormous debt load, and paying themselves huge bonuses along the way is not theft.

If it weren't for the fact that the U.S. federal code as it exists in June of 2020 is the definitive source of ethical and moral definitions, I would think that maybe something _untoward_ might be going on.

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

#96

Post by loughnane »

It's well established at this point that IA took a big misstep here and is too important and singular an entity to run afoul of current laws.

To those who think IA is wrong not just tactically but morally on the basis of "violating the law", I'd like you to consider the following:

Unjust laws exist.

- Shall we be content to obey them?

- Shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded?

- Shall we transgress them at once?

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

#97

Post by sp332 »

jjcon wrote: 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…

The lawsuit is only asking for damages for 127 books, for a theoretical maximum of $19 million according to https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/6/23/21293875/internet... And with books from the last 5 years excluded, and the opt-out, and the fact they were partnering with multiple other libraries and could probably include their copies, the damages the authors could show will probably be relatively small.

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

#98

Post by jjcon »

Gaelan wrote: post #84

[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…

> I'm better off, and you're no worse off. In an "ideal" society, the free sharing of knowledge would be not just allowed, but encouraged.

I agree that theft of digital goods is not equivalent to physical goods but abolition of copyright does not follow from that fact nor does it follow that theft of intellectual property is not possible.

I also agree this is an important conversation to have. The whole idea around copyright is to encourage the creation of intellectual property. If there is a fundamentally better way to do it that idea should flourish but I have yet to hear a realistic alternative.

> I imagine there's been measurable harm to our society's cultural and scientific advancement because copyright forces us to recreate others' work instead of building off of it.

I would argue that the damage from having no copyright protections would be unquestionably worse than the trade offs they bring. People would of course still create, but so many works would simply not exist if there was no way to protect intellectual property.

Certainly there are minutiae of copyright that have gone too far in protections but that doesn’t mean the system itself should be done away with. The modern world created this system knowing full well there were trade offs.

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

#99

Post by dangerlibrary »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #87
bosswipe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

That's a slogan I hear a lot. Unfortunately, the law disagrees. Copyright infringement is defined as a stolen property offense: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...

Fortunately, it is not an immutable fact.

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

#100

Post by enriquto »

mindslight wrote: post #53

I'd love for the Internet Archive to prevail here, but honestly it was quite boneheaded to do this legal experiment under the same corporate umbrella as their archival work. At this point they should proceed with a damage mitigation strategy of selling off their servers and storage to a second entity at fair market value (maybe "Archive Cloud"), and renting continued access. This way even if the IA organization is ba…

> it was quite boneheaded to do this legal experiment under the same corporate umbrella as their archival work.

I disagree. This is a wickedly good idea, and a very good hill to fight on. It is not a "legal experiment" but a major battle against evil people. Everybody loves the Internet Archive, it is our sacred castle. If a decisive battle is to be won against the publishing parasites, it may be likely this one, and we have to be all on the same side! After Aaron Swartz, the book parasites have never been so potentially hated by everybody. We must go all-in.

The error is on the side of the book parasites for having decided to fight against an institution that is so loved by mankind. They cannot but lose the battle (socially), regardless of what the short-time legal outcome is.

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