the reason they are doing this is the fact they are going to lose. libraries are a relic of the past too in my opinion.
EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
111–120 of 275 posts
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#112In addition to thinking about ways to back up IA, we can also start backing up our own content and things we visit locally, so we don't become so reliant on centralized datasets:
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#113EFF 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…
Even if you broke the law you don't just role over and give the other side whatever they want. They're inevitable going to ask for more compensation than they are entitled to (why wouldn't they), and you need to push back to make the penalty fair. That's just how our legal system is set up to work. The EFF is on the right side of the law the same way a lawyer for a criminal is. The lawyer (eff) is fulfilling a necess…
Please stop equating owners of IA and EFF with criminals - copyright infringmenent is nowhere near equivalent to actual crimes that cause harm. It's a disgusting rhetoric that was paid for by rent seeking publishers.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#114[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…
There's a real cost to government and society enforcing the copyright monopoly for the copyright owner. So why not have the copyright holder pay for upholding copyright? Imagine differential pricing for enforcing copyright on a work depending on parameters: - grow with every passing year - change with the level of protection required - zero for public domain and free (BSD/GPL/permissive CC style licensing) - symbolic…
The copyright owner pays the costs of enforcing copyright already...
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "No, the criminal in the above is absolutely on the wrong side of the law. That's the assumption after all." In America at least, the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. So the assumption should be that the defendant is on the right side of the law. It's the prosecutor or complainant's job to prove the defendant is in fact on the wrong side of the law. To call a defendant 'the criminal' (and saying…
Read their argument in the context of legal proceedings after the defendant pleads guilty The lawyer is still on the right side of the law after the plea
A defense attorney defending a guilty criminal doesn’t typically pledge financial and moral support and state publically that they are proud to stand with them (not for, with). EFF is tying themselves to IA far beyond just acting purely as a legal representative.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#116[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 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. Part of that harm is in creating monopolistic entities like Youtube because only big players can take on big media. If Youtube didn't have contentID they'd be sued into the ground by the publishers. > But what does that world look like? Quite…
Those monetization options pay less than you think they do for the vast majority of creators.
The US copyright regime has been responsible for an amazing exponential growth in IP creation because creators are financially incentivized to create.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#117[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…
> But what does that world look like? Quite frankly, I'm not sure. Of course, we can't just abolish copyright with no replacement; it's certainly necessary to reward the creation of this work somehow.
Why can't we? Wouldn't even that state be better than the current one, where publishers outright steal (in true meaning of the world) revenue from YouTube content creators because there might be a sound that's similar to some song written 30+ years ago?
The current state is so one-sided and abusive that it's not obvious that no-copyright world is worse. Heck, down this same thread we have people calling people who put books on the internet for everyone to read "criminals". How messed up is that?
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#118I'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…
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Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#119EFF 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 and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. I don't understand how people have such certainty about this. You have a situation where there are libraries who have bought millions of books from authors/publishers. The authors have been paid. Then, there is a pandemic and the libraries are closed, so the public has lost access to all t…
It would've been interesting if they'd tried to compile a list of all the books that existed at all the closed libraries, and then only lent up to the limits of that list (which would continue to expand as more data were added), but I don't think anyone would argue that was practical to do at the time. The whole country can be shuttered at a moment's notice, compiling data like that takes tremendous effort.
However, in retrospect, I suspect the case might hinge on someone actually compiling that data. Did they, at any point, lend more copies of any particular title than existed at the time within all the shuttered libraries combined?
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#120[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…
> 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 worse off. In an "ideal" society, the free sharing of knowledge would be not just allowed, but encouraged.
Up until now, the value of a book has been set by the author, and reinforced by scarcity. Entire large economic models and systems have been built by tying the two together. What is supply and demand, when supply is infinite?
Basically, the author puts in some amount of thought and labor writing a book, and they get rewarded by a purchase. Capitalism is heavily based on this: "Labor results in production, production is rewarded by consumers, because they need to part with some money to benefit for the end result". The last item is no longer true, which has ripple effects all the way up the chain.
No wonder people want to bring back the economic models and systems of capitalism they're familiar with, by enforcing scarcity -- thousands of years of societal and economic development might be upended by new technology.
Libraries have always been a thorn in the side of capitalism, but they've usually been constrained and limited enough that they aren't a real threat. With the ease of digital copying, the seams are starting to tear much faster now.
Some want to dismantle copyright but keep the rest of the capitalist system in place, untouched, which I don't really see as realistic. I think the two are much more closely linked than you might imagine. If we're going to be overhauling the whole thing, we need to have systems in place for the huge societal impact it will have.
You fill in the rest of the dots for what new systems one might prefer over capitalism, and charting the course for what comes next, that can support people. At the very least, capitalism might just be on its way out.