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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

#131

Post by jjcon »

izacus wrote: post #117
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…

> 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 t…

> 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?

Conversely for every one of these there are easily 1000 YouTube videos that shamelessly steal IP outside the bounds of fair use and nobody does anything. If pewdiepie posts a 30 second meme clip from the latest avengers people think it’s funny but if Disney used 30 seconds of pewdiepie in a movie without permission the internet would go nuts and lawyers would be lining up. Should copyright treat them so differently?

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

#132

Post by dingaling »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #89
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…

> 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…

> Giving them back access to the books they've paid for is obviously wrong?

That's a weak argument. Buses were parked but I couldn't just go and take one from the yard for a journey despite having 'paid' for it from public funds.

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

#133

Post by gpm »

jjcon wrote: post #127
gpm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. As explained above acting as legal council for someone who has broken the law does not make you yourself be "on the wrong side of the law".

And as I said - EFF isn’t acting as blind legal council - they are tying themselves to IA even saying they are proud to stand with them and pledging financial support for them. This is totally different from a public defender being elected for a citizen. I didn’t say it was illegal for EFF to do this or that they were breaking the law, I said they were on the wrong side of the law.

I'm beginning to think you actually just don't know what "the wrong side of the law" means. Here is the definition

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20the%20wrong%...

Exercising their first amendment rights to support an organization that broke the law is unequivocally legal, a healthy part of society, and not on the wrong side of the law.

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

#134

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

If you steal my book, I don't get paid as much for the work I put into the book. So I am very clearly and obviously worse off.

I find it really, really strange that some people find this hard to understand.

And your "crowdfunded patronage" model is still copyright, it's just copyright with a different revenue model.

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

#135

Post by markvdb »

gamblor956 wrote: post #114
markvdb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Everybody obviously pays for copyright enforcement already through general taxation. Look at orphan works for a prime example of how this is less than ideal.

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

#136

Post by hyperman1 »

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…

There is ain interesting flaw in: If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it.

Even if this is correct, you might have bought another book that was cheaper.

Case in point: Photoshop. It was pirated by everyone at home. But organizations could not pirate, so when they buy a photo editing package, it will be photoshop, as that what the employees know. If piracy at home was not an option, you'd see much more different photo packages at different price points in the market.

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

#137

Post by kick »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #130
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…

"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." you are so wrong in this mentality. the bottom line is, that someone took the time and energy to write and publish that book to make money, so that person should be paid. wit…

Illegal does not equal immoral; copying does not equal stealing.

Piracy of songs, movies, and applications actually improves sales, according to a study that the European Union funded and then tried to keep from getting published:

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

The law shouldn't guarantee you a successful business model. If you believe in capitalism, this should be self-evident. If you believe in socialism, this should also be self-evident. "We're going to enforce with a military your right to a successful business model" is absolutely silly and bizarrely harmful.

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

#138

Post by waterhouse »

dctoedt wrote: post #107
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…

You're channeling Thomas Jefferson, who himself channeled a Zoroastrian idea. Jefferson said: "... no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me." [0] The flaw in this concept is the free-rider problem: 1. Not all new IP can be created as a side projec…

There are free-rider problems everywhere. From a "rights" perspective, the fact that you can see a free-rider problem and have an idea for some kind of law that you think would improve incentives doesn't justify using legal force to impose these changes on everyone else. But I'm not sure how many people there are these days for whom a "rights" argument carries weight.

For a more empirical approach, I think it's worth looking at "Against Intellectual Monopoly" [1], from 2008. "Chapter 8: Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation?" [2] may be of particular interest.

[1] http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

[2] http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinal08.pdf

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

#139

Post by WaltPurvis »

enriquto wrote: post #108
WaltPurvis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law. Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that freeing slaves legitimately bought is defined as stealing property under US law.

That's not cute. It's incredibly appalling to compare the institution of slavery to people who pirate books simply because they want the benefits of authors' work without compensating those authors.

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

#140

Post by devit »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #55
devit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems quite a risky strategy as well, because it could backfire: if the court declares even just that controlled digital lending is legal, more companies and bigger companies may start offering it (e.g. Google that already has the scanned books), making things worse for the publishers.

I don't think Google is actually warehousing the physical books. They worked with a lot of libraries to scan their collections, but arguably couldn't legally offer CDL.

I think they have the capital to buy enough copies of all books in existence to allow effectively unlimited lending of not recently released books.
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