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My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

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Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#61

Post by aahhahahaaa »

dmurray wrote: post #50

> With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on their terms; we can only preserve in ways for which they have granted explicit permission, and for only as long as they grant permission; and we cannot lend what we have paid for because we do not own it. This is not a rule of law, this is the rule by license. This does not make sense. If tha…

It's in their best interest to settle in a capitulating way that will hurt them but not kill them. This might have to include a public apology that admits they're in the wrong because publishers can be petty about this type of thing.

It doesn't seem like they're willing to do that, and while I agree with their viewpoint and the troubling future with licensing... it may be the hill they die on and I'm not sure it's worth the trade off in this specific case. IMO the Internet Archive is incredibly valuable to humanity.

I admire them for taking the stance, but worry about their future. Hopefully they're playing tough publicly and aren't as willing to die by the sword in private.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#62

Post by twox2 »

gorbachev wrote: post #58

"With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on their terms;" And this is why I still prefer physical media. I own it and I can do whatever the hell I please with it. Not so with almost every digital media platform I've seen. Well, other than platforms built on piracy.

>I own it and I can do whatever the hell I please with it.

Not really... IP law still applies. You can't photocopy the book and sell it or give it out without consequence.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#63

Post by Apocryphon »

remram wrote: post #48
vuln wrote: post #4

I have a monthly reoccurring donation in the amount of $10. If you haven’t donated please do. https://archive.org/donate/

I had a recurring donation until they decided to take a step that was obviously going to get them sued. I support IA's mission and products, but won't throw money in legal proceedings they set themselves to lose; I feel like this is better spent on EFF etc who are serious about it. I object to modern intellectual property and publishing practices as much as anyone, but what did they expect would happen when they drop…

The EFF is taking up the legal defense in this suit, so your donation would be ending up at the same place anyway.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#64

Post by snapetom »

pwinnski wrote: post #23
bmarquez wrote: post #20

I'm confused by this article. As I remember Archive.org created a "National Emergency Library" basically breaking the 1:1 ratio of physical to digital books in Controlled Digital Lending, and allowing unrestricted use. The lawsuits were brought on June 1st, while the NEL was active. Are these lawsuits based on the CDL (which I personally support) or based on the NEL (which could be considered piracy)?

According to this post, they did not break the 1:1 ratio of physical to digital books, but expanded the pool of physical books to include those unlent at libraries across the country. That is certainly a debatable point, though. More to the point, the lawsuits are in effect and moving forward now, long after the NEL has ceased operations. They are directed at the CDL now.

"We lent books that we own—at the Internet Archive and also the other endorsing libraries. These books were purchased and we knew they were not circulating physically."

I read this as not increasing the book pool, but saying, "We own Book A. Our endorsing libraries have a total of 9 copies of Book A." However, instead of now offering 10 copies of Book A (which would have adhered to 1:1), they offered unlimited loans, which certainly breaks 1:1.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#65

Post by neuralRiot »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #21
joshuahaglund wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using controlled digital lending, yes. Why not? The libraries hold licenses to lend this media in physical format but were temporarily shifting to lending using controlled digital lending. They didn't just give away unencrypted copies to be pirated. They did what libraries do, lend media.

They lent unlimited copies. The limit is very very key to being covered under CDL.

So it’s just to create artificial scarcity, this brings back the problem of piracy, what’s the difference between lending 100 copies vs 1M? Or why they charge more to “buy” a digital copy of a movie vs “renting” it? The key problem here is that we’re trying to adapt old models to a totally different medium like trying to attach the horses to a car.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#66

Post by devwastaken »

dmurray wrote: post #50

> With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on their terms; we can only preserve in ways for which they have granted explicit permission, and for only as long as they grant permission; and we cannot lend what we have paid for because we do not own it. This is not a rule of law, this is the rule by license. This does not make sense. If tha…

IA will lose because the precedent set by winning would mean that all online digital sales can just be distributed. Itd evaporate a trillion dollar market overnight.

I disagree with book publishers and general copyright law, but judges can understand the difference between physical books and digital ones. Physical books cannot be outright copied atom for atom in 5 milliseconds and distributed to millions in hours. The difficulty of any sort of copying makes it significantly economical to just buy a new one, or have one lended that had to be bought.

I'm afraid IA is going to be demolished because of their move here. They shouldn't have done it under the banner of IA. If at all they should have done it under a rogue name and service over TOR.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#67

Post by adventured »

jjcon wrote: post #39
loeg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is: the library has 5 physical copies. IA loans 5 digital copies while the physical ones are locked up. The number of library copies of the work in circulation is net zero.

HN: Pirating a movie isn’t the same as stealing it HN now: Digital lending should be treated the same as physical lending

HN: privacy is absolutely critical

Also HN: overwhelming support for one of the world's largest privacy violators, the Internet Archive, which can never comply with GDPR or any other stringent privacy laws under any circumstances because they have no idea what's in their archive and they intentionally make it difficult to remove privacy violating content from it (which they hoovered up without permission and now you can't even stop them from doing it because they ignore robots.txt)

Yay for massive, epic scale privacy violations and being an abusive parasite that intentionally doesn't follow proper site directives!

Even if IA survives this debacle, they're going to get wiped out by privacy violation lawsuits in the coming decade. Their entire archive will have to be dumped, or combed line by line for privacy violating content (at extraordinary cost).

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#68

Post by phkahler »

dmurray wrote: post #50

> With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on their terms; we can only preserve in ways for which they have granted explicit permission, and for only as long as they grant permission; and we cannot lend what we have paid for because we do not own it. This is not a rule of law, this is the rule by license. This does not make sense. If tha…

>> It's reasonably well established that when it comes to intellectual property, you can refuse to sell it, and only grant a limited license. With some small carve outs like the First Sale doctrine.

Maybe pedantic but there is no "intellectual property" law in play here. Just plain old copyright law, under which they do fully own the books - as opposed to licensing them. What copyright law allows is everything that libraries do.

My opinion - One should be able to use a webcam to share a book with someone. That's not far from what IA is doing though it's also technically quite different.

On another note, I'm not a fan of using the pandemic to highlight IAs value even though I appreciate their efforts.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#69

Post by Spivak »

thatcat wrote: post #54
dmurray wrote: post #50

> With this suit, the publishers are saying that in the digital world, we cannot buy books anymore, we can only license and on their terms; we can only preserve in ways for which they have granted explicit permission, and for only as long as they grant permission; and we cannot lend what we have paid for because we do not own it. This is not a rule of law, this is the rule by license. This does not make sense. If tha…

The First Sale doctrine can be applied to the digital domain.

I mean you could try but you still wouldn't be allowed to duplicate the work. So you would only be allowed to sell your purchased version if you deleted any copy you had.

Re: My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

#70

Post by saagarjha »

neuralRiot wrote: post #65
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lent unlimited copies. The limit is very very key to being covered under CDL.

So it’s just to create artificial scarcity, this brings back the problem of piracy, what’s the difference between lending 100 copies vs 1M? Or why they charge more to “buy” a digital copy of a movie vs “renting” it? The key problem here is that we’re trying to adapt old models to a totally different medium like trying to attach the horses to a car.

And the problem was that by rushing into that without thinking we might end up much worse for wear after a judge thinks that digital sharing in general is totally bogus. You can't just try doing something to see if it works and then magically assume that people with entrenched interests won't come after you.
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