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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

#141

Post by Thorentis »

mulmen wrote: post #129
grawprog wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me sad we live in a society where profit is the first and foremost consideration for anything. Preserving history, human creativity, the progress of society, the betterment of future generations all comes second to profit. How many things will get or have been lost to time or just lost in general because they didn't make or cut into profit? The internet archive may have its faults, but its value to humanity…

I think that's an unfair take on the law. If you create something you decide what happens with it. That seems reasonable to me. Why are the rest of us entitled to your creation?

If you create somethibg, you decide what happens to it. In the case of IP, this should mean you decide whether or not you want to release it/tell others about it. But an idea is not a physical object. Once you tell somebody else your idea, they can tell somebody else with no loss to yourself.

It's like lighting a candle. If you create one, you do not have to share it with anybody. But once you do light somebody else's candle from your own, they are now free to light anybody else's without taking anything away from your candle. That's how ideas work.

The only reason IP law exists, is because people have decided that profit might be lost if people share your idea with others. We are artificially stifling the spreading of ideas from person to person, because of profit. This is a tragedy.

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

#142

Post by bscphil »

542458 wrote: post #130
bscphil wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article itself appears to be claiming this is not true: every book they lent was endorsed by a backing library, such that the physical book was guaranteed to be sitting in the stacks, not lent to anyone, whenever the digital copy of the book was in circulation.

This justification appears to have happened after the fact - As far as I can tell the endorsing library program postdates the National Emergency Library. They’ve never mentioned the endorsing library program in connection with the NEL until very recently that I can see. Additionally, they explicitly waived all waitlists when they launched the program, and spoke about is as if controlled lending had been temporarily a…

That could very well be true, I'm simply pointing out that OP appears to be stating as fact something that the article denies.

> Additionally, they explicitly waived all waitlists when they launched the program, and spoke about is as if controlled lending had been temporarily abandoned (whereas now they’re saying it was still CDL, just with a larger source pool). As far as I can tell, this is all a post-hoc attempt to make the whole affair more legal.

Well, obviously a post-hoc justification wouldn't make it legal. But on the other hand, if what they did was legal all along, the fact that they misleadingly described it at the outset in a way that made it sound illegal presumably wouldn't make it illegal.

It's not 100% clear to me what the justification is supposed to be. The article clearly seems to be implying that their lending was 1:1 with physical copies. If that's false, then obviously making this statement is not going to help their legal case, because the truth of it will be revealed in the course of the lawsuit. If it's true, then what was novel about their approach as discussed in the press release back in March? My best guess is that it has something to do with the physical libraries all being closed - that this enables more 1:1 lending because of the "650 million" books locked up, even if not each individual book was scanned separately. If that's not what they're claiming, I'm not sure what the point is.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

mulmen wrote: post #136
quazar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." First sentence of the Wikipedia article.

And how will they achieve that mission when someone makes the following edit: > The Internet Archive was an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by Nightshaxx »

grawprog wrote: post #126
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 makes me sad we live in a society where profit is the first and foremost consideration for anything. Preserving history, human creativity, the progress of society, the betterment of future generations all comes second to profit. How many things will get or have been lost to time or just lost in general because they didn't make or cut into profit? The internet archive may have its faults, but its value to humanity…

Without profit, people couldn't have created those things in the first place. Not because nessarily even they wouldn't have wanted to out of greed: if you can't feed your family at all with something it is less likely you will spend the amount of time on it that you would on something you can. Not to mention a lot of movies/books (Because of printing costs)/shows would just not have been possible without enough captial which comes from people who get said captial by making a profit.

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

#145

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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

Isn't that the exact thing they'd be referring to?

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

#147

Post by Vespasian »

nashashmi wrote: post #105

This article is very well written and very helpful. It presents the case for digital lending quite well. But in the last 20 years, pirates have abused digital copies of data and given digital copies a bad name. Today the publishers are sore from that experience. And they fight like they always did before. But they will use court cases against pirates to justify suit against IA. And that sucks. Judges worldwide have s…

Well, some countries already created legislation to settle the issue (Public Lending Right)

In Germany for example, libraries pay a few cents (~3-4) every time they lend out one of their books / films / etc. AFAIK this is also true for digital copies which are also limited to the number of licenses the library acquired.

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

#148

Post by voxic11 »

grawprog wrote: post #126
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 makes me sad we live in a society where profit is the first and foremost consideration for anything. Preserving history, human creativity, the progress of society, the betterment of future generations all comes second to profit. How many things will get or have been lost to time or just lost in general because they didn't make or cut into profit? The internet archive may have its faults, but its value to humanity…

The law actually balances many considerations, profit is only one of them. Maybe educate yourself, archival copies are one of the many exemptions to copyright.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

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

#149

Post by s1artibartfast »

walterbell wrote: post #146

Should the web archive organisation be legally separated from the lending library, to protect Internet history in the event of losing the lending library lawsuit?

It would have been a great idea before this. if they survive, they 100% should

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

#150

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nine_k wrote: post #98
nitrogen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm astonished and dismayed by all the comments calling for capitulation. It's very clear that the publishers in this case are bullies, plain and simple. You don't kneel to bullies if you want them to stop, you fight back. Not to do so leads to tyranny and feudalism, where the whims of the large become the law.

I think this does not mesh well with their mission. They are the Internet Archive , the archive of freely (in the past) available stuff that can't be found anywhere else, in most cases. This is much more fragile than old books which likely exists in thousands of copies anyway. I do not admire their stance, and am unhappy that they are recklessly jeopardizing their unique thing to make a case where they have a very bi…

Let's go ahead and put to rest this theory that they're going to cease to exist. They don't have enough resources to be destroyed.

Suppose the naysayers are right and they're going to go bankrupt. What happens in bankruptcy? They sell their assets for fair market value.

To a new non-profit that uses them for the same purpose.

All that requires is that they raise an amount of money similar to what they ordinarily have to raise to continue operating regardless. They do, after all, replace all of their computers with newer ones from time to time already.

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