Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive

blog.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 242 posts

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

#221

Post by Silhouette »

account42 wrote: post #220
Silhouette wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a strong argument, IMHO, since it would similarly condone any other law-breaking activity where the perpetrator disagrees with the law. It's not as if copyright wasn't controversial before or the IA's actions here have any realistic prospect of moving the needle. If you're talking about civil disobedience, that's a different matter, but one of the key things about effective civil disobedience is that large…

You don't get to large numbers of people disregarding the law before first having a few.

I suspect you're glossing over the accept the penalty part of my previous comment, which is quite important.

Besides that, how many other Internet Archives do you think will follow the one we've been discussing by also flagrantly violating both the letter and the spirit of copyright law?

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

#222

Post by Mindwipe »

cure wrote: post #152
voxic11 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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. One can say a lot about copyright law, but saying it 'balances' many considerations is a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. Copyright law pays lip service to a number of non-commercial interests, like archiving (up to a point). On the whole, it is strongly…

> Just wait for it, it's almost time for another term extension, or else Steamboat Willy is going to become public domain in a few years.

This is broadly a myth.

Most extensions of copyright globally have been about unification of duration, which tends to settle at the longest as any international treaties about anything do. Ultimately Germany and France were the biggest drivers of this globally, far more than works out of the US.

Now that process and unification has broadly happened (at least for newer works) it's unlikely there will be any meaningful term extensions. It's not impossible that some works that receive lower protections might be equalised, or that there might be some mandatory collective schemes for works of completely unknown provenance, but even they seem unlikely.

The truth is that a term extension for Steamboat doesn't really do much for Disney for the political capital required to obtain it. They still have the trademark effectively in perpetuity, Steamboat itself as a work generates no revenue, and there's no real risk to Mickey as a character as Disney likes to portray him nowadays anyway as it's materially different.

Steamboat Willy is a massive red herring in terms of discussion of copyright policy.

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

#223

Post by int_19h »

Reelin wrote: post #205
repiret wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly I’m not especially familiar with politics outside of the US, but I think the US has two distinct disadvantages compared to a lot of other countries: 1. Being one of the first lintel democracies implemented, it got some things wrong. The electoral collage and that there’s a local optima in a two party system are the first two problems that come to mind and were avoided by many western democracies. 2. The US is…

I guess we're a bit off topic at this point but I think the only glaring structural issue is the winner takes all voting. > electoral collage I'd disagree that the US got this wrong; it made a lot of sense historically. These days it arguably introduces some unnecessary inefficiency into the process but I don't think that really matters in practice. The primary objection seems to be that it doesn't reflect the popula…

EC made sense historically solely because that was the only way the Constitution was getting ratified by small states and slave states. As it was, small states wanted to retain the Articles of Confederation approach (one vote per state); and slave states wanted to count the entirety of their population for the purposes of representation, without letting slaves vote. EC was what they hammered out as a compromise, because, on one hand, it threw the small states a bone by counting their senators, and on the other hand, neatly incorporated the already-agreed-upon Three Fifths Compromise from the House, while retaining the general principle of proportional representation.

But something being a compromise doesn't mean that it was sensible - only that it was the best they could do. Furthermore, that particular compromise was hammered out by a very different group of states, and in the context of a very different distribution of powers between the federal and the state governments. Today, we have a much more powerful federal government, we have no slavers to appease, and we have so many small states that, taken together, they can amend the Constitution (via convention) while representing less than 1/4 of the country's population. In this situation, EC becomes a tyranny of the minority, and the majority is not going to tolerate that forever.

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

#224

Post by int_19h »

nitrogen wrote: post #198
icelancer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IA is being "bullied" under the letter - and likely spirit - of the law. They are the ones that did not do their due diligence and put themselves at risk. The publishers are no saints, but IA opened themselves up to this kind of legal liability.

I think it would be pretty hard to argue that the spirit of the law demands the unprivileged be barred from accessing library books during a global pandemic.

It would be very easy to argue, unfortunately. Neither our legal system nor our political system favor the unprivileged in general, so why should the laws they produce and enforce?

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

#225

Post by zackees »

nordsieck wrote: post #219
hnick wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm an educator and I want to select parts of a work to present in class, usually I'd want to view the whole work and select the pieces from that. That's how it'd work when using a traditional library. Is this basically what they are suggesting here? They are supplying the copies, and it's up to the users whether or not they break the law from there?

> If I'm an educator and I want to select parts of a work to present in class, usually I'd want to view the whole work and select the pieces from that. That's how it'd work when using a traditional library. > Is this basically what they are suggesting here? They are supplying the copies, and it's up to the users whether or not they break the law from there? Copyright doesn't work like that - the party who makes the c…

If true, this is just downright evil. Shame on IA.

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

#226

Post by blaser-waffle »

timeinput wrote: post #169
repiret wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s a moral or cultural failure but a political one. A high level politician is successful by being able to convince large donors that they should govern, not by being able to convince the populace that they’re good an analyzing policy and laws to steer them to a better place. That, I believe, is the root of the current imbalance in copyright and patent law.

I think in a way there is a cultural failing. This feels like a problem some countries don't have. It's not uniquely US, but how big of a problem are large donors in the Netherlands, New Zealand, or Denmark?

Denmark has just under 6 million people, the Netherlands has ~17 million, and NZ has about 5 million.

By comparison, California has ~40 million people and would be the 9th largest economy in the world if it was an independent country. Ohio has around 11 million people, and the Greater New York City area has ~20 million people.

Aside from structural / legal differences in the US, there are just massive differences in scaling and wealth in the US vs. those countries. They don't have these problems because they just don't have that kind of money and population base.

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

#227

Post by neltnerb »

manquer wrote: post #121
MayeulC wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also think copyrights should last like 20-30 years tops Seriously, I can't fathom why anyone would say that copyright should last longer than patents

Simple it is money . It is hard to make money on patents twenty years after initial filing or invention . It is considerably easier to do so with copyright.

I'm confused by your claim, of course it's hard to make money on a patent after it has expired.

Assuming you wanted to use the assumption that patents last as long as copyrights, I have a hard time imagining how a patent wouldn't be even easier to make money with given that a patent is far broader and inventions probably "remix" old inventions even more than cultural touchstones. Just imagine if "jet engines" or "wings" or "AC electrical grid" or "power transformer" were still under patent as broadly patented approaches to solving engineering problems.

Oof. Society might collapse, but I'm sure someone would make money hand over fist on the way down...

At least copyright allows fair use and remixing to an extent, no such luck with patents.

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

#228

Post by mthoms »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #226
timeinput wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in a way there is a cultural failing. This feels like a problem some countries don't have. It's not uniquely US, but how big of a problem are large donors in the Netherlands, New Zealand, or Denmark?

Denmark has just under 6 million people, the Netherlands has ~17 million, and NZ has about 5 million. By comparison, California has ~40 million people and would be the 9th largest economy in the world if it was an independent country. Ohio has around 11 million people, and the Greater New York City area has ~20 million people. Aside from structural / legal differences in the US, there are just massive differences in…

Population has nothing to do with it. Those countries don't have these problems because they have sane limitations on political donations.

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

#229

Post by nitrogen »

Reelin wrote: post #208
nitrogen wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any self-published authors complained about their book's presence on IA? Has anyone shown (or seems likely to show) material harm? AFAIK IA has legal, physical copies which they scan for digital lending. If that is not the case, and they will serve any random ebook, I would like to know because it would definitely shift my opinion.

They will indeed serve any random ebook. However, it comes encumbered by DRM (thus controlled digital lending) and they "own" an instance for each copy they lend at any given time (hence the waitlists they refer to). Note that many other libraries across the nation engage in exactly the same practice. Of course the legal problem is that digital goods are "licensed" instead of "owned" ...

So if I uploaded a pirated copy of an ebook for which they do not own a physical copy, they would let people read it? That's what I mean by "any random ebook".

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

#230

Post by dwild »

grawprog wrote: post #134
mulmen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's a good modern day example we could look at. Reggae music. Jamaica lacks (or did) copyright laws. Because of this, music was reused over and over again. From the 1950's onwards, kids, poor people, anyone with technical knowhow could build a soundsystem, cobbled together from spare parts, get some records and play music. Eventually, many of those people went on to form recording studios and such. Because there…

I have an hard time understanding your point, are you saying that the ones that build music out of someone else music, couldn't have done something similar without building out someone else works? They couldn't either if they had to pay a small license fee to the original author?

What made they come out of poverty? Their creation? Or their distribution? Because how you make it seems, the ones that came out of proverty aren't the creative ones... just like the good old copyright owner in America.... It's the ones that found something good and were able to sell it better. The only difference is that the creative one didn't have a choice but to forgo their ownership... just like in America though, which happens under economic pressure instead of by law, but at least, they can at least refuse that.

> The value to humanity in that situation far outweighs the profit of the original creators.

It does though if the original creator couldn't make money out of his original creation... Your premise depends on the fact that without the original creator, the subsequent creation wouldn't be worth it... You want to scrap what's worth it... for something that can't even exist without it.

Post reply on HN