or we could just end the idea of intellectual property and stop assuming everything needs to be tied to capital to have value
Judge decides against Internet Archive
201–210 of 835 posts
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
“We will appeal.” https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/16394247772647219...
I said it before on this very forum. Wikipedia does not really need your donations these days. IA just might.
IA and Signal are two nonprofits I donate to and recommend everyone donate to regardless of their political or religious convictions (or lack thereof).
The Internet Archive very well may be the only way to know a lot of important things from the past -- things that libraries used to keep track of but can't in the internet age.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article doesn't seem to understand the issue. Whether a copy of a work is fair use turns on, amongst other things, the effect of the copy on the potential market for the original. The article acknowledges this. Controlled Digital Lending competes directly with the licensing scheme publishers have for library ebooks. The fair use argument was always doomed to fail. The article then completely ignores the copyright…
There may be a question of definition here. Do you mean that they have to lend it, but they cannot give it away?
The parent post makes the unwise choice of using the word "copy" to mean "duplicate".
They intend to say "libraries do not distribute duplicates of purchased books; they distribute the originals".
Unfortunately the word "copy" could also mean "the books purchased by the library". Of course the library distributes purchased books. They just don't scan the books, print fascimiles of those books on new paper, and then distribute those prints they made themselves.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#204America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time, unless forced to do otherwise by external circumstances. Famously it only went against segregation because "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." (Attorney General James P. McGranery) https://redsails.org/concessions/ Fortunately this means more of an impetus for piracy in the meantime,…
> America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time Thankfully that's the best outcome. Unless you mean you support eminent domain. I'd pay hell to the country that even plans on using it against me, and I'll follow and protect others who this happens to as well. Anyone who decides they can steal my resources will have to fight for it. You do not own me.
I might not own you, but apparently you don't own your own books as much as you might have thought. ;-)
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even better: https://annas-archive.org/
This is the one use case where the blockchain/web3 is useful. Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
Why do u need a blockchain? Why not just torrents for sharing.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand the reasoning there though. Like, I can get on board with sayibg fair-use is silly, but lending a book that I own —either digitally or physically— should be protected.
The concept of "owning" a book digitally is already on shaky ground, since most large publishers only sell licenses for accessing ebooks. You're not actually purchasing a copy in perpetuity like a physical book. Naturally these licenses are entirely on the publishers' terms. In practice this means publishers can revoke access licenses for all sorts of arbitrary reasons, alter the content of ebooks already purchased,…
publishers only sell licenses for accessing ebooks
That right there is the true root of the problem.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/22/book-publishers-wont-sto... is a good overview (from a day or two before the judgement). >Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those…
The article doesn't seem to understand the issue. Whether a copy of a work is fair use turns on, amongst other things, the effect of the copy on the potential market for the original. The article acknowledges this. Controlled Digital Lending competes directly with the licensing scheme publishers have for library ebooks. The fair use argument was always doomed to fail. The article then completely ignores the copyright…
What IA is doing is removing the physical copy from circulation, making a digital copy, and lending out the digital copy.
I don't see the argument that this is "distribution" any more than regular (obnoxious) ebook lending is.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#208I think most people here saw this coming. Unfortunately this isn't a question of whether the law is good, it's a question of whether IA broke the current laws we have. IA can and should lobby for copyright law to change. But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
> But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
The entire US civil rights struggle would disagree with you.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if I purchase the paper book, there is - thankfully - no shrink-wrap licensing anywhere that tells me that I can or cannot lend it to anyone, yet I sure hope I can. Why IA can't?
They can lend the book, they just can't make a copy of it and lend the copy instead.
Which might be legally sound (so says this court, we will presumably hear from others), but it’s logically balderdash. The copyright applies to the “intellectual property” content of the book, not its paper and binding. (I’m sure there are some esoteric exceptions to this because artists gonna art, but I feel confident that I’m representing the vast general case correctly.)
If I rightly own a copy of a book, I don’t think any court within the bounds of absurdity would say I can’t make a digital copy for myself because that’s how I prefer to consume it. Being allowed to lend one finite form but not another equivalent one is definitely something law or license might specify, but that doesn’t mean it makes any kind of sense.
Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive
#210Yikes. I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds. Any idea if this means IA has to shut down lending by when? Tomorrow? Next month? Any chances for appeal here? Or any chance they relocate the…
Yes, IA has followed a similar tragic arc as Google Books, another martyr to the dream of a truly 21st century library.
What's most tragic about it to me is that that vast majority of works affected are "zombie" copyright works that have no actual commercial value. Someone, somewhere holds the copyright, but no one has sold a copy in years or decades. For the sake of protecting the tiny sliver of commercially valuable works, access to all of this other knowledge will be lost.