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

Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 582 posts

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#221

Post by greenie_beans »

dabraham1248 wrote: post #172
throwAGIway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an author sells the rights and does, should the buyer automatically lose what they bought? Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones.

> Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones. I mean, I know a bunch of authors. All of them wrote because they needed to write (even the textbook authors). And almost none of them earned much of anything from it (even the textbook authors). One English prof told me that he received almost enough for his morning coffee for about three years. Then he didn't. And he drank just…

yeah, everybody arguing in here like writers are making a living off their books

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#222

Post by encomiast »

romwell wrote: post #179
encomiast wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not hectoring (and was not intended to be rude). Authors build things. Just like people who build companies, houses, inventions, etc. There are a lot of theories of how ownership happen, but many (at least in the US and Europe) come from some for of the labor theory of ownership. We own the things we put labor into and create. Unless you have a competing theory of ownership that explains why other assets can…

> Unless you have a competing theory of ownership that explains why other assets can benefit the family of those who create things of value after death but not works of art, music, writing, etc., you haven't really made a cogent argument. Easy. The ownership of intellectual property can indefinitely remain with the author (or be passed on to their children, spouses, etc). We even have a great model for it now: NFTs.…

I think this is a specious argument. The value in intellectual property is the right to copy it. You can make a similar argument for other property: you own your car, but the right to drive it was not created by you. You own your house, but the right to occupy it and prevent others from occupying it is not created by you. It's not clear if you are arguing that there is some natural right to own and inherit a car that is granted by some authority other than the state and where that authority comes from.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#223

Post by ThunderSizzle »

vineyardmike wrote: post #191
Aurornis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away. On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting…

Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators . There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs. Libraries are free . We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible.…

Just to be fair, Spotify's free teir has changed significantly and no longer let's you play a specific song anymore.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#224

Post by badlibrarian »

rwasco wrote: post #162
badlibrarian wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't need to be a lawyer to understand the extent to which Internet Archive really screwed up here. For starters they lost on Summary Judgment, which means they couldn't come up with a single issue of fact that the judge thought deserved a trial. Read the Order, the Judge obviously has it straight. Then check archive.org's Form 990s and see how little money they run on, how much they pissed away on legal…

I disagree. Brewster demonstrated real courage. The world locked down u necessarily precisely because the population has not been getting smarter the past 50 years because copyright has poisoned our information wells. This is a fight worth having. It's time to abolish copyright.

When a CEO pulls some nonsense and gets his ass handed to him in court, it's not an act of bravery, it's hubris. He set the result both you and I want back ten years by running his organization in such a sloppy manner. Even before the lawsuit they didn't keep accurate records of what they were lending, full stop.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#225

Post by Zuiii »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #186
gwright wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your theory apply to the content consumed during the training of LLMs? If not why not? Where should we draw the line regarding intellectual property rights?

1. Absolutely. 2. Information and knowledge is for all. 3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne ), but 10 is better for today's age.

> The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.

I'd vote for politicians who push for laws like this. Sadly none do.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#226

Post by willcipriano »

slothtrop wrote: post #91
627467 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh we forgot about the music dark ages when piracy meant artists couldn't make a living from their art and music died completely

Most musicians don't make a living from their art, they work day jobs. That doesn't mean piracy is the only factor or a strong one, but it's part of the equation.

Most musicians make music that nobody wants to hear.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#227

Post by Wistar »

garciasn wrote: post #152
spankalee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's been jailed for singing Happy Birthday? How many people have been jailed for copyright violations at all? If you're arguing that copyright length should be shortened, I strongly agree. If you're arguing that we should eliminate copyright completely because we should only regulate things you would immediately throw people in jail for, I strongly disagree. As a society we need to be able to regulate some behavior…

No one. Copyright infringement is not a criminal court matter; it is a civil one.

“The jury convicted Dallman, Courson, Garcia, Jaurequi, and Huber of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.”

This was just today.

Deadline: “Operators Of Jetflicks, An Illegal Streaming Service With A Catalog Larger Than Netflix, Prime Video And Hulu Put Together, Convicted By Federal Jury”

https://deadline.com/2024/06/jetflicks-illegal-streaming-ser...

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#228

Post by bandrami »

garciasn wrote: post #152
spankalee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's been jailed for singing Happy Birthday? How many people have been jailed for copyright violations at all? If you're arguing that copyright length should be shortened, I strongly agree. If you're arguing that we should eliminate copyright completely because we should only regulate things you would immediately throw people in jail for, I strongly disagree. As a society we need to be able to regulate some behavior…

No one. Copyright infringement is not a criminal court matter; it is a civil one.

Wait but one of the main legal complaints about 21st century IP regimes is that they criminalize what was previously private tortious behavior. That's why the DMCA still rankles so many people.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#229

Post by chii »

ysavir wrote: post #204
vineyardmike wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators . There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs. Libraries are free . We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible.…

You're comparing to the free tiers of Spotify and Youtube, which in effect is saying that we should put ads into our books.

Libraries tend not to put ads into books to fund them.

The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it.

The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit. Now I'm not arguing that they deserve this profit, but there's no good model so far that both preserves the profit motive, but also make available the copyrighted material digitally and unrestrictedly.

Perhaps there could be a form of library "fee" that is funded by tax payers, in a similar way to how public radio gets funded. The state pays some amount to each published author who make their book available in the library, from a pot of money collected from taxation.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#230

Post by nanomonkey »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #211
poikroequ wrote: post #158

> "I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston. This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your…

No, it really isn't. That person, and you, don't understand how publishing - or mass production of any kind, it seems - works. A publisher "stopping printing" of a book is completely normal - books are like any other mass-produced good, in that there are fixed and variable costs to production and a factory can't economically crank out more than a certain number of different things at once. Sp, there are "printings" -…

Internet Archive isn't printing books, they are lending out digital copies. A publisher would have no reason not to sell a digital copy of their own. There are no production runs necessary on digital copies.
Post reply on HN