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

arstechnica.com

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

#261

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Aurornis wrote: post #171
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #25

There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…

> 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…

I don’t really understand this logic. Are you saying that multi generational projects are… well I don’t really know what you’re saying. When the world was dominated by the divine right of kings, and changing that was going to take hundreds of years… should people not have discussed what to do to move down a better path?

My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by building open source farming robots (see my profile) so that a generation of children grow up understanding that community owned community built robotics are a perfectly viable option, and we don’t need venture capital for robotics infrastructure development.

There’s a generation of adults today who grew up watching Carl Sagan’s COSMOS from 1980 and are now adults working in law to combat climate change - a major call to action in his show the fruits of which Sagan would never live to see.

I fully believe that the world I advocate for will never be fully realized by the time I die. This does not discourage me from laying the ground work and having the conversations. Just as I am working on open source robotics for farming, I encourage other people to contribute to open culture so that we can some day build a better world.

In fact that’s what the people at the internet archive are doing too. Building a better future by fighting now to establish precedent and prove to people what is possible. Human lifetimes are short and I see no reason to restrict our projects to things which can be achieved today.

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

#262

Post by winter_blue »

ryandrake wrote: post #80
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #25

There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…

I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, pure…

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

Something like this already happens with housing and NIMBYism.

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

#263

Post by mardifoufs »

vundercind wrote: post #79
koolba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m saying we should legalize the giving away of all books, but must rearrange society to ensure authors and all people still have the support the previously got from the existing system. There’s no way to implement this without taking away the freedoms of the author to choose how to distribute the fruits of his labor. Just because you think the world would be a better place if they all did that does not mean it’s…

Curiously libertarian language for supporting a system built on restricting individual freedom.

Maybe the person isn't libertarian then and you just misread said libertarian undertones? I'm not sure what's the point here, he can argue for some positions that might be libertarian in isolation, without being libertarian at all.

Do you agree that humans should be free to associate with other humans for example? Does that make you a libertarian? What about cannabis prohibition?

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

#264

Post by throw10920 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #76
MattGaiser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Such a system exists. You can publish a book and give it away freely. But few do. This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it." Why does open source / free software exist then? "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl fo…

> "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl for decades and gets paid nothing?

If you replace "nobody" with "very few people" then the statement is mostly true. The vast majority of open source software is crap. Sure, a lot of it is passion projects made by enthusiasts, and there's nothing wrong with that from an artistic hobbyist standpoint, but the quality of the software is very low.

Good and successful open source software is, in terms of numbers, rare.

Furthermore, most good FLOSS has at least some companies providing financial support, if not being almost exclusively worked on by employees of a company selling non-FLOSS software to pay the salaries of those devs.

Developers putting in hard work to write quality software for free do exist, of course, and many of them are absolute gigachads, but they're dwarfed by those actually getting paid to write software.

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

#265

Post by mardifoufs »

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.

There's absolutely no courage in putting that's been built and used for almost 2 decades on the line because of the wave of "we must do something" that was so common in March and April 2020 even when in most cases, doing nothing would've been more helpful.

It would be like if Mozilla decided to stop taking any google funding overnight because they felt like their values didn't fit with Google's. Sure, it would be well intentioned. But then you also guaranteed that Firefox won't be able to exist for more than a few weeks. Deciding to unilaterally reproduce (by way of unlimited lending without the copies to back said lending) books is the legal equivalent to doing that. It would be a nice thing to have, but it's not something you get by just getting wrecked in an open and shut case in court.

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

#266

Post by garciasn »

Wistar wrote: post #227
garciasn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We’re specifically talking about singing Happy Birthday in public, not offering 182,000 titles ripped from mainstream networks and other streaming services and then charging $9.99 to $19.99/month and making millions.

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

#267

Post by mardifoufs »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #260
CSMastermind wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions. An…

> What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? Too bad. Once you publish it the first time, the cat is out of the bag. Eventually it's going to go into the public domain whether you like it or not. > And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no…

Should we apply that logic to gplv3 code too? Just basically disregard the license since knowledge should be completely free? Or maybe impose some burden on the maintainers to keep the code active and constantly changed so that the codebase doesn't lose its license after an arbitrary period of time?

I'm genuinely wondering , because to me there's a clear parallel yet in tech circles we almost always see defense of copyleft code (which I totally agree with, I'm extremely pro GPL) and a very heavy bias towards maintainers. I know GPL code is already free but we are talking automatically putting copyrighted/licensed material in the public domain which isn't GPL compatible.

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

#268

Post by mardifoufs »

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.

Should GPLv3 code be licensed to the public domain after 10 years too?

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

#269

Post by TaylorAlexander »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #258
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth is we just failed to invest in the manufacturing tech and now they’re beating us in the market, so we’re taxing them to make it hard for them to compete. I’d way rather we just invest and outcompete them. I don’t think they’re intentionally undercutting us they just have lower costs from decades of investment that we haven’t been doing ourselves.

They're undercutting us by virtue of labor standards and other corners that we don't cut.

Honestly I know that used to be true, but how true is that today? Laborers in the USA don’t have great standards either. What proportion of the cost reduction comes from lower labor standards and what proportion comes from the fact that they absolutely have invested more in manufacturing than we have?

I order my PCBAs from JLCPCB in China and they’re about 1/10th the cost of ordering something from the USA. But you can watch a factory tour, it’s not some horrible labor conditions it’s huge highly automated machines: https://youtu.be/jTBOSob5MLg

They just invested more than we did.

So maybe their labor conditions are still worse than ours, by some amount, but it’s more than just saving on labor that got their prices low.

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

#270

Post by ModernMech »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #261
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…

I don’t really understand this logic. Are you saying that multi generational projects are… well I don’t really know what you’re saying. When the world was dominated by the divine right of kings, and changing that was going to take hundreds of years… should people not have discussed what to do to move down a better path? My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by b…

> My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by building open source farming robots (see my profile) so that a generation of children grow up understanding that community owned community built robotics are a perfectly viable option, and we don’t need venture capital for robotics infrastructure development.

Super solarpunk, I love it.

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