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The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

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Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#71

Post by TeaBrain »

room4 wrote: post #30
airhangerf15 wrote: post #16

Honestly the dumbest possible move by Internet Archive. IA has gotten more and more ideological as well, and it's been censoring content it doesn't like. I'm not sure if they're in the Wikipedia/Mozilla boat of screwed up political spending, but if they are, this decision should at least temper that down. I'm sure they'll be able to raise the money needed to pay off this lawsuit. It's true the Archive has a lot of am…

> how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020. I haven't followed the details of this case, but as a general notion, that sounds kinda reasonable to me? Copyright law and enforcement is terribly broken in the USA, with a handful of giant publishers wielding massive, abusive power and the average American being harmed by losing their fair use…

Copyright law is broken in the US, but that doesn't mean that Internet Archive was going to legally get away with what they were doing and escape legal trouble, even if it arguably wasn't morally wrong.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#72

Post by teruakohatu »

ilamont wrote: post #52

This has been playing out for many years. And it's all because Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped the rights of authors and publishers, and the laws of the United States. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - he continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored: The Internet Archive says it would rat…

> In his many interviews with U.S. media, he portrays the court cases and legal judgements as a crusade against the Internet Archive and all librarians. It's not. It's the logical outcome of one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law and the people who work very hard to bring new books into being.

If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. They hit and they missed. Claiming Brewster Kahle is against "the people who work very hard to bring new books into being" is unfair. The copyright goalposts have moved so far past where they were originally, the people who work very hard can be dead for decades and their works still in copyright, and by the time they are dead for 70 years, the copyright will probably be extended again.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#74

Post by ghaff »

pcaharrier wrote: post #32
room4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020. I haven't followed the details of this case, but as a general notion, that sounds kinda reasonable to me? Copyright law and enforcement is terribly broken in the USA, with a handful of giant publishers wielding massive, abusive power and the average American being harmed by losing their fair use…

"IA lifted its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, allowing its digital books to be checked out by up to 10,000 users at a time, without regard to the corresponding number of physical books in storage or in partner libraries’ possession―a practice IA acknowledges was a 'deviat[ion] from controlled digital lending.'" No argument from me that copyright and fair use is broken (and exclusively in ways that inure to the ben…

They were getting away with something because it seemed kind of reasonable. They were effectively letting one person effectively remotely view a physical book they owned.

But NEL threw all that out the window. And COVID was a pretty translucent fig leaf. It's not like there is any shortage of public domain works "for the children" out there even if copyright terms should be shorter.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#75

Post by wslh »

jandrese wrote: post #45

Very much not a surprise. I think the Internet Archive is providing an invaluable service to humanity in preserving works that would otherwise be lost to time. it is one of the crown jewels of the Internet, doing a job that nobody else is willing to do. But at the same time I know the courts side with publishers pretty much every time and copyright law being such as it is they're totally screwed. The only real questi…

But, beyond this ruling, could Internet Archive just scan the books, store the data and release it to the public at a later time? I am just thinking about the preservation part in your comment.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#76

Post by tptacek »

raytopia wrote: post #34

Crazy that this is not fair use but ai is.

IA's arguments that this was fair use seem exceptionally weak:

* Their "transformation" argument comes down to easing access, which has already been shot down in previous cases; unsurprising, since Napster could make the same argument.

* Their "nature of the work" argument came down to the fact that some of the books they scanned were nonfiction.

* They made a halfhearted attempt to claim that "amount and substantiality" weighed neutrally in this case, despite copying entire books wholesale and making them available in their entirety.

* They brought experts to make their "commercial impact" argument who limited their analysis to physical books(?!) despite the publishers coming to the case with competing ebooks.

It's wild to me they thought they could win this case. There's the law as people at IA and on message boards want it to be, and there's the law as it is. For people who want those two concepts to come closer together, this case seems like a major setback and an egregious strategic blunder.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#77

Post by tptacek »

hiatus wrote: post #62
thebrid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love the Internet Archive, is it really that crazy? The four factors used for determining fair use are: * the purpose and character of the use * the nature of the copyrighted work; * the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole * the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. In the Internet Archive case, they're d…

> In the Internet Archive case, they're distributing whole, unmodified copies of copyrighted works which will of course compete with those original works. Libraries would be illegal if conceived of today. If this weren't digital it would be a violation of first sale doctrine.

How? Libraries lend out actual physical objects. They're not xeroxing the books and handing them out.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#78

Post by [deleted] »

haswell wrote: post #64
thebrid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love the Internet Archive, is it really that crazy? The four factors used for determining fair use are: * the purpose and character of the use * the nature of the copyrighted work; * the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole * the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. In the Internet Archive case, they're d…

To me, the point isn’t that what the IA was doing was fair use, but that what LLMs are doing arguably is not . > In the AI use case, they're typically aiming not to output any significant part of the training data What they’ve aimed to do and what they’ve done are two different things. Models absolutely have produced output that closely mirrors data they were trained on. > not competing in the market with the origina…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#80

Post by tptacek »

teruakohatu wrote: post #72
ilamont wrote: post #52

This has been playing out for many years. And it's all because Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped the rights of authors and publishers, and the laws of the United States. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - he continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored: The Internet Archive says it would rat…

> In his many interviews with U.S. media, he portrays the court cases and legal judgements as a crusade against the Internet Archive and all librarians. It's not. It's the logical outcome of one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law and the people who work very hard to bring new books into being. If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. They hit and they missed. Claiming Brewster Kahle is…

The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create. The infinitesimal odds IA seemed to have at winning this case have to be weighed against the precedent they have created that may bind on future controlled digital lending cases with better facts. What IA did here wasn't costless.
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