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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

#281

Post by mumblemumble »

api wrote: post #269
teruakohatu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

Or at least that's what it amounts to in the information age.

When you get down to it, this is just not a good sphere for deontological ethics.

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

#282

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

I wouldn't have hailed them as a hero. While copyright law in the US is insane, what they were doing is equally wrong. I don't want either extreme to prevail.

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

#283

Post by orbisvicis »

tombert wrote: post #172
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…

This is why I stopped donating to IA, and I will not donate until they get new leadership. I'm a very big supporter of a lot of what IA does, but I feel if I donate, my money is just going to fund more and more legal defenses because Brewster Kahle is being stubborn, and I'm afraid it's going to lead to the entire Archive being shut down. I've mentioned this before, but there are lots of cases where IA will let you d…

So the IA should be forked; you can support the fork and people like me Brewster Kahle's original.

People who frequent libraries think CDL at retail prices is just; others that it is an end-run around publisher's rights.

But libraries pay so much for their limited-lending copies! Why isn't there any support for regional or global libraries? Publishers are like a syndicate but there's no opposing union so they run ramshod over the proletariat. Are libraries not good things? Beacons of culture and so forth? The IA clearly can't afford to fund CDL at library rates, but can't it get funding! Why won't the government step in and decree a federal library? Depending on geography, you're local library is probably already funded at the state and federal level.

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

#284

Post by TeMPOraL »

api wrote: post #269
teruakohatu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

Labor should not be free, but it should also not serve to establish rent to be paid in perpetuity.

> Mass indirect piracy via AI being used to flood the Kindle market with slop is bad enough.

That just amplified the problem that already existed before LLMs - human-written slop already flooded the Kindle market, and has been flooding paper book market too - and yes, "ending book writing as a profession" is likely the only way for good literature to be made again and be read.

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

#285

Post by codedokode »

doublescoop wrote: post #104
teruakohatu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This wasn't a case of the estates of dead authors trying to hold onto rights. Working authors were actively being harmed by the activities of the IA through the CDL. Working authors were met with refusals to meet to discuss this issue. I don't think that characterization of Kahle is unfair at all. His position was unreasonable, determined to be illegal, and damaging to people who depend on copyright to license their…

This was a case about whether you can do the same things with digital books that you can do with physical ones: re-sell or lend. As I understand, the court decided that you cannot.

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

#286

Post by tptacek »

codedokode wrote: post #275
tptacek wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to want things. The contours of the Google case are discussed in this decision: Google Books scanning is "fair use" because books aren't made available in their entirety, and the IA's library feature is (unless SCOTUS disagrees, which seems extraordinarily unlikely) emphatically not.

Google Books case establishes that scanning a copyrighted work is not always illegal; you cannot use that solely to prove the infringement. Regarding "books made available for free": libraries allow to read books for free.

It was never anybody's claim that scanning a copyrighted work is always illegal. This is an easy, straightforward decision to read; I think you'd be better off just reading it.

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

#287

Post by creer »

tptacek wrote: post #274
creer wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> future controlled digital lending cases with better facts. Was anyone else doing anything? Or standing ready to do anything?

I don't know, but anybody who wasn't doing anything and wasn't standing to do anything was more valuable to digital rights than the people who appealed this case to the 2nd Circuit, in that none of them actually damaged digital rights.

I don't know. From the point of view of the appeal and mechanical precedent specifically, maybe, maybe not. At first read, the decision rationale seems somewhat measured and interesting - it doesn't just say "Declined". And meanwhile, IA kept the issue present and discussed and with some attempt at doing something different - even in the appeal.

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

#288

Post by lupusreal »

codedokode wrote: post #267
lupusreal wrote: post #261

CDL was incredibly stupid. DRM and legal trouble from pissed off publishers? That's the worst of both worlds. Pick one or the other, not both. It would have been better for Archive.org to ignore books and leave that domain to the pirates and legacy libraries; one defying the law and giving people books without DRM, and the other staying safely inside the law. With the combination of these two we have the best of both…

What this court decision establishes is that you cannot treat the digital books the same way you can treat physical books. For example, you can re-sell or lend a physical book under "first-sale doctrine" but you cannot do the same with a digital book. So "they the people" have less rights now.

There was literally no upside to the CDL. Neither in theory from the start nor in the ultimate outcome.

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

#289

Post by mardifoufs »

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…

Except that IA is a non profit with a specific set of goals. Not only that but by the very nature of said goals (amongst others, preservation and archival of knowledge), they have to be even more prudent and have stability as one of their most important goals imo. Like, every goal they have becomes completely impossible to achieve without a very stable, long term outlook. "Hitting and missing" is usually fine, but it's an attitude that is more reminiscent of wallstreetbets than a serious knowledge repository that aims to preserve everything they can for at least a few generations.

To push the wallstreetbets analogy further, a hedge fund that bets on something risky and loses big is fine. But you don't just "hit and miss" at a large scale when you are in charge of trillions in retirement/pension funds. It just should not be part of the thought process in the first place, it's the completely wrong mindset.

Not that there's no room for activism , but it should be delegated to someone else or by supporting another group or organization that could take the fight and have much less to lose.

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

#290

Post by lolinder »

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…

I agree with you about copyright, but the fact is that the IA never had a chance and we knew it years ago.

The top comment on HN a week after their launch of the EL is critical [0], right at the moment when HN would be most expected to rally to their defense. By the time the lawsuit was actually starting to take shape most commenters had become very concerned for the fate of the IA [1]. This is on a forum that reliably champions freedom of information, but most of us knew even at the time that what they'd done was extremely unlikely to pass muster.

The IA was never going to be hailed as a cultural hero because they stood no chance, and they are too valuable for other, unrelated reasons to make themselves a martyr. This never should have happened under the same legal entity as the web archive.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182

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