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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

#291

Post by stavros »

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.

Sure, but that's judging in hindsight. Then again, everyone here was saying how dumb a move this was before the trial even started, so...

The payoff for winning would have been massive, but if the IA shuts down because of this, so will the cost for losing.

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

#292

Post by tptacek »

codedokode wrote: post #279
tptacek wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the same thing. When you give a book to someone else, you lose a physical object and they gain one. To "give" an ebook to someone, you have to copy it. We have a whole body of law about when it's OK to copy things.

IA allowed to read books throught the website so no copies are made. When lending a book through file download they used DRM to prevent reading after the lending term ends.

I'm sorry to have to disagree with you here but in fact every page of a book you show inside of a web browser is under the law a copy of that page of the original book.

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

#293

Post by matwood »

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…

I wish people would stop saying they were doing CDL. CDL means being able to lend out a digital copy of a physical book in place of the physical book. The findings in the case showed that IA had lost complete control of the physical book so at that point they were simply breaking copyright. Add in that they steered people to their own used book store, and this case never had a chance.

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

#294

Post by tptacek »

stavros wrote: post #291
tptacek wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but that's judging in hindsight. Then again, everyone here was saying how dumb a move this was before the trial even started, so... The payoff for winning would have been massive, but if the IA shuts down because of this, so will the cost for losing.

Yes, it is. But back to the point I made originally: this case had an infinitesimal chance of success. You can come up with a worse fact pattern for fair use, but you have to work at it. Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers? That was simply never going to be determined to be "fair use".

IA isn't going to shut down over this, I don't think. I don't think they'll pay any damages at all, since there's a statute that suggests damages be remitted for nonprofits.

Again: the real damage is a 2nd Cir. precedent that 1:1 CDL fails the fair use test. That's going to hurt other people. This happens often enough that there's a saying about it: "bad facts make bad law."

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

#295

Post by mumblemumble »

jandrese wrote: post #98
wslh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"A later time" being the after the year 2100 for most of these works. I am not exaggerating. If the author is still alive today their works won't enter the public domain until after you are dead. One can argue that the Internet Archive would be effectively useless if they strictly followed copyright law.

We've also got to think about the actual value of preserving all of these works in a completely indiscriminate manner. Curation is important. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that we could keep everything forever, actually doing so would ultimately harm the value of the archive, due to Sturgeon's Law. The truth is that the vast majority of cultural output is of only ephemeral value. It's relevant to a place and a time, but not necessarily great enough to also be interesting to people from a different place and a future time.

And I've only got a little bit of time in this life; I'd much rather read a trashy romance novel that was written this year and meant to entertain me than the trashy romance with politics that make me cringe that my mom was reading 50 years ago.

This is why, for example, the Library of Congress doesn't just keep a copy of everything. It's not just a space constraints or storage costs issue; it's a signal-to-noise ratio issue. As Mark Crislip is fond of saying, when you mix apple pie and cow pie it doesn't make the cow pie better, it just makes the apple pie worse.

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

#296

Post by matwood »

tptacek wrote: post #80
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…

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.

> The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create.

Not really. This put a huge chilling effect on real attempts at CDL, which IA was not.

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

#297

Post by wbl »

mumblemumble wrote: post #276
cmiles74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out. I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?

The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers. It also discusses that there is a very good reason why digital libraries don't typically get to have perpetual rights to a work at the retail (or used) price for a print book.…

IANAL but I don't think the work is legally a derivative any more than a JPEG of the Mona Lisa is. In US law those are the same for copyright. MS Word vs PDF shouldn't matter so neither should this.

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

#298

Post by codedokode »

healsdata wrote: post #173
cmiles74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out. I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?

Because other libraries have licensing agreements that benefit authors on a different basis than "you sold one book to one library". You may argue that that shouldn't be the paradigm, but one library unilaterally changing it denies the authors their say on the change, either through licensing or legislation.

With physical books the library doesn't need to pay anything to lend it; with digital books it has to pay for every view. Why is it so? Shouldn't the buyers of digital books have the same rights, i.e. the right to re-sell or lend it?

As for authors, nothing changes here: libraries lent their physical books without paying before.

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

#299

Post by tptacek »

matwood wrote: post #296
tptacek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The further you take a federal case the more precedent you create. Not really. This put a huge chilling effect on real attempts at CDL, which IA was not.

I think we agree.

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

#300

Post by Cheyana »

I’ve purchased quite a few old books from online booksellers based on my browsing of them through IA so I hope, at least, there could be some way to still expose these old treasures to people so they could somehow acquire a printed copy of them.
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