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

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

storage.courtlistener.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 848 posts

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

#331

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#332

Post by JumpCrisscross »

codedokode wrote: post #307
tptacek wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina (if you want to reduce to absurd).

> When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina

Not how our retina, the optic nerve, visual cognition or visual recall work.

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

#333

Post by Dylan16807 »

tptacek wrote: post #317
codedokode wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision is that lending of digital books causes "market harm for the publishers". It outweighs anything else. So the court only cares about profits of publishers and not right of the buyers, including "first-sale doctrine" and right to lend a legally obtained book. The court sees the case as merely making illegal copies and doesn't want to make analogies with libraries lending out books. It is obvious. You can a…

No, that is not at all what the decision says. There's a 4-factor test for "fair use". Market harm is just one of them. The court found IA failed all 4 tests. That's the ballgame: if your copying is (1) unauthorized and (2) not fair use, it's infringing. There's no "library exception".

> There's no "library exception".

The copying only exists on a technical level because digital stuff is weird. Only one copy is usable at a time.

So either IA is guilty of copying because of a technicality, or normal libraries are only allowed because of a technicality/exception. (Because normal libraries fail the transformation test, they fail the amount copied test, they fail the expressive nature test, and they fail the market impact test.)

I want to believe the former is correct. Either way I believe there should be a way for IA to access that same "this isn't considered copying" territory somehow.

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

#334

Post by dialup_sounds »

elaus wrote: post #160
xhkkffbf wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This court ruling was (also) about "CDL" (controlled digital lending), i.e. lending ONE digital copy of a book for each physical book in a library's possession – and only while the physical copy was not lent. This is as far away from "giving away infinite copies to anyone" as it could be.

This is misleading.

The lawsuit was filed when IA decided on it's own to increase the lending limit to 10000 copies of each title.

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

#335

Post by haswell »

caseyy wrote: post #330
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…

> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. You need a little bit more wisdom to change extremely entrenched laws. Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them. This was evident from the start. IA already had some disputes with rights owners for some of the content they archived. They should have progressively resolved these disputes until some pattern emerged where either mass arch…

> Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them

Breaking laws and pushing to change them has been the modus operandi for some of tech’s biggest names.

It’d be interesting to see how this might have played out if the IA had the resources that Uber, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, etc have at their disposal.

It’s a sobering look at who actually has power to shape the legal landscape, and which direction it’s likely to be shaped in.

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

#336

Post by tptacek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #333
tptacek wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not at all what the decision says. There's a 4-factor test for "fair use". Market harm is just one of them. The court found IA failed all 4 tests. That's the ballgame: if your copying is (1) unauthorized and (2) not fair use, it's infringing. There's no "library exception".

> There's no "library exception". The copying only exists on a technical level because digital stuff is weird. Only one copy is usable at a time. So either IA is guilty of copying because of a technicality, or normal libraries are only allowed because of a technicality/exception. (Because normal libraries fail the transformation test, they fail the amount copied test, they fail the expressive nature test, and they fa…

Libraries are not allowed to do what IA did!

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

#338

Post by Dylan16807 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #295
jandrese wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 a…

In the space it takes to store one movie, you can store ten thousand books.

For any published book, the answer of whether it's worth preserving that text is a very solid yes. There's not that much of it, no benefit to filtering.

And do you think future historians won't be very interested in those politics?

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

#340

Post by tptacek »

haswell wrote: post #335
caseyy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero. You need a little bit more wisdom to change extremely entrenched laws. Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them. This was evident from the start. IA already had some disputes with rights owners for some of the content they archived. They should have progressively resolved these disputes until some pattern emerged where either mass arch…

> Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them Breaking laws and pushing to change them has been the modus operandi for some of tech’s biggest names. It’d be interesting to see how this might have played out if the IA had the resources that Uber, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, etc have at their disposal. It’s a sobering look at who actually has power to shape the legal landscape, and which direction…

Big tech companies have gotten their asses handed to them in copyright cases in the past.
Post reply on HN