Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you all want to nerd out about how eyeballs works that's cool, this is the place for that kind of thing, keep it chill, etc. But the law absolutely does not agree that looking at a painting equates to creating a copy of that painting; under the Copyright Act, the colloquial term "copy" means fixing a work into some physical media from which others can recall it.
So if you stream a movie from a hard drive over the Internet without "fixing" it anywhere, so that the viewer cannot "recall" it, but only watch, then you are not making a "copy" and not breaking the law?
The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
381–390 of 848 posts
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#382I still cannot imagine how IA thought that giving unrestricted access to copyrighted books was a good idea. It seemed inevitable that someone would sue them over it. Honestly, I think that IA's ambivalence towards the use of their website for outright piracy might lead to their collapse, and that's a shame. The Archive can be a really wonderful tool, though I'm not sure that its current management really knows what t…
IA was trying to act like a library: they bought physical books and lent digital scans of them, ensuring that only one user can read one book at a time. So IA's position is that you can treat digital books like physical books, i.e. re-sell them or lend. The only difference is that they don't require you to come to library in person. Publishers position is that digital books are different from physical; you have no ri…
The lawsuits started when they removed that restriction during covid.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the fallacy of using the pathological case to argue against the normal case. Copyright is in need of reform but without it there is no intellectual labor, or at least no compensation for it. In the Information Age where everything else is increasingly automated, this eventually converges with all labor being uncompensated since all labor is eventually intellectual in nature if we are sufficiently advanced.
I question the assertion that copyright is necessary for compensating intellectual labor. For example, there will always be a need and demand for technical documentation, engineering, legal writing, etc, all of which will and must exists without copyright. A lawyer's product is specific to his client, and bridge engineers' output are a correctly designed bridge. You can extend it to musicians and artists. A musician…
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
IA was trying to act like a library: they bought physical books and lent digital scans of them, ensuring that only one user can read one book at a time. So IA's position is that you can treat digital books like physical books, i.e. re-sell them or lend. The only difference is that they don't require you to come to library in person. Publishers position is that digital books are different from physical; you have no ri…
Nobody complained when IA was lending to one user at a time. The lawsuits started when they removed that restriction during covid.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#385There are even datasets, collections of URLs like "common crawl". You cannot legally download them and use without breaking the law.
They cannot get away with "fair use" because they are harming creators income by making generative AI using their works.
But as there are big money I guess the government will make some exception for them.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
A physical library does not involve making a copy, but lending out an existing physical copy. One book, one reader. "Controlled Digital Lending" literally involves making and transmitting a copy to another physical medium electronically. Brewster has endangered the good work done by people at the archive for a case he was never going to win and which was of dubious value. If he wants to be the next Anna's Archive the…
1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal. 2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions. 3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consum…
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#387If I can relate this to movies [1], it might be illuminating: Watching a movie, you normally get a "home viewing" license. That does not give you the right to show it at your business (even if you don't charge money and only 10 people come). There's also a Public Performance Rights (PPR) license, and I always had to get PPR's because Google lawyers would shut us down otherwise. PPR costs considerably more than a home…
benley did get a pony for a day though had to provide his own fodder. There's a photo of him and Vint Cerf with the pony floating around.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Digitally accessible and searchable on site, not on line... unless you're saying the Library of Congress makes *in copyright* works available on line to all comers?
What is the difference between lending a book in the library building and over the Internet from the library website? Lending over Internet is better because it saves the user from transportation cost, allows to read books at night etc.
They broke the law. This isn't that hard to understand. If you don't like the law then either work to change it, create substitute works, or break the law in a way that doesn't involve dragging down the archive with you.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it isn't. They're issuing a copy to the reader for the duration of their checkout. Your argument might hold some weight if they scanned a book, destroyed the book, and then deleted the book from their own servers every time it was lent out... but that's not how CDL works. What they're doing is unambiguously copying.
They aren't lending the physical book and the digital book simultaneously; there's only ever one "book" lent. To my mind this is materially different from sites like Anna's Archive.
Seriously, I don't understand the reluctance of some to admit this. It's almost like the rule of law just doesn't exist for you as long as it's a cause you care about. Even more puzzling is the idea that you should just wantonly break the law in a way that drags down good institutions with you as if your own personal battle with bad law is more important than anything else. It really isn't, and I wish some of you would accept that fact rather than trying to one-up each other on the internet. It's not helping anybody.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal. 2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions. 3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consum…
> 1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal. I believe I remember this was tried at one point too. The significant difference here is that Google has seemingly unlimited money to throw towards lobbying and court cases
> The Second Circuit agreed with the district court’s ruling that Google’s digitization and subsequent use of the copyrighted works was fair use. In concluding that Google’s use was transformative, the circuit court found that “Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function . . . augments public knowledge by making available information about [p]laintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the [p]laintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.”
> ...
> Regarding the Google Books project’s potential to impact the market for or value of the copyrighted works, the circuit court held that—despite the search function’s potential to cause “some loss of sales”—the brevity of the snippet search results and the “cumbersome, disjointed, and incomplete nature of the aggregation of snippets made available through snippet view” make it unlikely that Google’s use could “provide a significant substitute for the purchase of the author’s book.”