541–550 of 848 posts
Things will get worse before they're get better, but ultimately the publishers will pay dearly for this. First, the IA should move to a more favorable copyright jurisdiction to preserve the collection. Second, there's no point fighting the copyright lobby, especially so in the US. We need to build an alternative access to knowledge that bypasses the copyright/ownership of knowledge paradigm.
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The rule that allows libraries to work is first-sale doctrine: once you bought a physical book you may re-sell or lend it without permission from copyright owner [1]. However you cannot do this with digital books because DRM doesn't allow that. So IA invented scanning physical books (that are legally bought and not circulated after this) as a countermeasure to allow lending digital books the same way as physical. So…
There's the questions of whether first sale _should_ apply to digital works in the same way it does to physical works, and whether it _does_ apply to physical works under current law. I'm teetering at the top of a very tall fence on the _should_ question. Publishers have always been opposed to digital first sale for a very simple reason: fear that their prices will go to zero. Used physical books prices are pennies o…
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> If you want to break the law, break it yourself... don't drag the archive down with you to do it. It takes a court decision to know if the law was broken or not. You apparently forget that the Wayback Machine itself breaks copyright laws and went to court over this many times. Most cases were settled by removal of infringing content but it doesn't undo the fact that infringements did actually happen. The IA exists…
> It takes a court decision to know if the law was broken or not. It takes only a working mind to know that, and the court's decision was obvious to most before it was rendered. This could have been foreseen (and was). > You apparently forget that the Wayback Machine itself breaks copyright laws and went to court over this many times. ...and they had good reason to do so then as there were fair use arguments to be ma…
Now the same thing happens with the CDL: they're sued over the content they host, they try to defend their rights, they lose and now will have to remove the content. Somehow you're upset and knew from the start they would fail.
> Please take your blackwhite thinking elsewhere. It's not productive.
This is amusing because your position of "don't break the law, change the it first, then do what you want" IS what's unproductive. Laws don't change when no one breaks them, it's works the other way round.
All these "carve-outs' and "fair use thing" you value so much appeared because it was demonstrated on practice they are necessary. People fought for their rights, people challenged the laws, people demonstratively broke the laws and laws changed as the result. There's no other way.
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This is because you cannot buy and then lend an e-book. You can do it with a physical book but you cannot with a digital book due to DRM. IA was trying to work around this and failed. As a result, buyers of digital books cannot enjoy the same rights the buyers of physical books have; it means people have less rights now.
You do not get to break the law just because you are working around some sort of restriction. The law says what it says and the judge is correct that IA violated it.
Different laws may be in conflict, and you have to resolve it one way or the other. For example if copyright law would prevent you from repairing your device (like you need to put a coprighted image of an Xbox logo on your hard disk for it to be recognised) then your repair right may trump the distribution rights of the copyright owner.
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The idea that copyright is necessary for this is ridiculous: copyright is necessary so that publishers and other middlemen can sell copies of their catalog, often with no more than a pittance to the artist. I’ve talked to a bunch of published authors who spent years of hard work on their books who receive no money at all, or an insignificant amount, from ongoing sales.
What happens without copyright is that hustlers trawl new releases, steal them, rebadge them and maybe run them through a light edit pass using AI, republish them, and take credit and all revenue. A version of that is already happening via AI assisted piracy but without copyright it gets easier because you can steal whole coherent works. That is until the bottom drops out of even that. Writing is tough to make a livi…
That's a problem with ads. Advertising as it is today needs to be banned. It's a cancer that corrupts every medium of communications.
> Instead of too many artists chasing too few dollars you have too many artists chasing zero dollars.
Taking the advertising cancer out of consideration, the bottom will drop out of that, and you'll have much fewer writers, and much better writing.
The Information Age killed the business model based on selling copies of creative works. Copyright is a desperate attempt at saving those business models, by legally constraining digital data to behave like physical objects. This is just fighting against the nature of digital data as a medium. It ultimately cannot succeed, it's increasingly costly to maintain, and the side effects are only getting worse.
> For God’s sake look at what happened to the open web where everything was free and copyright was ignored. That would happen to literature.
Yes, it flourished and reached amazing quality levels and very good SNR - that is, until marketing people went on-line too, which is when it all went to shit.
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> 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 reliab…
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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 o…
For some reason this was acceptable in physical form for hundreds of years. CDL is just making it more convenient for our modern reality.
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There was literally no upside to the CDL. Neither in theory from the start nor in the ultimate outcome.
The upside that you can lend a book without visiting a library; if you live in a remote area you don't need to travel; if you like reading at night you can do it; if you are a foreigner or illegal migrant, you can lend a book too. So digital library, lending books over Internet is much better than a physical library.
Am I to understand that it’s legal and okay for LLM providers to profit massively from training commercial models on copyrighted works, without the rights holders’ permission - but illegal, and unacceptable, for private individuals to access a digital library?