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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

#581

Post by mindslight »

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.

Aereo had much more favorable facts and yet was still decided in favor of copyright maximalism, so it's probably a moot point. Ultimately, the digital rights we have are the ones we take.

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

#582

Post by beeboobaa3 »

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…

Not really, it's just giving more fuel to the ai bros that they get to scrape everything

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

#583

Post by franciscop »

el_jay wrote: post #546

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?

Copyright protects mainly against the distribution of works, not about consumption. It is not the access to the library the bit that is illegal here, it is illegal for that library to distribute works without the copyright holders permission. You might like it or not (I don't), but copyright laws are fairly straightforward.

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

#585

Post by pcaharrier »

jawns wrote: post #575
pcaharrier wrote: post #27

This struck me as significant (buried in the opinion's last footnote): "IA makes a final argument that, even if its Open Libraries project did not qualify as a fair use, we should restrict the injunction to the Open Libraries project and allow IA to continue CDL for books that IA itself owns. In support of that argument, IA argues that the fourth factor analysis would be more favorable if CDL were limited to IA’s own…

> Why the court concludes that that "would not be substantially different" is unclear from just this footnote. It's because of two primary points made elsewhere in the ruling. 1. Copyright law tolerates lending by libraries in the case of print books because those books eventually wear out. Digital copies, on the other hand, arguably do not wear out. Therefore, the court does not think that what is tolerated for prin…

>Copyright law tolerates lending by libraries in the case of print books because those books eventually wear out.

I don't think this is entirely accurate when it comes to copyright law. The law extends back centuries and digital books only appeared within the last couple of decades. The ability to lend a book (by libraries or any owner) without committing copyright infringement is much more closely-related to the first sale doctrine (which has been around for at least a century in U.S. law in one form or another) than it is to a book's durability or lack thereof. Recall what the opinion says about the underlying rationale for copyright law: let the authors have a period of monopoly so they'll have an incentive to keep writing. If the first sale doctrine doesn't defeat that rationale in the case of print books then the same logic should apply to digital copies; it's the first sale that matters, not how many times the owner of an individual book can then lend that book to someone else. Granted, as in your second point, publishers can limit lending of digital books through license agreements or other digital rights management, but at that point you're in the realm of contract law, not just copyright.

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

#586

Post by sumeno »

dannyobrien wrote: post #551
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 disagree with this assessment on many levels, but I think the most important challenge I can make is to the idea that Brewster Kahle is a rogue actor, who in some sense mis-interpreted the mission and strategy of the Internet Archive. For those of you who are just learning that name from this lawsuit, here's his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle Kahle founded the Archive in the nineties,…

> Why did only Kahle do it, and why was it only Kahle coming up with CDL as an idea to prevent the death of first sale, of lending a book, of the idea of a free library in a digital future?

Lots of libraries do free digital lending of ebooks in a legal way and have done so for a long time

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

#587

Post by CrazyStat »

71bw wrote: post #531
Y_Y wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point about the exclusion of sites that probably deserve to be in the Wayback Machine. Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites? Does anyone know of one or want to set one up? (To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardl…

Archive.is has a donation page set up on buymeacoffee [1]. I prefer to use them over web.archive.org. >Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites? Now that I have looked at it, I likely will. I never was one to donate my money to anybody (especially with no income...), but now being employed I believe it's only fair to give them a little bit here and there for them to keep aflo…

I absolutely will not support archive.is/archive.today given the shenanigans they’ve pulled with cloudflare dns [1].

> Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.

> The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users.

[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-is-failing-...

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

#588

Post by mezzie2 »

vesinisa wrote: post #522
rakoo wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of having digital preservation if noone can read the archives ? Digital access make sense, it's the logical conclusion to what IA does

But that's not what this case was about. Throughout the trial they have been allowed to provide continued digital access to the scanned books, granted they operate like a library (each borrowed book is backed by a physical copy.) The case was launched when during the Covid-19 pandemic they removed the limitations under the veil of "National Emergency Library": https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-resp…

> This was the inevitable outcome of "National Emergency Library" and they knew or should have known it.

They knew. I have an MLIS and took one copyright course and could tell immediately that what they were doing was illegal/wouldn't hold up in court. For them not to know would suggest that their staff is less informed than I am, which can't be true.

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

#589

Post by perihelions »

71bw wrote: post #481
vesinisa wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. Worth also noting is that IA lost the case by summary judgement. This usually means that the legal matter was so clear that the judge didn't even see a reason to start a trial. This judgement has now been confirmed on appeal. Just about any lawyer could have probably told them this was the inevitable outcome had they listened. I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the p…

>I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. I've never donated to them and figured it was the right choice after they started excluding websites from the WayBackMachine - the most vocal case being kiwifarms [1], whe…

The stuff they voluntarily censored includes a Reuters exposé about a software startup hacking US journalists for overseas dictator clients.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.reut... ("This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.")

https://archive.is/B1T2P#selection-2151.0-2155.234 ("A Reuters Special Report | How an Indian startup hacked the world")

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg... ("How a Judge in India Prevented Americans From Seeing a Blockbuster Report")

IA cannot be trusted to be an archive of record for news stories; they memory-hole them freely and liberally. (What a total mess the internet has become, pontificating generally, that we can't rely on even tier-1 newswires from not getting scrubbed from history. No one has the power to walk into dead-tree libraries and physically tear up archived newspaper articles they want to hide. But in the internet world, that's becoming an easy and commonplace thing censors do, and get away with. The internet was supposed to be the opposite of this. People who erase the past, and especially the self-styled Internet Archive, have abandoned the core values the internet was meant to idealize...)

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

#590

Post by mezzie2 »

Shank wrote: post #508
gizmo wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You approach this from a perspective of realism. The law is what it is and IA is wrong according to the plain interpretation of the law. Except that's not how everybody lives. Some people do what they believe is right regardless of the consequences. They will fight fights they are guaranteed to lose. Not because it makes sense but because that's who they are . The people who get mad that idealists fight losing battle…

> Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support. I don't think so. IA is a valuable resource for the Wayback Machine and other endeavors which are far more seated in fair use or preservation. Choosing to sacrifice the rest of IA for…

> Choosing to sacrifice the rest of IA for a grandiose or idealized vision of how the world should work is a betrayal of those who donate to IA in hopes of funding the much more tangible goal. If he wanted to take the stance he took, he should have spun the library component out of IA and served it as a separate legal entity to take on that risk.

Hard agree, and this is how I've felt since they started this whole boondoggle.

> Maybe the community trust in IA has been misplaced. The mission on their website clearly says they want to serve "All Knowledge" but I'm not alone in thinking it would be best for them to narrow their scope to just internet-related things, and specifically, things that aren't served by other archive or library sources.

I'm a librarian/archivist and my very first career goal back in the 90s was to work for the IA - digital preservation is why I went into the field. They've essentially torched my opinion of them by doing this, and I was one of their biggest supporters/proponents. Even my most charitable readings of their actions lead me to think that either their egos got in the way (because oh goodness did they ever get accolades within the profession and librarianship/archivism has a severe problem with not thought out armchair activism) or they're just idiots when it comes to tactics and strategy. Either of which suggest to me that they are thoroughly unsuited to run an archive of any importance.

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