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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

#611

Post by sam0x17 »

jasode wrote: post #607
pk-protect-ai wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now there will be a legal precedent to shut down all CDLs of these "lots of libraries".

>And now there will be a legal precedent to shut down all CDLs of these "lots of libraries" No, it's a different situation. In contrast, the government public libraries legitimately purchased ebook licenses (aka "renting") from the publishers and then "loaned" out a limited # of simultaneous copies in a legal manner. The book publishers approved this arrangement. The Internet Archive didn't do that. Instead, they "lo…

If they have the physical book how is this any different, it had to be purchased at some point or donated for them to acquire it. If anything I would argue they are doing more work for the publishers by creating an ebook from scans. I also think a sane interpretation of fair use would be that the scan is a new / derivative work that is transformative, but we'll never get there with the current legal climate. Philosophically I've always been there.

And yes, I would outright abolish copyrights if I could, so please don't try to what-if me, I won't care about the implications in the way you would want me to.

If anything, imo to be able to hold on to a copyright you should have a burden of proof that society benefits as a whole long-term from your work remaining copyrighted, and virtually nothing meets that burden of proof.

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

#612

Post by hilbert42 »

caseyy wrote: post #356
haswell wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Tech companies have large legal departments which find ways to skirt around existing laws. Where these companies break laws, they almost never challenge them. When they are prosecuted for breaking laws, they draw attention to orthogonal issues in court proceedings and hearings, delay the process, and involve a lot of other legal strategies. When they are sued by competitors for infringing on other's interests by brea…

"They also lobby."

Tragically, lopsided lobbying by Victor Hugo and cronies brought about the original 1886 Berne Convention. Back then outside of rarified publishing circles very few even knew what copyright was, and to the few who did it was of very little concern as copying anything was a mammoth technical undertaking—and when piracy did actually occur it was usually committed by one of their number—another publisher.

The net effect was there was no effective lobbying to counter the many excesses of Hugo's mob thus, unfortunately, they essentially all passed into international law. What we're witnessing now with the IA is another attempt to redress the imbalance only for it to fail yet again.

International law is nigh on impossible to change, combine that with the fact that publishers are guarding their windfall/golden nest egg like Fort Knox and thus we've ended up with this horribly unfair copyright mess.

Whilst I'd truly hate to see it perhaps if the Internet Archive were to succumb and go under it would be for the best. Maybe it will take a catastrophe of this magnitude to bust Publishing's stranglehold on the lobbying process.

We need a circuit-breaker to make politicians see reason and act in the best interests of the citizenry and perhaps the Internet Archive has to be the sacrificial lamb. That will only happen if the public is outraged enough to force politicians to act. That said, I'm pessimistic enough to believe the political climate is nowhere ripe enough for that to occur.

As mentioned elsewhere, the writing's on the wall for publishers, eventually balance will be restored.

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

#613

Post by holmesworcester »

jasode wrote: post #607
pk-protect-ai wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now there will be a legal precedent to shut down all CDLs of these "lots of libraries".

>And now there will be a legal precedent to shut down all CDLs of these "lots of libraries" No, it's a different situation. In contrast, the government public libraries legitimately purchased ebook licenses (aka "renting") from the publishers and then "loaned" out a limited # of simultaneous copies in a legal manner. The book publishers approved this arrangement. The Internet Archive didn't do that. Instead, they "lo…

And those paying attention will see that the publisher-approved version of digital lending gives publishers a legal/technical off switch on the existence of libraries, to the extent libraries go digital. Is anyone here okay with this? Kahle/IA certainly aren't!

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

#614

Post by _factor »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #124
tptacek wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem is that the preceding analysis is a category error, in that it assumes the law has a purpose of minimizing the circulation of an individual book. It does not, which is why traditional libraries weren't threatened by it.

I don’t know, it doesn’t take a genius or a law degree to understand that maintaining a one to one ratio of physical copies to digitally lent books is the same shit as a regular library but more convenient. It stands to reason that the law shouldn’t preclude technological advances that make libraries more convenient. The reason traditional libraries aren’t threatened by the law is cultural. There are states that ban…

It’s apparent to me that the law has jumbled a bunch of archaic concepts of what “copying” means in order to transfigure the argument into a technically obscured realm.

A library allows one person to read one book at a time. A digital library doing the same while using technology to make lending more efficient accomplishes the exact same goal.

We’re using precedent to override common sense and prevent digital libraries from effectively existing under the guise of protection.

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

#615

Post by ndriscoll »

CrazyStat wrote: post #587
71bw wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That does sort of sound like Cloudflare is pulling the shenanigans. It's awfully convenient for a CDN company (the same company that MITMs half the web) to cite privacy concerns to not pass through data to enable better request routing. In almost all cases the DNS lookup precedes a connection from the client anyway.

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

#616

Post by _factor »

aezart wrote: post #502
IncreasePosts wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think physical libraries harm the people who bring books into being? Yes, actually, I do. But the public benefits of libraries outweigh the harm it does to authors. But, the fact that I can buy a book once, and pass it between 50 friends to read feels unfair to the author who effectively makes no money off of the work.

If I buy a hammer and then lend it to a friend, is that unfair to the hammer manufacturer?

In our disturbing legal climate, many judges would say yes.

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

#617

Post by account42 »

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 agree CDL was a mistake. The IA should have never embraced DRM and shared as much without it as possible, silently archiving the rest for saner future generations that don't let so-called IP-owners restrict their free speech.

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

#618

Post by mlyle »

perihelions wrote: post #589
71bw wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/mag…

I'm having a hard time aligning "voluntarily" with "in compliance with a court order" in my mind.

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

#620

Post by mlyle »

dannyobrien wrote: post #524
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't have hailed them as a hero. While copyright law in the US is insane, what they were doing is equally wrong. I don't want either extreme to prevail.

i just want to clarify what you think would be so wrong with a service where you can find a book title, check out a scan of that book -- which has a corresponding physical copy in the real world, a one-to-one mapping to a physical book that is taken out of circulation -- and read it, while others cannot (because only one person can read that scan at a time), and then when you're finished, leave it for another person…

The thing that's a little tricky here, is in practice you can pretty easily keep a copy of that scan. It makes subsequent infringement a whole lot easier than checking out the book from a library or borrowing a physical book from a friend, because the thing that's an impediment to casual copying (scanning) has already been done.
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