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The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
671–680 of 848 posts
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of this sounds nice, but also ignores the details of the lost court case. When I learned more about the actual case details it really seemed like a strange hill to die on for the IA, and it was nearly inevitable they would lose. I think there was a very sensible middle ground the IA could have chosen to avoid it all while still sticking to their core mission.
I will claim that IA is an overly-sensible org because they fought this in court. That about show a healthy respect to the law, middlemen and authors to argue in the presence of a judge. For Publishers and middlemen, this is a hollow victory. Murky water. Say for instance, I buy a book. I make a scanned copy and lend out the original. The person who borrowed the book, makes a copy and sends it back. I do this for 1 m…
For a legal activist, government, or large company, the decision about whether to go to court is different than for individuals.
For an actor like that, you want to take cases that you can win to court, to establish precedent step by step. You want to settle cases you might lose out of court to avoid establishing precedent to your disadvantage. In this way, you can slowly change the interpretation of the law.
Taking this to court is seen as a mistake because it was a predictable loss and established a harsh precedent.
Internet Archive had lent books on a 1 reader for 1 physical copy basis for a long time, and the publishers didn't want to take it to court because the judge would need to weigh the rights of a person purchasing a physical good against copyright. They might no like the decision. It suited them to leave it untested.
Internet Archive chose to lend unlimited copies and pursue the matter to its conclusion in court rather than settling out of court.
Assuming Internet Archive were well advised, knew they would lose, and still chose to create this situation and go to court, you have to wonder why.
Are they trying to create an unacceptable legal precedent so that they can get the law changed? Some other reason I am not seeing?
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
They lost here on both regular CDL and the National Emergency Library "uncontrolled" variant. The court's decision and conclusion is almost entirely about just regular CDL: "This appeal presents the following question: is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-l…
Well, that is a disaster. I'll have to read more, I hadn't realized that.
My hope is that doesn't mean you can still digitize media that's on a dying format and that can still be used in CDL. Like if you owned a legitimate copy of a movie on betamax that format has been dead for years you can't buy a new betamax player you can digitize that before the tape becomes unreadable. That's been explicitly in copyright law last I looked and it's just a matter of defining what media is "dying" enough to count under this.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will claim that IA is an overly-sensible org because they fought this in court. That about show a healthy respect to the law, middlemen and authors to argue in the presence of a judge. For Publishers and middlemen, this is a hollow victory. Murky water. Say for instance, I buy a book. I make a scanned copy and lend out the original. The person who borrowed the book, makes a copy and sends it back. I do this for 1 m…
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Define stealing.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will claim that IA is an overly-sensible org because they fought this in court. That about show a healthy respect to the law, middlemen and authors to argue in the presence of a judge. For Publishers and middlemen, this is a hollow victory. Murky water. Say for instance, I buy a book. I make a scanned copy and lend out the original. The person who borrowed the book, makes a copy and sends it back. I do this for 1 m…
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This is just moral pedantry. The law doesn't really mean anything if its not enforceable. Students pirate books all the time and face no legal consequences. Meanwhile, the good faith actors are punished with completely unreasonable book costs. At a certain point, you should point your finger towards an unfair system that leads to bad incentives, not students simply trying to learn.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm heavy into the tracker and open water scenes. IA is most certainly holding some amount of content that is copyrighted and currently sold like they mentioned. It's just not easy to find.
> IA is most certainly holding some amount of content that is copyrighted and currently sold like they mentioned. It's just not easy to find. You could say the same of YouTube. As long as they take down copywritten works when asked, they should be fine.
I don't think that YouTube is a fair comparison. YouTube very proactively tries to avoid copyright infringement, going so far as to allow copyright holders to upload copies of their media so that it be used to detect potential copyright violations. This obviously can lead to a lot of false positives, and I'm not claiming it's in any way perfect, but it more or less ensures that YouTube stays within compliance of copyright law, or at the very least makes it fairly unlikely that they will be directly sued for hosting copyrighted material.
> As long as they take down copywritten works when asked, they should be fine.
I think that's broadly true, but if they're aware of copyrighted material being distributed on their platform and they choose not to do anything about it, data harboring laws only go so far. If there are internal emails of employees noticing violations, and choosing not to do anything, then it's more like Napster or Megaupload, and less like YouTube.
In some sense, I think even ThePirateBay might be less guilty of distribution of copyrighted material, simply because ThePirateBay doesn't actually host any of the copyrighted material themselves, simply torrents/magnet links that point to peers that have it.
The thing is, I really don't want to shit on IA, and I don't even personally have much issue with people violating US copyright law, but my opinion on this really doesn't matter. The law is the law, if you break it you risk criminal charges or lawsuits. That's just kind of how society works, and I feel that IA's flagrant disregard for it is going to get them sued to oblivion, taking down stuff like The Wayback Machine with it.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you can reasonably make a "the law is not as simple as you say it is" argument and shore it up with a "the law should be different" argument. The 4 fair-use test questions: * How transformative the derived work is * How much of the work is copied * The expressive nature of the work * The impact the derivation has on the market for the original The Internet Archive: * Copied works and made them directly…
>Made them available as a substitute for publisher-provided ebooks. Is this true? A substitute is like for like. The IA lending provided them as a lend on the proviso that a physically purchased book is available and unused. Its like saying that a Bookstore is competing with a Library. However the Library can only satisfy a small amount of Bookstore demand, and does so as a public good. They arent the same and the le…
Publisher ebooks don't have to satisfy any tests. The publishers own the copyright on the work. They can generally be as anti-consumerist as they like. That's the law.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
All of this sounds nice, but also ignores the details of the lost court case. When I learned more about the actual case details it really seemed like a strange hill to die on for the IA, and it was nearly inevitable they would lose. I think there was a very sensible middle ground the IA could have chosen to avoid it all while still sticking to their core mission.
The free flow of information is slowly being eroded by rights holders. If people don't find a way to stop being influenced by narratives that really only service this establishment, we will find ourselves, renting and not owning works of art. When rights to own and enjoy a creation on your terms gets taken away from you, the control over your life does as well.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one has to be honest and realize that the desire of digital preservation stands in conflict with present day laws.
Yes, but this case was not about digital presevation but lending out scanned traditional books without proper controls, presented as some sort of a social welfare project. Choose your battles.
> Yes, but this case was not about digital presevation but lending out scanned traditional books without proper controls, presented as some sort of a social welfare project. Choose your battles.
People were banned from exiting their homes. Libraries were forcibly closed. Emergency lending of digital books is the most noble battle they could have chosen.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's not. Libraries don't make copies. They lend you the actual books. Copyright is literally right to copy. Scanning the book and doing something with, such as lending it forward, is copying. (The covid thing strengthens the case of the book guys - the CDL suddenly let anyone get anything because Archive decided to change the rules unilaterally)
The problem is that the act of sharing something digitally is implicitly assumed to be making a copy wheres lending someone a book you have already read and internalized is not. Copyright laws should have been adjusted to preserve the same freedoms for digital use as you had before rather than being even more of a bad deal for society.
It's not "assumed" to be making a copy. It clearly is making a copy. Nerds like us want there to be a special kind of copy that doesn't "count" under copyright law, to facilitate things like CDL. But there isn't, and the courts are the wrong place to look for it. Go get a new Copyright Act passed.