Earlier quoted context omitted.
As in, is it somehow different when the copy that gets transmitted to the user's computer is encoded images of the pages instead of encoded text of the pages? No. You are using the word 'view' to describe receiving a copy. Again: It doesn't matter whether the UX presents it as a copy. The data factually is copied, and that's all that matters.
The copy is something that "fixes" the work permanently. The device I am describing is not "fixing" anything in a tangible medium. Replace Internet with a video cable, and the device with a CRT TV. No copy is produced in this case.
The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
771–780 of 848 posts
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you wanna get into byte copying, from a legal view, isn't also copying from disk to memory a copy of the book then ?
The law says that copy is something that is "fixed" on a tangible medium. DRAM might not fall under that definition.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#773Earlier 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…
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…
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both copyright protection and fair use exceptions have valid but contradictory “logical conclusions” that require practical considerations, wisdom and negotiated compromise to balance. Anyone going all in on either side is not on the side of maximizing access, which legitimately depends on maximizing the production of things to access. Anyone making a crusade of only one side, without collaborating with the other, wi…
Not really. We ha an abundance of creation long before copyright.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both copyright protection and fair use exceptions have valid but contradictory “logical conclusions” that require practical considerations, wisdom and negotiated compromise to balance. Anyone going all in on either side is not on the side of maximizing access, which legitimately depends on maximizing the production of things to access. Anyone making a crusade of only one side, without collaborating with the other, wi…
Not really. We ha an abundance of creation long before copyright.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#776Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest piece lost in the conversation around digital/IP rights is awareness of how it worked pre-digital. First sale doctrine (in the US) said the buyer owned the physical copy and could resell or do what they wanted with that single copy.^ Obviously, that isn't portable to a zero-copy-cost digital realm. However, the "buyers never actually own anything digital" modern reality is vastly different than the histor…
> Obviously, that isn't portable to a zero-copy-cost digital realm. I'm not sure how you figure that. Its still a sale. You might want to read though how much case law there is all over the world that conflicts with that conclusion. Read that post, it has plenty of examples how it doesn't matter if its digital. Here is one in particular: In a 2016 Australian case regarding Valve's refund policy for Steam, Australia's…
What point is legal prohibition if technical implementation is trivial?
And what of legal requirements if technical implementation is impossible?
The unwritten assumption girding physical ownership was "... and it's non-trivial and expensive to physically copy a book."
With digital copying, that's no longer the case. Consequently, simply to maintain the same system the law would still need to change.
Unfortunately, in the back and forth between extreme positions, publishers used this difference to argue that ownership was no longer financially possible and usher us into the realm of rent-only.
PS: Valve maintains sufficient control of Steam-distributed apps that's a defensible position. A better case would have been GoG.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#777Earlier 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
In a controlled manner in line with existing laws, yes. The law is still the law, even though the law may not be what you or I would like it to be.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#778Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking purely in the realm of Law, and what arguments will get past a court, "buying" a digitally distributed work does not confer any ownership. At the bare minimum, what is actually being purchased when you buy a digitally distributed work is a combination of a license and a service. They transmit the work to you, and you have a license to copy that transmission and store it indefinitely, for your own use. There…
I agree with pretty much everything you said here. However, I'm kind of hoping my comment would draw out more on this idea. > Speaking purely in the realm of Law Let's argue this from the basis of expanding the ideas of copyright to something newer and better for this digital age. As mentioned, these days we're really just buying licenses. How do we better define property rights with this new(ish) concept of ownershi…
Anyway.
First you need to legally define the kinds of licenses we care about. There's a bunch of very good reasons why permission can't be sold, so we want to make it clear that we're only talking about things that function like a sale. That is, one-time purchases of works that are downloaded to a device and whose license grants fall within normal use of that work. This is the sort of thing that needs to be drafted water-tight because the industry absolutely will search for excuses to not comply with the law.
Second, we need to define how a transfer can be done and who needs to honor it. This has per-work and per-service considerations, especially in games[1], which have anticheat and toxic player removal. There are times where a copyright owner has a legitimate interest in taking away the thing you bought because you are ruining the experience for everyone else. So we need carveouts for our carveouts, both of which need to be carefully drafted to not interfere with anticheat.
And this is only considering digital-to-digital first sale. That's easy to do because the systems already exist to revoke and delete your ownership over digital copies of works; you just aren't allowed to use them for first sale purposes. We're ultimately just dictating that certain kinds of DRM license files have a legal mechanism to transfer between owners.
Physical-to-digital schemes like the IA's Controlled Digital Lending pose an additional problem: there's nothing to physically enforce the destruction or disabling of the physical copy when you convert it to a digital one and lend it. The book doesn't refuse to open because someone has it open in Adobe Editions. Everything is done on the honor system and there's massive incentives to cheat CDL. The discovery on the IA lawsuit showed that they basically had never complied with their own legal theory. They had partner libraries who were counting copies of books as digitally loanable without actually taking them out of circulation, and when IA had discovered this on their own, they never did anything to take that library out of the system.
An actually legal CDL regime would need infrastructure to support itself. I'm talking legally qualified DRM banks that could lock up or burn books in exchange for DRM limited files that accurately represented the time in which the physical side of the book was inaccessible. That's... still extremely complicated. Actually, screw CDL. If we're talking about amending the law, there is a far easier way to go about fixing the problem with ebook lending: Book Communism!
Compulsory licensing is a scheme in which the government sets the price of a specific kind of copyright license. If you pay that amount of money to the copyright owner, you automatically have that permission, they can't say no. Naturally, copyright owners would liken this to theft, but they thought your dad's VCR was a home-invading rapist[2], so I don't consider their opinions on the subject to be meaningful. The idea is actually pretty straightforward: having a government-set license price makes licensing a lot more straightforward. Creative work owners can't make silly demands of users or withhold shit because their """strategy""" that quarter was to keep something off the market or sell exclusivity[3].
The specific imbalance that IA tried to fix with CDL is that libraries, being public services run by local governments, do not have negotiating leverage for favorable ebook lending terms with major publishers. "Just lend out physical books digitally" fixes the problem for libraries but the infrastructure needed to make this not unfair to authors or publishers is silly. Why can't we just have the federal government say, OK, we'll sell licenses in which any library can pay $X to the owner of a given book and then digitally lend it out Y times or for Z days? The Copyright Office or some administrative judge can determine fair values for X, Y, and Z.
[0] For one thing, if you are a small artist, you effectively do not have copyright protection because the enforcement costs for a single infringer greatly exceed your total revenues. Copyright is already a failed system.
[1] For example, if reselling whole accounts is legal, then I can buy hundreds of accounts, play the game I want to cheat in on each one, and switch accounts whenever I get banned.
If reselling individual licenses is legal, then after I get banned, I can resell the license - which continues to remain valid - and get my money back so I can repurchase the game on a new account with a fake identity.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...
[3] A related wrinkle in the CDL story is that publishers really, really hate libraries. Not because they let people read books for free - in fact, library circulation is actually really good advertising for sequels that won't hit libraries right away. The problem is that libraries are run by book fans, so they're going to recommend books they like, not what the publisher needs to sell that month.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#779Earlier 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…
You make him into a martyr because you agree. The other characterization is he's someone standing for theft. I don't see how one can reasonably apply your perspective to problems or disputes in the world. He's good because he's an idealist without regard? Yawn.
Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you're making a "what happened" argument in response to a "what should have happened" argument. It's possible to make an argument in favor of this being fair use, and it's possible to make an argument against fair use. The (subjective) decision here was the latter; it doesn't preclude the possibility of the former. I'm not arguing that it was a stretch to say "no"; I'm arguing that it also wasn't a stre…
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…
The four-factor test does not require that all factors pass. It's possible for a use to completely fail some of the factors but still qualify as fair use on the basis of the other factors.
No argument that CDL failed "amount and substantiality of"; they copied entire books. (This is, of course, exactly what they do with everything else, and that's not been a problem before.)
IA's "nature of" argument could have been reasonable for the subset of works that constituted nonfiction/educational material (there is a long history of the copying of those such work for educational use); that wouldn't have sufficed for other works, but it was a reasonable point for the subset of works it applied to.
For "purpose and character", the use was not hugely transformative, but it was turned into a different and more accessible form.
As for "effect of the use", I would argue that CDL was not in practice a substitute for most uses of a book or ebook. A book that you borrow, and have to return, can sometimes substitute for owning your own copy, but not always; in practice, the users of libraries and the users of bookstores overlap but I would venture that the majority of people who borrow a book from the library would not typically have bought the same book if the library didn't exist.
Suppose one built an automated apparatus that remotely opened a physical book and held individual pages up to a webcam for transmission to you on a video call. That's technically making a copy in the course of its operation, but you're still effectively reading the original physical book, with some assistance. (The Supreme Court ruling against Aereo would sadly probably be cited to shoot down such a model. That was a sad ruling as well; the opposite ruling would have enabled an incredible variety of uses and possibilities.) The 1:1 CDL mechanism seems effectively equivalent to that.