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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

#781

Post by gizmo »

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…

You're angry that IA is not run by rational pragmatists, but you don't seem to appreciate that projects like these never are. Some people live by idealism and die by idealism. I get that from the outside it looks pointless to set a valuable project on fire like this. Like you I don't want AI to self-immolate. But it's not a betrayal of any kind. The assumptions you made about IA were wrong and you were wrong to project assumptions of pragmatism on an organization that fundamentally isn't.

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

#782

Post by account42 »

Mindwipe wrote: post #518
codedokode wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With physical books the library doesn't need to pay anything to lend it; with digital books it has to pay for every view. Why is it so? Shouldn't the buyers of digital books have the same rights, i.e. the right to re-sell or lend it? As for authors, nothing changes here: libraries lent their physical books without paying before.

It is worth noting this is a US only oddity. In almost every other country in the world libraries do pay a royalty to lend books. It's notable that the IA service was not geofiltered to the US only.

AFAIK the IA does not operate outside the US. The notion that every entity needs to either follow foreign laws or make sure people from other jurisdictions cannot acces their services is absurd.

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

#783

Post by account42 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #203
tomxor wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing against a principle that applies to physical libraries (Who also have films btw)...so are physical libraries also nonsense? Libraries do not serve the interest of publishers (and let's just focus on publishers because if we're being real here, publishers are the ones who stand to lose money - "think of the authors" is just a distraction)... i digress, Libraries exist as a benefit to society, they aren'…

> let's just focus on publishers No. I'm focusing on all media - books, tv, movies, games, etc. It's one set of copyright laws. > so are physical libraries also nonsense? Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers. Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfe…

> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers.

Not at all. Creators have no ihnerent rights that need to be balanced. Copyright is only granted with the argument that encouraging creation benefits society. That is the only argument for its existence.

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

#784

Post by trustno2 »

Nullabillity wrote: post #657
trustno2 wrote: post #556

Earlier 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)

Except that's the whole point of the CDL compromise , that only one person can borrow the book at a time.

The compromise is obviously unilaterally decided by Archive, as demonstrated by the fact they randomly decided to not even honor that "compromise".

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

#785

Post by dark-star »

TeaBrain wrote: post #280
dark-star wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IA will let you download full video games for the switch that are still being actively sold That's a weak argument that is the same as saying "BitTorrent is bad because you can download illegal stuff" or" file hosters should be banned because I found $illegal_thing on this one" Yes, a free upload service will get abused. And yes, they are very quick to take these kinds of warez downloads offline when someone notifi…

That example isn't the same at all. BitTorrent is just an application for torrenting. It isn't an organization centrally hosting content like IA is. Both Megaupload and Rapidshare are much more similar examples of sites that allowed anonymous distribution from central servers. Megaupload was taken down and Rapidshare ended anonymous file sharing after the Megaupload takedown.

MEgaupload and Rapidshare were taken down because they ignored takedown requests from rights holders and just gave them the middle finger. That was obviously a very bad idea. OTOH all the hundreds of free file hosters that exist today don't get into trouble, simply because they take stuff down when notified.

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

#786

Post by account42 »

zajio1am wrote: post #147
teruakohatu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The copyright goalposts have moved so far past where they were originally, the people who work very hard can be dead for decades and their works still in copyright, and by the time they are dead for 70 years Note that copyright lasting 50 years after the author's death was already in Berne Convention from 1886. Some (but not all) of these extensions in US were just adaptation of older weaker US copyright to interna…

Those "international conventions" were still established by lobbying from the US copyright industry. International treaties are a great backdoor for laws that a government wants to pass but which are unpopular with the population.

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

#787

Post by account42 »

anonymousab wrote: post #600
_kidlike wrote: post #484

Earlier 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 ?

Yes, and that's why running an executable can technically be copyright infringement. This came up in some anticheat lawsuits.

Which is an absurd position. It's not far removed from sayng that reading something and committing it to memory is an act of copying.

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

#788

Post by account42 »

tptacek wrote: post #361
Dylan16807 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your whole point is that we could tear down all of copyright law and replace it No, no, not at all. In this situation I just want to change the definition of "copy" slightly. (And to point out that slightly different definitions of terms would make libraries illegal. There's nothing special about the current definitions. In particular they're not the most straightforward definitions at all. Again, none of this i…

There is no reasonable definition of "copy" that would make the lending of a physical book a copy. The word "copy" literally exists to differentiate other actions from that action.

It is however not much a stretch to say that someone reading a book and committing it to memory is making a copy not inherently different from the "copies" being made when viewing something over the Internet. Now if you go and lend/sell a book after reading it you still retain the copy in your mind. Yet somehow that is legally fine.

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

#789

Post by account42 »

ipatrol wrote: post #444
Dylan16807 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reasonable definition of "copy" that would make the lending of a physical book a copy. But it could count as distribution. Copyright covers that. Library style distribution could be just as illegal as CDL style copying, by barely changing anything.

The point is that yes, digital items get treated differently by the law because using them requires "technical" copying. Moving them requires copying, using them requires copying, lending them requires copying. The law as written means that digital works will give their buyer far fewer rights than identical physical copies of the same. And yes, that's precisely why the current law is bananas, because it turns digitiz…

> because that's not what courts do

Except when it is. Laws are not computer code and it's precisely the court's job to interpret how they apply. This can include overturning previous interpretations. For examples see the recent ruckus about supreme court decisions changing what people interpreted as fundamental and accepted rights.

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

#790

Post by account42 »

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…

> I wonder why judges are anti-library.

Is that really suprising considering the general copyright climate? Do you link libraries would be allowed to exist if they were conceived of today?

I'd say probably not - but then "AI" seems to not be facing the same rules as regular people so perhaps if libraries could find a way to become "big" fast enough they could have a chance.

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