Thanks, Chuck Wendig!
Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
121–130 of 582 posts
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#122[deleted]
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best part had to be the whole moral grandstanding they had when doing it. Controlled digital lending was tolerated. It was never legal. I can't buy a bunch of DVDs and start a streaming service even if a each copy can only be watched by a single person at a time. It really sucks since they do a lot of good work aside from this.
The emergency library wasn't what publishers sued over. They used it perhaps as a rhetorical cover but what they were actually suing to prevent is IA offering digital versions of scanned hardcopy books. With IA's loss, publishers get to control the way libraries lend digital media because you can't take a hardcopy and legally "scan" it into a digital copy, so the only way to get a digital copy for lending is as a DRM…
All this could be avoided with some sensible legislation. Publishers should be prohibited from taking advantage of libraries, and some minimal compensation scheme should be offered for digital lending. Of course, that's not what companies want. It is the wild west of modern capitalism.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#124This is why Piracy is good for humanity.
Does your theory apply to the content consumed during the training of LLMs? If not why not? Where should we draw the line regarding intellectual property rights?
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't about their pandemic actions, this is about the controlled digital lending they did for like a decade before COVID. If it were just over the emergency library, the court would end the restrictionless lending and likely issue a fine. Instead, the court ruling was that CDL was illegal, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say "as CDL was already illegal, it was also illegal." There also would…
The suit was filed 2020 June. It's quite plain the uncontrolled lending triggered it even if it was about CDL.
Even if it presented an opportunity for them to pull the trigger, the publishers had their eyes on the lawsuit for years. The NEL may have been a mistake, but it's not relevant to the actual lawsuit.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Can't agree. Even as recent as about one decade ago, the best way to learn a programming language is often buying a book or checking out a book from the library, because that's the only high-quality source on the topic. Since then we have had people creating complete tutorials like the Rust book and distribute it on the Internet, for free. In the US, some professors profit from selling textbooks that get updated ever…
> the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free.
Ah, no. That isn't communism.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge You don’t get more golden eggs by killing the goose who lays them. Also the IA book UI was terrible.
Is the goose here the publisher? Or the author? If it’s the latter, then would killing the publisher necessarily dictate that the author also must die?
Yeah I genuinely cannot understand that comment.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#128There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…
Why should an author be forced to give away their work for free? They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.
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Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#129Oh this appeal to the public, pithy empty words about openness and shit. Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk. They said, there are enough physical books in closed li…
AFAIK, the "borrowed" books on this platform weren't downloadable on the library site, merely viewable. Per TFA:
> "We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers," Chris Freeland, IA's director of library services, wrote in the blog. "But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing."
Is the "lend the books we own" part somehow inaccurate? I'm assuming IA has some sort of claim to the books they're lending and scanned, similar to any physical library. This seems very different from "a gigantic book piracy site".
Furthermore, I'd argue removing access to those books on IA will likely lead to one of the following:
A. people will fall back to actual piracy through other means to get the same content "even less legally" through well known alternatives
B. people simply not being able to access the content, e.g. if it's out of print , not available locally, or only available used for some exorbitant cost that wouldn't go to the publisher
C. people will spend whatever the publisher charges by buying from them directly
My understanding is that A and B are way more likely than C, since the vast majority of books on IA's website include out of print and hard to get books.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dead authors can't choose to give away their works, they're dead. Yet someone still owns the rights 60 years later.
If an author sells the rights and does, should the buyer automatically lose what they bought? Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones.
There's no reason that "selling copyrights" needs to a be a thing. If the author themself wants to profit from their work, sure, but once they die, that's it, and there's no excuse for it to not be in the public domain at that point.