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Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

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Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#131

Post by xhkkffbf »

metadat wrote: post #15
COGlory wrote: post #6

So...they didn't think the law should apply so they just decided to ignore it? What were they expecting? How can they possibly expect to win this lawsuit? I hate copyright with all my soul but this is just stupid. You can't just decide to take the law into your own hand. This is just a waste of money and effort.

The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders. At the end of the day, The Internet Archive has good intentions and is morally in the right. The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more. It's about selecting for the common good over the…

I'm an author but I'm not rich. Therefore the only way I can afford to write books is because people pay the publishers who, in turn, then have money to pay me.

If you want to preserve human culture, you want to make it possible for the non-rich to help create it.

If you want to write books for free, go to it. But what the IA did was just plain wrong. Plenty of bookstores like Powells were operating remotely during the pandemic. Many libraries had curbside pick up. Amazon was still delivering. There was no reason to run up the pirate flag.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#132

Post by SkyBelow »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #20
metadat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders. At the end of the day, The Internet Archive has good intentions and is morally in the right. The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more. It's about selecting for the common good over the…

If libraries hadn't already been in existence since antiquity, copyright holders would never have allowed them to exist.

Libraries are government approved piracy.

This can be taken as being positive about piracy or negative about libraries. I think the real question is not which way I mean it but why does the average user see one as positive and the other as a negative, thus causing the conflict when the two are linked by this statement.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#133

Post by xhkkffbf »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #20
metadat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders. At the end of the day, The Internet Archive has good intentions and is morally in the right. The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more. It's about selecting for the common good over the…

If libraries hadn't already been in existence since antiquity, copyright holders would never have allowed them to exist.

But why do you say that? Kindle unlimited is a pretty similar to a library and many publishers support it and include their books. Yes, it costs something per month, but it's much less than the overhead costs for librarians, heat and a building. Many municipalities could actually save money by closing their libraries and giving everyone with an active library card a subscription to Kindle unlimited.

I'm not suggesting they do that. I like the old buildings. But it's important to note that copyright holders are coming up with many new and innovative ways to help readers get books and authors get paid.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#134

Post by jl6 »

twblalock wrote: post #111
jl6 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, Apple could buy News Corporation (the parent company of HarperCollins, one of the litigants) with a single quarter’s profits. Not revenue, profit. News Corporation enterprise value: $11bn Apple quarterly profit: $25bn

Yes but why should Apple do that? How would Apple benefit from doing that?

They could use all the books as a loss leader for the Apple ecosystem, similar to how Google Maps spends billions on data that is made available for “free”.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#135

Post by SkyBelow »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #131
metadat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders. At the end of the day, The Internet Archive has good intentions and is morally in the right. The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more. It's about selecting for the common good over the…

I'm an author but I'm not rich. Therefore the only way I can afford to write books is because people pay the publishers who, in turn, then have money to pay me. If you want to preserve human culture, you want to make it possible for the non-rich to help create it. If you want to write books for free, go to it. But what the IA did was just plain wrong. Plenty of bookstores like Powells were operating remotely during t…

What about what libraries do in general. By buying some number of copies and then letting many people read those copies, it leads to fewer people buying books overall leading to less pay, meaning those who depend upon income from writing books to be less able to afford continuing to write books.

And any arguments along the lines that libraries actually lead to increased numbers of readers and thus overall increase book sales could also apply to this instance as well (I've even seen such arguments made about piracy in general, though I've never seen any conclusive research indicating if the argument is realistic or not).

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#136

Post by xhkkffbf »

eslaught wrote: post #73
metadat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders. At the end of the day, The Internet Archive has good intentions and is morally in the right. The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more. It's about selecting for the common good over the…

Disclosures: I've written a book I'm currently trying to get published. Also, almost all of my professionally-written (as well as personal) code is open source. And I have used the Wayback Machine extensively. To be honest, I'm having a hard time getting upset over this lawsuit. As best I can tell, IA isn't getting sued over having scanned the books. They're not even getting sued over lending them out. Instead, they'…

The thing the publishers fear is that there is one and only one sale of the book to someone who then turns around and makes infinite digital copies to anyone who wants to read it.

This just doesn't work, even if there's a rich person who is willing to pay quite a bit for the first copy. The rest of the people get excluded from the decision making and the rich person is the only one who decides which books are worthy of being rewarded.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#137

Post by ghaff »

kmeisthax wrote: post #128
ghaff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that (probably because they didn't want to force the issue), the publishers seem to have been OK with lending out digital copies so long as the archive had a corresponding physical copy. Which AFAIK is not clearly covered by first sale doctrine but there's an argument to be made. OK, well enough. But TIA then does something that clearly violates copyright. And the fig leaf that is "But COVID" really does…

Digital lending has no legal basis in either the controlled or uncontrolled format. In fact, the argumentation is suspiciously similar to the ReDigi case. Courts generally have upheld that first sale ends when copying begins, even if the end result is the moral equivalent of a sale rather than a copy[0]. And, indeed, the publishers were grumbling about controlled digital lending (CDL) before IA pulled the National Em…

The history of software licensing is sort of interesting. I had occasion to dive into it a year or so ago for a book and it seems to have been institutionalized with the IBM/360 because 1.) IBM was feeling pressure to sell software independent of hardware for antitrust reasons and 2.) All of the existing IP protection mechanisms seemed pretty iffy at the time.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#138

Post by bshanks »

Has there been any progress in software to allow individual unaffiliated volunteers to help make decentralized third-party backups of the Internet Archive's WWW Wayback machine data?

My opinion is that it may be difficult to find enough volunteer storage to fit the entire Archive, but if we focus on prioritizing plaintext HTML, plus perhaps graphics included in web pages constrained to a size limit, we can do it.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#139

Post by orev »

yellowapple wrote: post #117
orev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your same logic, I will single-handedly decide that all software companies (and the developers working there) have received enough compensation for their efforts, and demand all their services and code be made available for free. As long as you got one paycheck from those months of work, now I want it for free. /s

My code is already free. The service I provide is creating new code, not selling existing code. Contrast with publishers, where it's the other way around.

Not knowing anything about you, I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS. That’s your choice, and publishers have the same right to release their works under different terms (through agreements with the authors they have signed, etc). You don’t have any say over what other creators choose to do with their works, and if they choose terms you don’t like, you can’t just ignore them.

Without strong copyright laws, the choice you make is just as enforceable as the choice they make.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#140

Post by nonbirithm »

The centralization of the IA should've got more attention sooner. I've worried that the Wayback Machine will only remain up for another couple of years as a result of the IA's actions. It has saved me countless times in the past, but it's sadly a one-of-a-kind, fragile trove of data in the hands of an organization that didn't keep their ideals separate from reality.

I feel they should be taking steps immediately to ensure that at least the data of the Wayback Archive will outlive the whims of IA-the-organization in the coming decades/centuries, before it's too late. There's probably a lot of people willing to help out with such a replication task.

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