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Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

arstechnica.com

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Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#181

Post by kibwen »

encomiast wrote: post #177
kibwen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough with this nonsense. A book isn't a family business, it's not the family home, it ain't the family farm, it's an artifact that you produced once, it makes no sense to inherit the right to copy it . We allow inheritance to exist because it creates social good by facilitating community continuity. And the best social good when it comes to copyright is to let it expire as soon as possible; let's be honest, "until…

> We allow inheritance to exist because it creates social good FWIW, this is also why we have copyright. In fact, this is explicitly why we allow copyright in US.

> this is explicitly why we allow copyright in US

The founders of the US intended copyright to last for 14 years, with the ability to renew for a single extra 14-year extension. Like patents, copyright was intended to expire quickly in order to serve the good of the public. Thank Disney for fucking that up for everyone. You have refuted your own argument.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#182

Post by pyuser583 »

hysan wrote: post #140
encomiast wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure this argument works unless you are willing to give away the other property on death like houses, stocks, farms, etc. Maybe 60 years is too long, but that doesn't seem to be your argument.

Genuine question since I don’t know much about inheritance. Don’t things like houses, stocks, etc get taxed in certain places? Whereas I don’t think copyright does? In a way, that is similar to having to give property away upon death (can’t pay the tax, forced to get rid of it).

People who hold copyrights for profit tend create corporations to hold the copyrights, then just pass on shares in the company to their heirs.

These shares are valued the same as any other shares for an opaque, non-public company, with a single owner, whose assets have very ambiguous and widely disparate values, and which has the ability to cease operations for long periods of time and still remain profitable.

In other words, they’re worth whatever the owner wants them to be worth.

This is just my cynical interpretation. But if you think valuing real estate is hard, try valuing copyrights.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#183

Post by DamnInteresting »

liendolucas wrote: post #110

What I will never understand is why this is needed at all. The books that I do find interesting I buy them. Sure, you can bypass paper by having ebooks. But is it really a replacement for a printed book? There is nothing like a printed book. No power needed, nor devices needed, you can go back to any page, any chapter instantly and if you have stomach even write on them. On the other side having the possibility to ju…

I like ebooks because wherever I go, I always have the book I'm currently reading right in my pocket. If I get stuck waiting somewhere, I can read some diverting, thoughtfully-composed material instead of scrolling through reddit or playing a mindless game. Screens aren't quite as pleasant to look at as a printed page, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff for me.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#184

Post by pyuser583 »

lupire wrote: post #142
hysan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question since I don’t know much about inheritance. Don’t things like houses, stocks, etc get taxed in certain places? Whereas I don’t think copyright does? In a way, that is similar to having to give property away upon death (can’t pay the tax, forced to get rid of it).

Income is taxed, obviously. Copyright is taken away, originally after 14 years, now 70(?) years. After the death of the creator

It was interesting from 2010 to 2015 when all of the people who died in WWII and Holocaust lost their copyrights.

It started with Freud, and ended when Adolph Hitler and Anne Frank lost copyright protection on the same day.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#185

Post by spankalee »

jrm4 wrote: post #170
spankalee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a deeply unserious way to frame this; it presumes the unnatural (even if useful/positive) present state of copyright as a naturally occurring thing. It ain't. "Why should we lessen or diminish the legal right of authors to control how copies of their work are distributed; the way we've been doing it works well." is what you SHOULD have said. Doesn't sound as sexy, but here, the accuracy matters.

I didn't say the current system worked well, but neither was the parent post critiquing just the current system, but "purposeful restriction" in general. Accuracy matters.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#186

Post by thedevilslawyer »

gwright wrote: post #124
zouhair wrote: post #36

This 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?

1. Absolutely.

2. Information and knowledge is for all.

3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#187

Post by hliyan »

spankalee wrote: post #104
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #25

There 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.

I think a lot of the problems being discussed in sibling comments can be solved to an extent if we limit copyright to its original 14 years. That number was decided in a much, much slower age (1790). In today's world, 14 years should be ample time to monetise most creative work.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#188

Post by 1oooqooq »

Aurornis wrote: post #173
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Why should someone be thrown in jail for singing the happy birthday song in front of a crowd of people? This is not a thing that happens, and it’s hard to take anyone seriously when they’re presenting this as a counter argument. If you can’t even understand the difference between criminal and civil matters, how can you even begin to discuss this topic?

except it is.

try to upload to YouTube your birthday party with a barely audible pop music playing in the background.

now which argument can't be taken seriously?

granted, it's not jail. but being removed from the monopoly forum for internet videos could be worse than jail if you're business depends on that.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#189

Post by rml »

> And even when IA temporarily stopped limiting the number of loans to provide emergency access to books during the pandemic—which could be considered a proxy for publishers' fear that IA's lending could pose a greater threat if it became much more widespread—IA's expert "found no evidence of market harm."

I feel that IA erred very badly in lifting the one-to-one correspondence that is at the heart of "controlled digital lending" (https://controlleddigitallending.org). It is frankly annoying that they did that, and then still purport to be doing CDL, even though the CDL website clearly states the 1:1 "owned-to-loaned" ratio is a key part of the CDL platform.

For the record I'm extremely pro CDL, but I feel the IA did not do any favors to the CDL movement with this boneheaded "activist" implementation of CDL

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#190

Post by shagie »

kibwen wrote: post #130
throwAGIway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lets change from "selling" to "assigning".

Could you assign the copyrights to a corporation (that then doesn't die). Would that prevent them from going into the public domain?

If I write some software and assign its copyright to the Apache Foundation or FSF or some other organization through a CLA, what happens to the license if I kick the bucket tomorrow?

For that matter, what happens if I don't assign its copyright to some other organization... does all the GPL software that I write suddenly become public domain?

If no, there is reason for it to remain under the GPL or Apache license so that it can continue on in the spirit of the license it was created under (which copyright enforces) ... then there is equal reason for the works of an author or photographer or singer or song writer to also remain under copyright for some duration.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.en.html

> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

> That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is—as a copyleft. All code added to a GPL-covered program must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file. I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

If the GPLed project lost all of its teeth upon the untimely death of a contributor, would that be a bad thing?

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