231–240 of 614 posts
I think leadership at Internet Archive was deeply irresponsible for deciding a short term stunt was worth potentially existentially threatening legal exposure. The entire leadership there and anyone who signed off on the decision should be replaced. I am a donor but I'm pissed. They should have known better.
Maybe they shouldn't have done something that moronic? If people wanted free books they could always pirate them, openly infringing by hosting copyrighted books for a few people to slightly more easily read them for free... How could they possibly think that was a good idea?
The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things). Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions. Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved. Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a worka…
> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved. That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted. Here's from th…
There is a whitepaper on Controlled Digital Lending that should be required reading for anyone wading in to this discussion: https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/
So, how do we create an Internet Archive Archive?
The main issues are storage, centrialisation, moderation and copyright; that if you wished, rebel and ignore these with a distrbuted model like BitTorrent, or IPFS.
If an library burns to the ground you loose everything, so you will have to decentrialise. That then causes moderation issues as if you were to truely go decentrialised; what's stopping a bad actor uploading icky stuff? It would resolve the take-down from copyright, as they couldn't kill all nodes. But all sounds like a lot of work for a very little return.
Copyright law needs to change. Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it. Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later). Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really belie…
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much late…
That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.
No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.
Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.
Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we s…
Totally agree with the first part. > Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes. One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will not sell them "real" licenses, but only "quota licenses" that allow a total of n borrows and m concurrent borrows. Once the total number of borrows…
NPR : Planet Money : The Indicator - The surprising economics of digital lending - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1118289764
That's from August of 2022 and the lawsuit against the internet archive was just starting to gain steam.
And more recently (November 2022):
NPR : Planet Money - The E-Book Wars https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385
which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we s…
> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. Fuck it. It should never get off the ground, really. We, as a society, don't need controlled lending for something that can be copied for free. What we need is a fair mechanism to keep authors whole while keeping digital copies available for all, free of charge. And the system slowly changes by itself, discovering multiple such mechanisms. Like, for…
which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we s…
I actually wondered initially, even if CDL was legal, how are they going to enforce the actual Controlled part? What's the standard for that? Is simply not having a download button sufficient? Do you need to prevent people from right-clicking and choose "Save Image"? Or do you need to run the book through a video stream encrypted with Widevine L3 so screenshots don't work? Or heck, why not Widevine L1 which requires…