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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

#511

Post by persnickety »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #507
persnickety wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information. Why should that incentive take form of making information a product? "just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" is a gross misrepresentation of what the person before said, and you even quote the passage indicating as much. It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pos…

>It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pose problems doesn't mean much. The current side of the false dichotomy causes problems as in the OP. Their suggestions last people who "just want to deny it happens" and their solution is to just let the government pay for it (spoilers: it's allready subsidized), so I don't exactly understand why yo…

Um, I reacted to this exchange in context:

>>Why should we turn information into a "product"[...]

> Because [...]

That clearly indicates that you're in fact advocating it to be a product. Perhaps I misunderstood your post, but then I'm afraid you're not making yourself very clear. I'm also not seeing any references to survival in your post, just of incentivizing where work goes, so I am fairly certain what you think you write is not what you actually write.

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

#512

Post by belorn »

WalterBright wrote: post #491
belorn wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past there was a fairly common practice to create a monopoly by outlawing people from importing food to a local economy. People may recognize the concept of mining towns, company stores, or its role in debt slavery. The practice back in those days were to advertise inflated wages for a job in remote areas. People then traveled there, only to find out that food and living costs, all under the control of the com…

> outlawing people from importing food I.e. the government is doing it.

No, this was companies doing it. They controlled ports, rail and roads (or what ever roads that may exist in remote areas), and controlling in-going supplies was a matter of policy and enforcement. Mining and railway companies where once very large and powerful, similar to some trading companies in the past.

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

#513

Post by franga2000 »

paulcole wrote: post #501
franga2000 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contents is the thing that deserves protection, not every individual instance of a medium it's stored on. If I buy a music CD, I paid for one license to play that album plus some plastic and distribution fees. If I make a copy to play because I don't want to damage the original, if I then lend that copy to my friend, if I rip it to mp3 because nothing plays CDs anymore - in all those cases, only one copy is being…

> if I rip it to mp3 because nothing plays CDs anymore - in all those cases, only one copy is being used so my one "license to play" should suffice. Sure, I disagree but whatever. Your license to play in this case shouldn’t extend to lending those MP3s that can easily be copied by as many people as you can “lend” those MP3s to. > The contents is the thing that deserves protection Also I disagree with this. The conten…

I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself, not the piece of plastic or paper holding it. Whether works "deserve" to be protected is an entirely separate discussion.

As for lending, there is very little difference between lending a physical medium and expecting it to be returned and sending a digital asset and expecting it to be deleted afterwards. In both cases you have basically no way of preventing someone from making a copy and have to just trust them and/or dangle the threat of legal action over them. Yes, some things are more effort to copy than others, but with modern phones and OCR, even books can be digitised and copied in a matter of minutes and with no material cost.

So practically, if we wanted to prevent copying, we shouldn't allow lending at all. And I think that would be too important of a thing to sacrifice just to get authors a few extra percent in income (since, as we've seen, people who pirate are not very likely to buy if piracy isn't an option).

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

#514

Post by johnnyanmac »

persnickety wrote: post #511
johnnyanmac wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pose problems doesn't mean much. The current side of the false dichotomy causes problems as in the OP. Their suggestions last people who "just want to deny it happens" and their solution is to just let the government pay for it (spoilers: it's allready subsidized), so I don't exactly understand why yo…

Um, I reacted to this exchange in context: >>Why should we turn information into a "product"[...] > Because [...] That clearly indicates that you're in fact advocating it to be a product. Perhaps I misunderstood your post, but then I'm afraid you're not making yourself very clear. I'm also not seeing any references to survival in your post, just of incentivizing where work goes, so I am fairly certain what you think…

I've gotten 15 other responses and the ideas I write and respond to inevitably blend together. So I apologize if I make some assumptions based on statements from other parts of the post that I have answered.

Regardless, I am a huge fan of the devil's advocate. You can talk about points without them being your complete world view. That's the assumption that we seem misaligned with. Just because I don't want all information to be free the moment it is published (or stolen) doesn't mean I want to abolish copyright.

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

#515

Post by paulcole »

franga2000 wrote: post #513
paulcole wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I rip it to mp3 because nothing plays CDs anymore - in all those cases, only one copy is being used so my one "license to play" should suffice. Sure, I disagree but whatever. Your license to play in this case shouldn’t extend to lending those MP3s that can easily be copied by as many people as you can “lend” those MP3s to. > The contents is the thing that deserves protection Also I disagree with this. The conten…

I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself, not the piece of plastic or paper holding it. Whether works "deserve" to be protected is an entirely separate discussion. As for lending, there is very little difference between lending a physical medium and expecting it to be returned and sending a digital asset and expecting it to be d…

> I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself

I disagree with this as well. “Works” don’t deserve anything. Stuff comes and goes.

> So practically, if we wanted to prevent copying, we shouldn't allow lending at all.

Who said we wanted to prevent copying?

IMO we want to prevent cmd+c / cmd+v copying or trivial DRM breaking with Calibre or something. If somebody wants to snap photos of each page of a book to “preserve the work” go nuts. But then don’t go sharing the MOBI they make of those pages.

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

#516

Post by ryandrake »

belorn wrote: post #512
WalterBright wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outlawing people from importing food I.e. the government is doing it.

No, this was companies doing it. They controlled ports, rail and roads (or what ever roads that may exist in remote areas), and controlling in-going supplies was a matter of policy and enforcement. Mining and railway companies where once very large and powerful, similar to some trading companies in the past.

In systems such as our own, where government power has been essentially captured by corporate lobbying, there is little difference between "government is doing it" and "companies are doing it."

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

#517

Post by quesera »

arcimpulse wrote: post #454
quesera wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author chooses the publisher.

In most cases this isn't accurate. The author (or, more commonly, their agent) submits the book to several publishers, who either accept or reject or refer for edits. Unless you're in the top percentile of published authors, there's very little room for negotiation. It's pretty rare for an author to have more than one "accept" on a work simultaneously, many publishers frown on multiple submission precisely because it…

The author always chooses the publisher. They might not have many (or even multiple) options, but there is no coercion and the author can choose to keep looking for a different publisher, to go with a lower-tier publisher, to publish themselves, to publish via vanity press, or not to publish at all.

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

#518

Post by jrm4 »

encomiast wrote: post #216
spankalee wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious about the argument that is framed with "it presumes the unnatural (even if useful/positive) present state of copyright as a naturally occurring thing." I don't think this should be discounted so quickly. Nothing in this domain — money, private property, laws, justice — are obviously naturally occurring things. One of the great traditions in the effort to understand how rights and value come to be is the c…

I submit that intellectual property is absolutely less natural than e.g. real or personal property. I haven't done a deep dive, but I'd strongly wager that if you did a sweep of traditions of property across times and cultures, you're going to find a LOT more uniformity over the idea of property rights over PHYSICAL THINGS like land and food (and probably money or other forms of exchange? maybe not) than you will IP.

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

#519

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

During the early Covid period there was a general sense that “the rules don’t apply” or “the rules are insufficient” for this crisis and therefore can be safely ignored when they conflict with Covid counter-measures. Even those in authority were breaking some laws to respond to it. In addition any action that could be perceived as “combating Covid” was seen as an automatic good. Combine all that with the extreme fear and uncertainty and you have the perfect environment to make a stupid move. The IA should just admit the “emergency library” was a mistake, move on and stop wasting money and risking the entire project on this.

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

#520

Post by talldatethrow »

anigbrowl wrote: post #503
talldatethrow wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't just write books to profit while they are alive. They write books so their families have something to pay the bills once they die as well. Books are hard enough to write and sell successfully. The few that make it are special for the families of the writers, and you want to take them. You're free to give away your work. Stop telling others what to do with their work and that you want to take it because t…

Design patents have a 15 year life. I'm a great lover of books and arts in general, but I'm not clear on why ownership rights in some creative endeavors should be massively privileged over others. Can the families of authors not write books of their own, or engage in other economic activity? What about the families of people who toil over creative work and don't hit the jackpot? There are many fine writers/artists wh…

Sure they can, just like you could have your house taken from you and you could build another one. Why do your kids expect to get your house when they could build one too?
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