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The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

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Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#591

Post by iggldiggl »

mumblemumble wrote: post #276
cmiles74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out. I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?

The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers. It also discusses that there is a very good reason why digital libraries don't typically get to have perpetual rights to a work at the retail (or used) price for a print book.…

> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks.

While physical books might indeed wear out, I think they wear out way slower than what current library e-book licenses might suggest (apparently two years or 26 lends seems to be popular in the US? – my library has tons of books older than two years, and back from when they used to stamp the return date in the back, quite a few books had hit 26 lends without falling apart yet).

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#592

Post by SkyBelow »

ilamont wrote: post #52

This has been playing out for many years. And it's all because Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped the rights of authors and publishers, and the laws of the United States. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - he continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored: The Internet Archive says it would rat…

>Kahle portrays the court cases and legal judgements as a crusade against the Internet Archive and all librarians (see https://blog.archive.org/2023/12/15/brewster-kahle-appeal-st...). It's not.

I'm not sure one should be so certain on this. I don't intend to suggestion it is an intentional action, but I do find that libraries are inherently at odds with how most of copyright otherwise works. There is a tension in this relationship and one that is likely pushing towards libraries becoming illegal for new forms of media. A common sentiment I've seen, expressed for different reasons by different people, is that if libraries didn't already exist, they would be illegal to create.

This is part of the larger role copyright plays in society, from being used as a legal hammer to handle AI issues (as in, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail) to newer digital media being sold in a way where one can't easily share what they own (if you even can call it owning at this point).

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#593

Post by mezzie2 »

Y_Y wrote: post #528
71bw wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. I've never donated to them and figured it was the right choice after they started excluding websites from the WayBackMachine - the most vocal case being kiwifarms [1], whe…

You make a good point about the exclusion of sites that probably deserve to be in the Wayback Machine. Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites? Does anyone know of one or want to set one up? (To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardl…

> (To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation.)

Even if it didn't, preserving places like KF is necessary to prevent future scholars from having a really warped idea of what the Internet was like in the 2020s. I find KF extremely off putting (I lurked there long enough to form my own opinion), but I'm not sure how a person is supposed to research how to prevent unhealthy communities from forming without examples of said communities.

I also find it darkly hilarious/sus in light of the fact that one of the primary points of the social justice movement is how we've whitewashed/erased our history. (e.g. how Americans' history education has minimized the perspective of Native Americans or omitted uncomfortable facts about racial discrimination). Are they against historical revisionism or do they just think they'd pick better things to 'erase'? I feel the same way about censoring books that use the n-word: knowing that was at one point acceptable really hammers home how acceptable open racism was for most of American history. Censoring/omitting places like KF from archives (when those archives claim to be representative/neutral) is going to give the impression that there was far more consensus on the 2010s/2020s Internet than there actually was. It's misleading.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#595

Post by EasyMark »

jandrese wrote: post #45

Very much not a surprise. I think the Internet Archive is providing an invaluable service to humanity in preserving works that would otherwise be lost to time. it is one of the crown jewels of the Internet, doing a job that nobody else is willing to do. But at the same time I know the courts side with publishers pretty much every time and copyright law being such as it is they're totally screwed. The only real questi…

I agree, it can take a while for the limits on something like this are found. I would love for all books to be available there but I see the concerns (overblown) of authors and publishers however, they’re in a tough industry and it’s getting tougher. I think IA should take the L and save us from AI being the only source of information in 10 years or so. Soon most people will choose instant coffee over roasting, grinding, and brewing their own from beans. Hopefully the judge(s) will take their value and uniqueness into account and give them a small judgement with a much bigger one waiting in the wings if they ignore the decision. Maybe they can move some place safer like Russia or China and serve from there.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#596

Post by mezzie2 »

iggldiggl wrote: post #591
mumblemumble wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers. It also discusses that there is a very good reason why digital libraries don't typically get to have perpetual rights to a work at the retail (or used) price for a print book.…

> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks. While physical books might indeed wear out, I think they wear out way slower than what current library e-book licenses might suggest (apparently two years or 26 lends seems to be popular in the US? – my library has tons of books older than two years, and bac…

Also, physical books can be rebound/repaired. The binding is usually the point of failure, and even smaller libraries often have rebinding equipment. I worked in libraries for over a decade and I could probably count on one hand how many books (as opposed to CDs/DVDs/other materials) that were weeded due to condition versus because they simply weren't used or contained out of date/wrong information.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#597

Post by Amezarak »

vesinisa wrote: post #522
rakoo wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of having digital preservation if noone can read the archives ? Digital access make sense, it's the logical conclusion to what IA does

But that's not what this case was about. Throughout the trial they have been allowed to provide continued digital access to the scanned books, granted they operate like a library (each borrowed book is backed by a physical copy.) The case was launched when during the Covid-19 pandemic they removed the limitations under the veil of "National Emergency Library": https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-resp…

Under US copyright law controlled digital lending was clearly illegal. This case did not establish any new precedent, it's a plain reading of the law and the decision reflects that. You and I can both not like it, we can wish the law was different, but no court ruling was ever going to go any other way, and the reckless move of opening uncontrolled digital lending doesn't change that.

It may make logical sense to think of CDL as indistinguishable from physical book lending in libraries, but because it entailed making a copy, that was never legally the case.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#598

Post by matwood »

vesinisa wrote: post #522
rakoo wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of having digital preservation if noone can read the archives ? Digital access make sense, it's the logical conclusion to what IA does

But that's not what this case was about. Throughout the trial they have been allowed to provide continued digital access to the scanned books, granted they operate like a library (each borrowed book is backed by a physical copy.) The case was launched when during the Covid-19 pandemic they removed the limitations under the veil of "National Emergency Library": https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-resp…

And their poor implementation of CDL (based on the findings they were often missing the controlled part), has now set a precedence that will make a real CDL case that much harder. Grandstanding appears to have been more important than enacting change.

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#599

Post by pk-protect-ai »

sumeno wrote: post #586
dannyobrien wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this assessment on many levels, but I think the most important challenge I can make is to the idea that Brewster Kahle is a rogue actor, who in some sense mis-interpreted the mission and strategy of the Internet Archive. For those of you who are just learning that name from this lawsuit, here's his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle Kahle founded the Archive in the nineties,…

> Why did only Kahle do it, and why was it only Kahle coming up with CDL as an idea to prevent the death of first sale, of lending a book, of the idea of a free library in a digital future? Lots of libraries do free digital lending of ebooks in a legal way and have done so for a long time

And now there will be a legal precedent to shut down all CDLs of these "lots of libraries".

Re: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

#600

Post by anonymousab »

_kidlike wrote: post #484
pie_flavor wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe as lending a digital copy, is making new copies. As a matter of engineering fact, the bytes were copied from one location to another; as a matter of black-letter law, that is making a copy in the sense that it is copyright infringement to do so without a license. That IA 'controlled' it to have only one outstanding copy at a time in hands other than theirs does not make it legal. The carveout saying…

if you wanna get into byte copying, from a legal view, isn't also copying from disk to memory a copy of the book then ?

Yes, and that's why running an executable can technically be copyright infringement. This came up in some anticheat lawsuits.
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