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EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

torrentfreak.com

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Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#81
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that they have an easy opt-out system. But this is kind of like spammers who have easy opt-out... better than nothing, but I shouldn't be getting spammed in the first place.

It's worse than that. They're violating copyrights, i.e., stealing, and then saying "if you don't want us to steal from you, we have an opt out form you can fill out." EDIT: People are downvoting this because I equated violating copyrights to stealing, which is odd because US law explicitly defines copyright infringement as stealing property. That's not debatable; it's a simple fact. (A fact that apparently bothers s…

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#82
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that they have an easy opt-out system. But this is kind of like spammers who have easy opt-out... better than nothing, but I shouldn't be getting spammed in the first place.

It's worse than that. They're violating copyrights, i.e., stealing, and then saying "if you don't want us to steal from you, we have an opt out form you can fill out." EDIT: People are downvoting this because I equated violating copyrights to stealing, which is odd because US law explicitly defines copyright infringement as stealing property. That's not debatable; it's a simple fact. (A fact that apparently bothers s…

Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist.

If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too expensive at any price.

You can make the argument that capitalism should exclude me from ever being allowed to read it, because my willingness to pay is below the seller's willingness to sell. Fair enough.

However, it's pretty tough to calculate actual economic damages here - I was never going to buy the book, at any price. And I haven't deprived anyone else of the ability to buy the book. You might say to me: "But you are clearly in the target market - you wanted the book enough to pirate and read it." I disagree - by definition, the target market must consist of people who want the product enough to pay for it.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#83
post #2

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through th…

Fair use is a term and redefining is a big hill to climb but a worthly one.

All copyrights expire and all works have fair use clauses. It's just a matter of when and what country is issuing the copyright.

You can give away free digital books. Project Gutenburg has been doing it for years. Even if the author's family doesn't like it. It's not stealing either. It's simply waiting for the copyright to expire.

In this case they are using borrowing like a libruary as a defensive with covid hardship thrown in to justify removing a limit on the amount of books they can lend.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#84
[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se.

If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no worse off. In an "ideal" society, the free sharing of knowledge would be not just allowed, but encouraged.

I imagine there's been measurable harm to our society's cultural and scientific advancement because copyright forces us to recreate others' work instead of building off of it.

But what does that world look like? Quite frankly, I'm not sure. Of course, we can't just abolish copyright with no replacement; it's certainly necessary to reward the creation of this work somehow.

One thing I've thought about is a sort of "crowdfunded patronage" model, where the creator of a work declares upfront how much money they want to make off of it, and releases it into the public domain once they've received that much money.

Another possibility is drastically reducing the term of copyright to 20 years or so. That'd still give 20 years to exploit the work—and I imagine most copyrighted works make most of their money in the first 20 years—while allowing others to reuse the work much more quickly.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#85
post #61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is abuse of copyright. IA did bad, and should not be rewarded for this behavior.

And (modern) copyright is abuse of a legal system.

I don't like copyright either; I think that it is bad and it (and patents, too) should be abolished. However, there are some other opinions (for example, I have seen the suggestion that you have copyright limited to only a few years, that after the first year you have to pay a fee, and other changes to improve it), but I would be OK to just abolish copyright entirely. I don't want to copyright my own writings either, and would rather be public domain, so that is what I do.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#86

I'd love for the Internet Archive to prevail here, but honestly it was quite boneheaded to do this legal experiment under the same corporate umbrella as their archival work. At this point they should proceed with a damage mitigation strategy of selling off their servers and storage to a second entity at fair market value (maybe "Archive Cloud"), and renting continued access. This way even if the IA organization is ba…

I still wonder what their plan was in anticipation of this confrontation. Worst Case: Chirping (Not seeing this coming at all) Naive Case: "Surely they will come to recognize our 'superior' 'moral' arguments and cease their evil ways" Historically ignorant case: "The people will stand up and join us. We are invincible" (aka every rebel ever...most fail)

I don't know. There was that point right after society became aware of COVID that everyone was imagining pulling together for the common good, before the political machine grabbed the crisis and performed the all-too-American response of corporate bailouts coupled with tough luck for everyone else. I can only imagine they got caught up in that feeling, and thought everyone being stuck at home would be a good time to demonstrate the regressiveness of copyright. Unfortunately copyright infringement doesn't have equitable punishments like actual property crime but rather is playing with fire. If they had thought ahead, they could have pulled a similar stunt but with definite inventories of books sitting on the shelves of closed libraries. Alas.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. They're violating copyrights, i.e., stealing, and then saying "if you don't want us to steal from you, we have an opt out form you can fill out." EDIT: People are downvoting this because I equated violating copyrights to stealing, which is odd because US law explicitly defines copyright infringement as stealing property. That's not debatable; it's a simple fact. (A fact that apparently bothers s…

Copyright infringement is not stealing.

That's a slogan I hear a lot. Unfortunately, the law disagrees. Copyright infringement is defined as a stolen property offense:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. They're violating copyrights, i.e., stealing, and then saying "if you don't want us to steal from you, we have an opt out form you can fill out." EDIT: People are downvoting this because I equated violating copyrights to stealing, which is odd because US law explicitly defines copyright infringement as stealing property. That's not debatable; it's a simple fact. (A fact that apparently bothers s…

Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…

Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#89
post #2

EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through th…

> EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team.

I don't understand how people have such certainty about this.

You have a situation where there are libraries who have bought millions of books from authors/publishers. The authors have been paid. Then, there is a pandemic and the libraries are closed, so the public has lost access to all the books they've paid for.

Giving them back access to the books they've paid for is obviously wrong? They're definitely going to lose?

It would be one thing if they had lent out more books than existed in all of the closed libraries, but is there any evidence that this is the case? That seems quite implausible, considering the massive number of books that have been paid for in all of those libraries.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. They're violating copyrights, i.e., stealing, and then saying "if you don't want us to steal from you, we have an opt out form you can fill out." EDIT: People are downvoting this because I equated violating copyrights to stealing, which is odd because US law explicitly defines copyright infringement as stealing property. That's not debatable; it's a simple fact. (A fact that apparently bothers s…

Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…

> the target market must consist of people who want the product enough to pay for it.

That in fact doesn't work even in the case of actual stealing, otherwise we are forced to conclude that the target market for luxury cars includes teenage kids who hot-wire them and take them for joyrides.

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