Internet Archive Kills Its Free Digital Library Over Copyright Concerns (inputmag.com) 61
The Internet Archive's National Emergency Library is finished. The non-profit repository for digital preservation, which began offering millions of e-books for free to address the closure of libraries during the pandemic, buckled under a joint lawsuit filed by major publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins. From a report: Publishers said lending out books without compensation was "mass copyright infringement." The digital library will close next week. The archive of books was initially invite-only and only allowed a given file to be downloaded a limited number of times at once, with each rental limited to 14 days. But then the pandemic hit and libraries closed, so the Internet Archive responded by making all the books accessible to everyone, with no limits.
Good! (Score:1)
Good.
What they had effectively done is make a statement "due to COVID19, copyright laws shouldn't apply any more, so we're going to steal everything and give it away for free."
I do understand that the current US copyright law has problems (mostly, the absurdly long copyright period that continues after the authors are long dead.) But deciding unilaterally that they can give away the works of living creators for free was wrong.
...What these people need to be doing is establishing a mission statement that the Internet Archive is there to create an archive of the Internet and no more. The digital library needs to be an entirely separate project by a separate organization...
Yep. And then it should not give other people's work away for free without askin
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Re: Good! (Score:2)
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What is it with people thinking... (Score:1, Insightful)
...They have a right to Free Shit?
Seriously...why do you have the right to the results of other people's labor?
Can we come into your house and take your shit? Can we get into your bank account and take your money? How about borrowing your car for the weekend without asking you?
Re:What is it with people thinking... (Score:4, Insightful)
Intellectual property laws and copyright are intended to provide recognition, protection, and incentive to creators for a limited amount of time. During that time fair use is allowed and after that time the work should become public domain for the benefit of all.
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...They have a right to Free Shit?
Seriously...why do you have the right to the results of other people's labor?
Can we come into your house and take your shit? Can we get into your bank account and take your money? How about borrowing your car for the weekend without asking you?
Yeah. And just imagine if they thought they could just install whatever they wanted on your computer without asking. Or if they just took your youtube ad revenue by filing a sworn statement claiming copyright over your own original content which contains none of their copyrighted material. How about if they tried to extort money out of you because you were sharing a torrent that merely had the same filename as one of their movies?
Re: What is it with people thinking... (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly! Why do the pirates of the Content Mafia think they can just steal our money and not pay for it with actual work, but merely with a copy of its result??
That is as if I'd go into a supermarket with a copy of a $100 bill, and demand that they take my fake $100 for the cart full of meat I'm about to steal, with the statement "I worked HARD for those $100, you thieves, you pirates, you *snorts more cocaine* rape me!". And then you find out that I didn't even work, but it's just the money I leeched off o
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...They have a right to Free Shit?
Seriously...why do you have the right to the results of other people's labor?
Because the US Constitution says so. That's what a 'limited time' refers to. Authors are granted limited protection for a limited time, in return for the benefits their work provides to society. It's called a 'social contract'.
If you do trail maintenance on a public park, you wouldn't expect to suddenly own that park, would you? Your labor doesn't magically take over the public interest.
Can we come into your house and take your shit? Can we get into your bank account and take your money? How about borrowing your car for the weekend without asking you?
You can make a copy of my house, spending your own money to make the copy, and building it on your own property, and
Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just go ahead and say it since I'm sure everyone else is thinking the same thing.
Copyright laws need to be reformed.
Not just the whole time frame for copyright. Which is completely ridiculous at the moment. The notion of digital library needs to be codified into law. Digital preservation should enjoy the same protections as curation does. First sale doctrine should apply to every digital purchase. And that's just getting started...
Copyright is an area of law that is not just out of date. It is woefully out of date. It needs to stop operating like it's 1950 outside.
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It's almost as if copyright law and subsequent rulings did not anticipate the appearance of world wide network that lets over 4 billion people duplicate works almost instantaneously. We still like to cling to arguments based on the printing press in order to justify current copyright law, it's a disconnect between the philosophy behind our legal code and common practice in the real world.
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But seriously, copyright law has nothing to do with printing presses. Forty years ago I could copy books in a copy shop, except it was more expensive than the books (used it for out of print books that I would have preferred to buy). The philosophy behind the legal code is that the author should be rewarded for their work, or we will run out of authors.
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or we will run out of authors.
Something other than money compels people to write. We'd still have authors, but they'd be living in a cardboard box eating cat food. Not ideal admittedly.
We do have ways to compensate authors for their work without granting them ownership for their lifetime. For example they can reassign their work to a corporation, which can keep ownership for multiple lifetimes plus the added bonus of a government sanctioned monopoly with access to both civil courts and federal law enforcement. It's a pretty sweet deal,
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Either copyright law is OK or it needs to be reformed, there isn't a middle ground. That stands regardless of my lack of persuasive argument.
I'd rather make light of the subject because ideally I want to provoke thoughtful insight rather than provoke an (unproductive) argument. Sorry if it was confusing, bad communication on my part. I wrote more and edited out a lot of it because it was too rambling.
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I get your point that authors should be compensated.
However, the library model has existed for *centuries*. What needed to happen here was that the internet library needed to purchase a fixed number of copies of the books and then exclusively loan those out to one person at a time.
Also, I think the compensation for authors is ridiculous in a global market and more than high enough to drive authors to write for free to try and get it. But it's a horrible exploitative model where some writers become wealth
Re:Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, this runs smack into the area where the American system is most corrupt: the circle-jerk of corporate campaign contributions and regulatory capture. And make no mistake, the vast overreach of copyright law is regulatory capture: use of the law in a way that on the surface appears to protect the individual by limiting what businesses can do, but in practice limits what all but the largest corporations can do at the expense of the individual.
As I'll keep saying as often as it comes up: publicly held corporations need to be banned from any sort of participation in politics, from campaign contributions to contributions in kind.
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Covid19 may have started in China, but under President Trump's leadership, the U.S. is #1 in the world.
Why yes... This old gun owning texan is reacting to your racist signature. Pandemics start anywhere. There is a very high probability the "Spanish" flu actually started in Kansas and U.S. troops took it to europe. It damn sure didnt' start in Spain. It got the name because Spain was the only nation not censoring their newspapers due to world war 1.
China acted with average bureaucratic incompetence whic
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Setting the weak personal insult ad hominem aside,
The US is 12th highest number of cases per million out of 195 countries.
The US is now 10th highest number of deaths per million in the world.
In the US, cases per million are increasing by 60 cases per million every day. At the current rate, the US will be 9th highest cases in the world in under a week- right behind Chili. Deaths per million are growing by 3 per million per day. The US will be 9th highest number o deaths in the world in under a week- ri
Re:Copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
We should legalize noncommercial infringement fully.
We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book, listen to music, or watch a movie.
We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free.
What the Internet Archive did and the very idea of the internet itself basically is a global free public library [freepubliclibrary.org].
We need to accept that as the reality we live in and business models need to adapt to that reality. Legal prohibitions to deny reality don't work. File sharing is widespread and inevitable. Adapt.
Internet Archive is theft [Re:Copyright] (Score:4, Informative)
What the Internet Archive did and the very idea of the internet itself basically is a global free public library.
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No. That's what they said they were going to do. But libraries actually buy books, and lend a given book to one person at a time. If they want two copies, so they can lend it to two people at the same time: they buy two books. What Internet Archive did is declare that they can buy one copy of a book and "lend" it out to a million people at once.
Authors like libraries! What authors don't like is people saying "you don't deserve to be paid for your work, I'll just take it for free."
Re:Internet Archive is theft [Re:Copyright] (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand the distinction you're making. What I'm saying is people don't care about the distinction, because it burdens readers unnecessarily, which is why people circumvent it. If the only way you can make money is to limit a reader's ability to access the book, it's not the reader who's wrong for circumventing your limits, it's you that's wrong for trying to impose them to begin with.
Your business model needs to adapt. You need to learn to attract more flies with honey than vinegar. Use carrots, not sticks. Your strict whack-em-with-the-stick enforcement attitude just leads people to ignore your distribution channels entirely and pirate things. You can't stop it, but you can adapt to it and stop screaming into the void about a reality that won't change.
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It doesn't matter what authors think. The modern reality we live in is one where literally anyone can freely copy your work an infinite number of times once they have it. The answer to this isn't to form a gestapo that goes around doing no-knock raids and executing people for sharing copyrighted works.
It's for artists and creators - and most importantly the publishers - to wake the fuck up and realize that today doesn't operate under the same rules and conditions it did 50 years ago and THEY need to adapt t
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We should legalize noncommercial infringement fully.
We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own
So it's okay to pirate anything as long as you don't get paid for it?
That is not going to fly in a world where bandwidth is cheap and infringement is trivial.
Ignore the pandemic and the altruistic motives of the internet archive for a second and look at what they actually did. Headline: "Library starts copying books and giving them away to anyone for free with no limit or expectation of return."
I can't stand the fucking content mafia but I find it hard to accept the Internet Archive's business plan nor a co
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Except that "copying books and giving them away to anyone for free with no limit or expectation of return" is not what archive.org was doing. They had some kind of legal copy backing each of the online works available. And as I understood it, they were lent one at a time for a period of time, after which the item was virtually returned (deleted).
Re: Copyright (Score:2)
"ignore the pandemic"
How about I ignore the copyright
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We should legalize noncommercial infringement fully.
What exactly is "noncommercial infringement"? If I was going to buy a new book for $30 and I find a copy online on a pirate site, and I download it instead of spending $30 to buy the book, is that noncommercial? I'm saving $30 which I would otherwise have spent. If I'm running a pirate site where people don't have to pay for what they download, is that non-commercial? If I sell advertising on that site, is that non-commercial? If I don't sell ads, but I make money on the lecture circuit talking about w
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We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own
No... it's right there in the US Consitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Now, you can call current US copyright and patent law perverted from that original purpose, but that is why it was created.
A friend of mine is a published author. He has a day job - he's not living off of his books. But that doesn't mean he's just spending a ton of time writing and editing
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Easiest way to start (Score:2)
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I'll just go ahead and say it since I'm sure everyone else is thinking the same thing.
Copyright laws need to be reformed.
Yes and no. If the type of reform you are looking for is to prevent situation where people aren't able to get access to library materials under extraordinary circumstances then sure.
If you're saying that a Library reproducing works and giving them away for free without limits to anyone should be permitted, well even I can't get behind that.
I like what the Internet Archive did in an extraordinary circumstance, but make no mistake they were *not* by any definition a library lending material under their new di
Simple solution: Stop buying their books (Score:2, Interesting)
Boycott the publishers who sued the Internet Archive - and don't waver the first time a book comes out that you want to read.
Tell them, every month, on their social channels, why you're not buying their books. Review-bomb their books when they come out, and say you're not going to support companies who bully non-profits that try to provide access to learning during a pandemic.
It'll work if enough people do it.
Is it fair? Well, they didn't stop to ask if what the I.A. was doing was fair under the circumstanc
Re:Simple solution: Stop buying their books (Score:4, Insightful)
But they did - read the article - authors and publishers have been saying that what the IA did was illegal BEFORE anything to do with the pandemic. And they were complaining back then too.
You're just sucking in your anti-Hollywood-billionaires hype and bringing it into the realm of book publishing.
IA took books (still in copyright), scanned them, and put them online for all to see, without consulting the authors or publishers. They got complaints. Then they opened it up so that there was no limits to the amount of people able to see them, and they got sued.
Even a library can't just photocopy a book and put the copy on its shelves next to the original, but that's what IA did, and then told the world.
I know a guy who wrote a textbook. It became a standard texts in the country he lived it. When his publisher/agent was destroyed in 9/11, it crippled him financially. Are you saying that we should all just copy his book and put it on the Internet for free?
Let me give you context: He has published 30+ books. One standard text. Via traditional publishers/agents and self-published via Amazon (since 9/11). For 30 years in total. He spends years writing them, many, many, many hours a day, every day. He teaches, and so some of his books are also educational textboooks. Of the last ones he wrote a few years ago, the country of Kuwait basically stole from him - literally copied his book, changed the name, and put it into schools. But he has published, official, standard text in US schools.
If he's lucky, really lucky, his "royalty cheque" will today cover a cup of coffee and a slice of cake a week, if he sells a dozen copies of each of his books. That includes the new ones and the textbooks.
But you want the IA to just scan his books, stick them online, and pay him nothing, while in the process destroying his entire income stream from them? And 90% of his books aren't even published in the US, but the IA wouldn't see that either. They are literally breaking copyright of international authors too.
The IA are, have been, and always were highly illegal in their whole book/software regard (they have complete MAME roms sets for even the most recent MAME... NOBODY else has got away with hosting those! How Nintendo etc. haven't sued them to oblivion, I can't work out). Mirroring old public sites that are dead is one thing (and legally dubious), claiming "library" status and then letting anyone check out digital copies of in-copyright books was beyond the pale - being a wholesale scan-and-distribute with no regard to copyright law whatsoever? Damn right they were asking to be sued.
I don't particular care about, say, Harper-Collins, but I do care about the guy who wrote the book for them. He isn't getting paid in all this, and yet his life's work is all over the Internet making it impossible for him to get paid. And likely, in these kinds of cases, that guy is an academic who published the book so that people could learn from it. And IA have screwed him over, in perpetuity, by putting it out there for free. Possibly years of work, by dozens of authors, who don't get paid big advances (those are extremely rare until you're already famous) but might get a pittance of a royalty.
IA are in the wrong here. They know it. We all knew it.
If you want copyright-reform, ask for it. Demand it. Protest.
But IA can't just scan in books and put them on the net any more than I can. It's illegal. No matter your personal thoughts or feelings on it, it's illegal. Always has been.
If IA started uploading Disney movies and letting everyone watch for free, do you think Disney would just sit back and allow it? Or if IA just uploaded the whole Getty photo archives? Why does the medium cause the response to differ?
IA overstepped the mark a long time ago. To me, this is long overdue, far too gentle a response from the copyright holders anyway, and they've caved in immediately. And I have absolutely nothing in the way of stuff that I would profit from by having it published or not.
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If you want copyright-reform, ask for it. Demand it. Protest.
But IA can't just scan in books and put them on the net any more than I can. It's illegal. No matter your personal thoughts or feelings on it, it's illegal. Always has been.
You are confused about what a protest is. Nobody gives a shit about legal protests. Only illegal ones actually change anything.
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Even a library can't just photocopy a book and put the copy on its shelves next to the original...
Oh, but they can:
... it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord ...
— 17 U.S. Code Section 108(a) [cornell.edu]
The Internet Archive is a library, and libraries are allowed to make and distribute copies of copyrighted works under some circumstances. Of course Section 108(a) quoted above only allows one copy, but there are five other copyright exceptions for libraries in Section 108. In particular, 108(e) places no limit on the number of copies made of works for which "a copy or phonorecord of the copyrighted work cannot be obtained at a fair price". The only issue there is that the copy must become
Sure, stop stealing (Score:4, Insightful)
Boycott the publishers who sued the Internet Archive - and don't waver the first time a book comes out that you want to read.
Since you already told us you don't intend to pay for books, why should they care? You're saying "I'm going to boycott the books that I used to just steal! Ha! Now I won't steal them! That will show ya!"
...Is it fair? Well, they didn't stop to ask if what the I.A. was doing was fair under the circumstances,
Did the I.A. ask anybody? No. They just decided that it was ok to steal stuff. If "did they stop to ask?" is your criteria, I.A. failed.
A lot of publishers made massive efforts to put large amounts of content out on the web for free [google.com] during the pandemic. But the point is that they voluntarily chose to make things available free.
Yes, consent matters.
Re:Simple solution: Stop buying their books (Score:5, Interesting)
Even simpler solution: start pirating their books.
In 1841 a bill before the British Parliament proposed to extend copyright to the then-unheard-of term of the author's life plus fifty years. Lord Macaulay rose to oppose this:
Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
Macaulay frames his objection in terms of philosophical conservatism. He does not argue for the Utopian idea that the public has a natural right to copyrighted works, nor against the Utopian idea of copyright being a legacy that should be handed down in families. Instead argues laws should reflect what practical experience has shown people are willing to live under, and warns about the dangers of imposing laws upon public that it sees as unreasonable:
Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.
If i had to pick a single place where copyright infringement has become rampant and perceived as legitimate, it would be textbooks. Textbook prices are insane, and by in large it's not because textbook writers are getting rich; in fact contributors of chapters to advanced texts might not get paid at all. The lion's share is going to middlemen who perform functions which, in a modern context, are not really necessary
I could care less about Internet Archive lending out copies of novels and other entertainment. But one of the really useful things the library did was make textbooks available for up to two weeks. That's usually not long enough to work your way through a textbook, but if you are teaching yourself something it's enough to figure out whether a text is useful without paying hundreds of dollars. In a reasonable world, that would be seen as a win-win.
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In 1841 a bill before the British Parliament proposed to extend copyright to the then-unheard-of term of the author's life plus fifty years. Lord Macaulay rose to oppose this:
I agree the current copyright term is absurd, but that isn't what's being discussed here. What IA did was steal works from living writers and say "no, we don't have to pay anybody."
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The lion's share is going to middlemen who perform functions which, in a modern context, are not really necessary
And this is likely to be a thing of the past, now that self-publishing is becoming easier.
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I could care less about Internet Archive lending out copies of novels and other entertainment. But one of the really useful things the library did was make textbooks available for up to two weeks. That's usually not long enough to work your way through a textbook, but if you are teaching yourself something it's enough to figure out whether a text is useful without paying hundreds of dollars. In a reasonable world, that would be seen as a win-win.
In a reasonable world it would be the publisher's decision to do that. Not the decision of some third party saying "I want to steal your stuff, but you should thank me for it! It's exposure, you'll sell more books!"
If it's really a "win-w
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The problem I have with this is you're begging the question by assuming what's going on here is something most people would consider stealing. If a bricks-and-mortar library lends a copy of a book, should they get the publisher's blessing? In fact there were attempts in the late 19th and early 2
Today's Internet is a joke. (Score:1, Insightful)
(TrueScore: 5, Truthful)
My actual experiences with today's Internet:
Publisher = pirate / criminal / thief. (Score:1)
Nothig harms art more.
Nothing harms creative people more.
Nothing is more pointless and useless in times of the Internet, where every idiot can self-publish.
They are actively causing an information amd art dark age since they started existing.
Imaginary property and copyprivilege must become a crime. Like theft, robbery, fraud, usury, artificial scarcity, monopoly, and other words for the same crime.
Only the rich can enforce copyrights / IP (Score:4, Interesting)
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The poor absolutely can enforce their patent, especially when you expect to get a windfall in the lawsuit. Now if you on the other hand like the IA have no legal grounds to stand on then you probably shouldn't attempt to defend your worthless patent.
This is not about David and Goliath. It's more about bankrobber and a bank. What the IA did amounts to commercial scale copyright infringement, and not charging for their product is not a legal defense, and they know it.
I don't like it. It was a dick move to sue
Exactly what was planned.... (Score:1)
Exactly what Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie envisioned when they were pushing for their existence and expansion; "Support the publishers over the common man!!!"
Back to "bookz" (Score:2)
Oh well, people will just go back to pirating what they want, with Internet Archive and the publishers having ZERO control over what readers have downloaded.
Censored (Score:1)
Re: Censored (Score:1)
You are acting as if they care about ideals, or future generations.
Who cares if the world turns into a locked down, violent, toxic, dark ages shithole.
After all it's not their problem, they will be dead by then after all
Copyright law (Score:1)
As it stands now, it's life of the creator + eternity.
With that in mind, how is all of this going to be handled? Are the kids 30 generations later still going to get royalties for what some 'singer' chanted into a tape recorder centuries ago?