500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library
500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library
If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the lib…
If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the library for damages, wouldn’t you think that would be a major news story? Wouldn’t you think many people would be up in arms about it?
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This is upsetting, but yet again this is ignoring the real reason they are being slammed and is misrepresenting things to try and support (the legitimately amazing) internet archive.
They willfully, intentionally, and very loudly broke the laws/agreements about how many copies of each book they could lend out simultaneously. I hope they win this. I hope more people become aware of this situation.
I also hope more coverage about this starts to be more honest and straightforward about why this is occurring.
You got downvoted by the hivemind because it’s unpopular, but you’re not wrong. IA flew in the face of existing copyright law by opening up their site to unlimited downloads. They knew the existing copyright law, because they had systems in place to comply. Then they intentionally disabled those systems, to blatantly violate existing copyright and licensing agreements. Pretty much everyone who understood copyright law went “uhh this is a horrible idea and you’re going to get sued so hard” but the IA forged ahead anyways.
Their entire argument has basically been “but we’re a library” and completely misses the fact that even public libraries need to comply with existing copyright and licensing laws. They can’t just allow unlimited downloads for ebooks; They purchase a specific number of licenses, can only lend out as many ebooks as they have licenses for, and then have to use time-locked DRM to ensure those rentals get automatically revoked when the check-out time is expired. All of this is well established, and IA used to comply with it fully. But again, they intentionally disabled those systems, which put them in violation of copyright law and their licensing agreements.
I love IA. I use it all the time. But they fucked around, and now they’re finding out that the large studded dildo of copyright violation lawsuits rarely arrives lubed.
I was super pissed at them when they made the move, as stuff like the wayback machine is far too important to risk by making unforced errors like this
Right? The US government was on there side and granted the Wayback machine a copyright exception. Apparently they let that go to the head.