Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
Internet Archive fans beg publishers to stop emptying the open library.
You're viewing a single thread.
I was looking for resources for a custom LLM and noticed they had a ton of copyrighted books and wondered to myself how the heck that was legal
I guess this answers that
Just like regular libraries have copyrighted books: they lend them to one person at a time.
They definitely weren't monitoring the one at a time rule... I downloaded the file and now have it forever
Sounds like a you problem. ;)
How does that make sense? How does putting a "Download PDF" button on their site with no restrictions make this a "me" problem?
You should obviously delete those downloaded files like a good boy.
Which IA failed to do, which is why they got sued, and why they can’t lend those publishers’ books at all anymore.
I have no sympathy.
Just want to let you know why you're being downvoted. It's not because you're wrong. From a legal perspective you're right. This court case was decided this way because you're right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There's a meme for this.
"You're not wrong. You're just an asshole."
It's an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don't poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn't matter if you're "in the right". The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it's what they're best at.
"No one should stand up for new rights. Don't rock the boat bro."
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
What does the Mafia do? Show up, "Wow you got a lot of valuable things here Be a shame if someone broke them. Best listen to us."
The Mafia leverages potential of damage to existing value to extract cooperation.
I see very little difference here between the Mafia and the plaintiff.
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
Yes, let's just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it's a quote! That's fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting "I don't care about your rules, just try and stop me!" was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It's a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I'm not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don't deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised... but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
Omg this can't be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.
One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I'm open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.
I only took issue with your regressive philosophy
The "regressive philosophy" you're accusing me of holding is the opposite of what I said. There's your misunderstanding to be corrected.
I don't like the publishers, I think copyright has gone bananas with its various extensions over the years, I want to see them fought and defeated in court. The problem here is who is doing the fighting.
Imagine a scenario where there's a ravenous man-eating bear in the woods. There's two people available to fight it; a grizzled woodsman who makes it his entire business to go out and fight bears, and the village librarian who's carrying around a backpack full of irreplaceable books. For some reason the librarian is out there poking the bear with a stick, and when the bear didn't initially respond he started whacking it over the nose. Now the bear is chewing on the librarian's leg and the librarian is crying out "oh no, my backback full of books is in danger!"
Well duh. You shouldn't have been carrying that backpack into harm's way like that. Nobody is in the least bit surprised that the bear attacked the librarian under those circumstances. I don't have to be on the bear's side to understand how this situation was going to go down and call the librarian an idiot for willingly getting into it.
The woodsman (the EFF) should have been the ones to take this fight. They're better at it, it's their job, and if they fail they don't risk that precious backpack in the process. The librarian should have kept his books safely ensconced until the fight was over and it was safe for him to bring them out. If he really wanted those books distributed in the meantime, there are some sites who are already out there running around under the bear's nose taking that risk for their own reasons; let them continue taking those risks for now. The IA's job is to protect the archive.
"Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor."
How you like them strawmen?
It's a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I'm usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it's essence. Tho it doesn't seem very deep..
"Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor."
So in short.
Having laws at all is a dictatorship.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I'd ignore. It's easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.
"You're not wrong. You're just an asshole."
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
You should strive to improve as a person rather than be content being a stagnant asshole
I know who I am.
But you should know who you could grow to be.
Exactly. This is the best I’ve got. I could be so much worse.
Don't restrict yourself with a fixed mindset.
Growth mindset. You could be better. Always.
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won't be on the internet for very long.
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn't have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we'll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he's not an asshole for being right. He's an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I'm not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren't originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn't worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that's effectively indefinite.
It wasn't just "the corpos", you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
doesn't Disney count as 'the corpos'?
It counts as a corpo. Not multiple corpos.
Credit where credit is due.
"With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!" ~ERB's depiction of Walt Disney.
It’s not just about laws or systems. It’s ethically wrong to steal works from people.
As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn't.
I have talked to a few published authors (most unsuccessful) and listened to a few successful published authors, and they all say the same as you. Some of them (esp. successful) give away free books on their website. They just want people to read their books.
The ones complaining here aren't the authors, but the publishers.
Yeah, even the big names tend to not care much as long as nobody else is profiting off of their work. Agents and publishers, they tend to get right snippy about piracy lol.
Mind you, there is a segment of working authors that do suffer in their ability to go from a part time, almost hobbyist situation into a proper career of it. They tend to see the lack of sales as more of a problem, but they tend to be younger and didn't ever see how impossible breaking in to traditional publishing was. It's easy to look at your self published income and think "oh, if people had to buy these, I'd be making a living at this instead of it being barely enough to cover expenses for writing". But, most of the time, back before self publishing was actually a valid and useful route, they wouldn't have been selling anything, they'd be hoping for an agent to get their first sale for them.
And I'll never tell anyone that they can't profit from their own ideas and labor, and expect anyone consuming it to pay up. Authors that object, that's fine by me (and I actually don't pirate their stuff). But like you said, most writers would rather someone read and enjoy for free rather than not read at all.
Unequivocally no.
No.
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
Copyright serves a very useful purpose. It's just been twisted into something it wasn't meant to be.
You misunderstand me. When I say, "copyright is bullshit" I don't mean that I don't like it, or that it doesn't work. I mean it's bullshit in the same way that the crystal healing or mushroom cancer therapy is bullshit.
You cannot steal an idea, it's impossible. So creating laws that punish people for doing things like copying a digital file doesn't make sense. Copyright supposedly was created to create an incentive for artists and inventors to make cool and enriching stuff.
But what it actually does is protects business savvy people and allows them to game the system, get first mover advantage over all others, and then punish any potential competitors in that space.
As if nobody was creating artwork or inventing useful devices before copyright law came into being.
Just because something is useful doesn't make it good, atomic bombs are useful, factory farming is useful.
I think the only thing people should be protected from as a creator is fraud. You can copy a person's works and modify or distribute them in any manner you see fit, as long as it's clear that you are not the original creator. You cannot claim to be them or to be affiliated with them unless you actually are.
That is what the principle of copyleft is all about. If copyright worked in principle, then you should see millions of individual creators enriched and protected by it.
But you don't see that, instead, a few giant mega corps and super wealthy tycoons own and control enormous swaths of "intellectual property" and small time creators struggle to make ends meet and are sued into oblivion by the same powerful groups.
Sure it's great for boosting wealth and GDP, but that boost does not apply to most of the population, it applies to the tiny elite that has now captures enormous segments of the market and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.
Copyright is structurally flawed, it doesn't work because it cannot work. It's fundamentally based on a the nonsensical concept of "intellectual property" which as I said at the beginning, is bullshit.
I'm not sure I misunderstood you at all.
Copy left, incieldentally, is a form of copyright.
It only exists to counter the existing framework. In an ideal world, nobody would honor or respect the idea of "intellectual property" and hence, only fraud would be punished.
Exactly. Copyright used to last 14 years and required an application for a one-time extension. Let's go back to that.
100%.
The whole point was to "promote the useful arts" by allowing creators SOME time to make money off their work. People would be way less likely to write a book, a news artucle, make a movie, etc if someone else could just instantly sell copies and you couldn't support yourself with the work.
But the whole point was to give you enough protections to make it worth your while.
If you can't make enough money off of the work in 14 (or 28) years for it to have been worth it, then it's not worth it.
No one has ever said "if this isn't going to give me the exclusive right to make copies for 80 years after my death, then there's no point making it". And that was the only point to copyright. Doing the minimum to allow people to realistically make new stuff.
Exactly. This was created like 200 years ago when books took years to print and distribute. Since information travels much more quickly now, a work is probably going to succeed or fail in the first 5 years. So drop 14 to 10 and it's probably more than enough.
Companies can still use trademark indefinitely, so they still get their brand protections. Screw modern copyright.
no?
Redistributing them, especially for money, maybe.
They should have known better..
"Because what is legal is always right.
And what is right is always legal."No?
In a fascist state, your mindset is welcome, "Well they broke the rule, they must pay," but do you never abstract one more level? Is the rule itself breaking something?
Those who downvote you say yes. Nuance is important. The rule has two main affects that I see.
- Direct effect (the goal) :Publishers maintain a monopoly on bookselling low value books, the structure of their business preventing any competition.
Okay lets think about #1. Is that good or bad?
- Indirect effect : the members of that society now have a restricted access to knowledge.
Okay lets think about #2. Is that good or bad?
Being critical in thought enough to recognize the flaws of the first quote is key.
This isn't about right or wrong though. It's explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say "Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won't you little chickenshit." then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I'm not holding my breath.
It would be more accurate if you said, "This is not about right and wrong (for me)."
If you say it's not about right and wrong, dead stop, then you are pledging full faith to the institutions, the very ones we are critiquing.
Basically, you are dismissing my opinion as misguided, dismissing me as missing the point and I am telling you it was expressed exactly as intended.
In short, you are arguing on the wrong conceptual meta-level for me to respond without dismissing my own claim. If I take as True that "this isn't about right and wrong" (it is), then I am setting aside the power I have in a democratic society to say, "Fuck this I'm changing it." Maybe we've just been stuck in gridlock politics, with a ruling class that strips and monetizes every aspect of humanity that the society today doesn't realize the power citizens wield.
Not sure. Been fun to think and share thoughts with you though. Thanks for your time and have a nice night.
An impasse is a perfectly acceptable outcome on a sane platform like Lemmy.
They claimed to use the same protections as others. Is there a more accurate article about how their lending was faulty?
During Covid, they lent out multiple copies of the same book when they only had physical access to one copy. It would be like your local library making Xerox copies of their collection and handing them out. There’s no protections for that.
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That's literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
They should have poked the bear with a separate legal entity so the obvious resulting legal loss wouldn't effect their core operations.
I support the idea as long as it's for dead authors/out of print books, but from what I understand they were just letting people 'borrow' anything? That's just stupid (if idealistic)
That is what happens though, it's clear about that.
(citation needed)
McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access.
— https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-internet-archive-hurt-sales/, linked in a link in the article
FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?
If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.
Unfortunately, that's like saying everyone has the right to read any book that IA usually archives for free at any time. Do I agree with that? Yes. Does it hurt intellectual property? Yes. There's obviously evidence that readers used the service a lot. I agree with the principle, but they should've just temporarily "merged" with public libraries and increased borrowing limits for books in stock, not allow everyone in the United States to just get a book as long as they have less than 9 other books as well.
Permanently Deleted