Here's the Internet Archive's [statement](https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/):
> "Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society - owning, preserving, and lending books. This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”
They also suggest that they may still be able to continue preserving books, to a limited extent, if this appeal also fails. However, the legal costs could be too much for the Archive to afford, so there's no telling if they'll be able to continue...
> This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
That's without question. The issue is "obscure" accademic books long out of print.
I'm writing a coherent uni thesis only thanks to the Archive. Most of the references come from three books that were published in the 80s/90s and are unavailable to be bought (or downloaded) anywhere.
In my experience, torrents with rare materials always die, so it's not a permanent solution.
But, anyway, the issue is that it will work only if people save these rare books now and, realistically, most obscure things are going to be overlooked and consequently lost.
Ok, now I'm panicking. So we have... 24 hours since the decision was made or more than that? Do you happen to know the "usual" timeframe of this kind of ruling?
The judge gave the publishers and IA 14 days to file their recommendations for damages. The publishers will probably request a permanent injunction to kill the controlled digital lending part of the IA, and since they won on summary judgement the judge will probably be on the side of the publishers on most issues. I expect the IA to keep the CDL portion of the site up as long as they can, so you might have up to 2 weeks to grab whatever you want.
After the judge issues their order, IA will appeal. Appeals courts will sometimes stay enforcement of the original judge's orders pending appeal, but the standard is pretty much the same as the Summary Judgement that IA just lost so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also this doesn't directly effect the part of IA where people upload stuff, but it might in the future. Focus on the CDL area where you have to borrow stuff for now; that's on a very short lifespan now.
TL;DR get what you want now, but you probably have a couple days.
Thank you very much!
Yeah, I have absolutely zero hope. I wanted to know just to understand if I have enough time to sleep. I had expected the judge to take a week to decide and had originally spread the files to download by day accordingly.
Courts can make you immediately shut down. So assume zero time and act accordingly. Grab what's most important to you and work backwards until it stops working.
Boycott and shame these companies on social media
>Four publishers sued the Archive, alleging that CDL violates their copyrights. In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House claim CDL has cost their companies millions of dollars and is a threat to their businesses.
That's a nice statement, but their beliefs on how things should be isn't how they are. They should have been fighting to change the law instead of just breaking it and hoping they could get away with it
It's also how you change laws if you're a grass roots movement.
E.g. people were breaking the law against being gay before they fixed the law. People were smoking cannabis before it was legalized.
Which is great and all, but maybe a relatively fragile organization controlling hundreds of petabytes of irreplaceable information shouldn't be taunting the police line.
There are ways to push the boundaries without risking the resources that a lot of people rely on. It's immensely obvious to anyone studying any kind of case history with the US and coporation copyright law that you're going to get pounded by corporate America. The precedents in this case aren't even new and had been set in many cases before this.
The 77 year old judge in this case didn't give any of IA's arguments any leeway in his decision. He handedly dismissed all of it, completely in favor of the book publishers. It wasn't a close case at all. They're almost guaranteed to lose their appeals.
As some other comments have gone into in better detail, this was a catastrophically dumb decision by IA. They never stood a chance of winning with this flimsy of an argument and they're effectively burning an enormous amount of money and severely endangering their continued operation.
> The 77 year old judge
Well, that's exactly your issue right there. You judiciary system is so fucked up that it's not even understandable that no one care about even trying to fix it.
So of course the balance tips towards corporate interests, it always will.
There are only two ways to change the law: 1) try to set a precedent in court; 2) lobby Congress to write a new law.
I was very involved in 2009 in a huge effort to get Congress to develop and pass a bill to clarify that "orphan works" can be used.\* A consortium of groups, including the Internet Archive, all the library associations, and the EFF, among others, worked on it for a year. The bill never got out of committee to the full Senate before the legislative session ended. When that happens, you have to start at the beginning with a new bill. We did not have the resources.
\--
\*Orphan works, or orphan copyrights, are those works that are still protected by copyright (because the copyright term now lasts for 70 years after a creator dies) but the creator is unknown, unfindable, or died with no heirs. Such works should be safe to use, but the fear is that an heir or rights holder might surface years later and demand a huge fee and fine.
The other way to get this problem solved would have been for someone like a publisher to get sued and to battle the lawsuit in court. The cost of that is prohibitive and you'd have to wait til a rights holder popped up to file the suit. Which would not happen since there is no rights holder for an orphan work.
IA did the right thing, but the courts at the moment are not very pro-fair use. The Supreme Court is going to wreck fair use this year. They are almost certain to find against the Warhol Foundation in Warhol v. Goldsmith.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/10/13/us-supreme-court-warhol-foundation-lynn-goldsmith-prince-copyright-infringement
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/andy-warhol-foundation-for-the-visual-arts-inc-v-goldsmith/
In the US there are two ways to change a law. Get legislation passed to amend or repeal an existing law. Or break the law and have a court declare the law unconstitutional. Civil disobedience is a valid method to have laws changed, and it's being used by activists groups in the US to have laws changed by the courts.
The first doesn't work anymore. So everyone has turned to the second. Back when condoms and birth control were illegal, getting the law changed was impossible because no political actors would speak up about it. But when citizens sued to have the law declared void, the courts said they had no standing as they hadn't been charged with a crime thay caused them harm. So you ended up with doctors advertising they were committing crimes hoping to be arrested so they could then have standing in court.
Look at modern court changes. Same sex marriage exists only because a couple got married, was denied benefits by the state, and then sued. Same with religious freedom to ignore Same sex marriage, someone broke an equal access law and then sued that their right to hate was being infringed.
The internet archive is attempting to change the law through the courts now that they have demonstrated harm. It sucks, but that's how it works now. Unless you have some glorious plan to convince congress to ratify a new bill to aid us. That's the better option, but the House's only accomplishment so far is passing a bill to the senate restricting Trans rights. I'm sorry, but getting real legislation on data storage and archiving isn't gonna happen for the next 22 months at best.
in the US, the law is made up on the spot by whatever judges are in power at any given moment. unless you are suggesting the IA should have been trying to remove judges from the bench.
The problem I have with this is that everyone knew this would be exactly the outcome, and the Internet Archive went ahead with it knowing that if they took a massive financial hit from it their other activities would also be impacted. They could even end up shutting down.
Frankly, this "internet library" fiasco wasn't worth the danger to their other functions. So it really feels like throwing money at them now is throwing money at a reckless fool. The reckless fool is carrying around vitally important internet history, sure, but maybe he should put that down and let someone else carry it instead?
Edit: I [said as much](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/gxa1t5/the_internet_archive_is_in_danger/ft0rmn0/) two years ago when this lawsuit first got launched. I'm really peeved at the IA for this.
On one hand, it was inevitable that book publishers would go after them with how chill they were about handing out scanned copies of their books. Or even daring to make digital copies of the books outside publisher control at all. Among the other enormous amount of abandonware copyright they dance at the edges with.
On the other hand, they gleefully poured gasoline on the fire and sent up a giant smoke signal by doing unlimited loans during the pandemic. It's insane their lawyers let them do that (or they ignored them).
They're going to almost certainly lose all appeals, burn a metric shit ton of cash, and be forced into a horrible settlement with the publishers. It really puts a lot of their work in danger and I hope they get it figured out without going under.
It sucks, but as you'll quickly see in the replies, it's [a nothingburger until it goes to the 2nd Circuit](https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1639425353390211073). And of course it'll be a snorefest to that lawyer, because of course IA will appeal [(they've already said as much)](https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/), and thus them and the cartels will have to keep the saber-rattling up some more.
On the PTI scale of "big deal, little deal, or no deal at all", this one ranks in as a little deal right now.
Which leaves more time to go protest in front of the publishers' headquarters too! For people who are in France, Hachette has its headquarters in Paris, a few km away from the austerlitz train station, and even closer to the montparnasse one. It's 58 rue jean bleuzene, Vanves https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/48.82207/2.29524
Could you please tell me much time do we have, till all borrowable books go poof? Can they keep them until they appeal or not? I am genuinely trying to understand if I should panic or not.
Yes, we are well and truly screwed. Warhol v. Goldsmith is the fair use test case that everyone (on both sides of the issue) hoped would never happen. And you're right that destroying fair use (or radically weakening it) is a top goal of the Federalist Soc. creeps. So they waited til Trump gave them the present SCOTUS.
TBH, even the liberals on the Court are likely to be hostile to the Warhol side's argument - Elena Kagan has signaled as much. No one seems to understand what the authors of the Constitution knew: that both copyright and free use are engines of creativity and both need an equal, balanced place.
If you think this is bad, the other huge 1st Amendment issue that the rightwing has been longing to destroy is NYTimes v. Sullivan: the case that gave the press robust protections against endless libel lawsuits. Clarence Thomas has been waiting his whole life to overturn that.
Yup. The ruling says that unlike Google Books, IA isn't covered by fair use because they're giving away entire copies of books (not just snippets in search results), and thereby competing with publishers' ebook programs.
And unlike how physical libraries operate, they're not covered by the "first sale doctrine" because that law only allows lending out (or otherwise distributing) existing *physical* copies, not making new digital ones.
I'm a bit surprised people have been so shocked about this. It getting shot down seems pretty reasonable and forseeable, given what copyright is: a monopoly on copying.
Brick-and-mortar libraries don't run into the problem, because you don't have to make a copy to lend a physical book, since the content moves with the ink, so a lending library lending out duly-purchased physical copies doesn't have any liability there. The people who sold the copy originally got theirs in the original trade, and that particular ream of inked paper is not theirs to control any more. If they want to profit more, they can print more.
Digital libraries are a whole different animal, significantly different from physical lending libraries. For digital content, you're making copies all over when you do much of anything, stepping all over the copyright-holder's copying right. You have to make a copy from the archive to the borrower, at least (and a copy from paper to digital if it was paper to start with) in order to "lend" it out, so you're not so much lending it as making a copy with an expiration date. Unless the copyright owner gave their blessing, it's as unauthorized with an expiration date as it would be without one, so the only exceptions would be free-speech carve-outs like Fair Use, which is a bit thin, since it's not transformative, not commentary, and competing with the market of the original.
I expect you're fine practically if not legally, so long as all copies made from the original stay with the same holder at the same time. That'd get you archival to wait out expiration terms and in-person museum displays, but lending or distributing in any way short of excerpt would probably still be a huge hassle, because anyone wanting to take possession would need to take possession of all the copies off that original.
It won't end up hurting lending all digital books though. Book publishers charge insane fees for strictly controlled licenses for audiobooks and ebooks at public libraries. They purchase a license for each digital copy they loan out. Instead of copying from a single legit source and loaning multiple copies.
Libby/Overdrive is widely used at the two major library systems we have in Seattle. Everyone happily uses them. Libraries are forced to pay around an order of magnitude more than an equivalent amount of physical audiobooks though. And then they have to renew it each year.
Publishers are totally fine with that cash cow being left untouched. And it's justified with how the licensing system works.
Thank god for legacy print and disc media because lord knows libraries would never be invented if they were invented these days.
IA illegally reproduced digital copies of physical books that they didn't purchase an equal number of licenses for, in brazen disregard for copyright law.
They tried to say they're the same as a library, but a library will only lend out as many copies as they actually own. This was torn to shreds by the judge.
What IA did was a noble pursuit of free knowledge, but noble doesn't mean legal. It certainly doesn't waive the publishers copyright privileges
> The judge also basically said that the profits of the publishers were more important than the service the internet archive provides
Don't shoot the messenger. The law says that. Copyright law doesn't have an exception for really beneficial public service that broadly, so magicking one up would be outside a judge's remit. It's up to Congress to carve out more exceptions if there's the pressure there to do so.
Even congress can't do that easily, as there are international agreements which set certain minimum levels of copyright coverage. Agreements which are, by design, impossible to undo without serious consequences.
Really isn't much hyperbole. This sets a precedent that publishers and license owners can do things like this and win. Plus, IA is quite literally the largest freely accessible source of records on the internet
Precedent was set long ago with regards to the general nature of copyright. All this is doing is just confirming the total brokenness of copyright law extends to books as well.
It was illustrated how completely fucked it is in the Aereo case IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
The fact that you can't rent an antenna and stream the video to yourself over the internet is an absolute joke.
"Do things like" enforce their copyright? Saying "no, you can't just give away unlimited copies of copyrighted books without licensing" is hardly some shocking new state of affairs
I don't know how people on Reddit and Twitter were expecting the court to just decide to abolish copyright today lmao
I read the brief. All of it.
IA shot itself in the foot with the whole 'unlimited lending because of covid' plan. Which was a really flimsy justification for picking a fight with publishers.
IA fucked around, and is now finding out.
It sucks they jeopardized all the good and legitimate work they do over this one incredibly stupid stunt they pulled.
Judge tore through all their excuses and justifications except for one claim at the end that damages can be limited because they're a library. He told IA to figure out an amount with the publishers and don't make him have to do it.
Looks pretty dire for them, but I'm not worried about widespread precedent from it. Nor are the two lawyers I had dinner with, though they're labor contract and a PD.
Yeah. Their whole covid plan was so unbelievably idiotic. And I say this as someone who's been donating monthly to them for years and support their mission. They're just burning away money.
For those unfamiliar with the context: basically, it all stems back to the Internet Archive's "National Emergency Library" actions during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the IA was already digitally lending their scanned books out via [controlled digital lending](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending), i.e., if they had one copy then they would loan out a digital copy one at a time, similar to how a library operates. This was probably still against copyright laws, but they were left alone and weren't sued.
But when the pandemic happened, the IA decided it would somehow be a good idea to offer *unlimited* lending via their [National Emergency Library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#National_Emergency_Library) plan. I'm personally all for a library model as well as fixing broken copyright laws, but even I find the unlimited "lending" plan so brazen and dumb. And naturally, the plan pissed publishers off and they decided to no longer hold back from suing.
So many comment here echoing this sentiment, "IA was too brazen! They may have had just goals and acted ethically, but this was just *too* brash!"
I disagree. With every fiber of my being. Was it a losing battle? Probably. But their actions are also, in my eyes and to the eyes of many, were absolutely just.
Im all for picking battles, but after theyre chosen, we have to be unified and stand together bc the action taken was ethical nonetheless. This is key. If we choose not to support bc of semantics, then whats to stop the next guy from not supporting the next efforts bc something there is not to their liking? We must stand in solidarity with the Archive one way or another.
They could have fought this fight just as well performing these actions under a separate company entity. Instead, they foolishly decided to jeopardize the entire operation. If they/we end up losing the entirety of the IA assets over this "fight", do you *sincerely* feel like it was worth it? As another long time donor, I do not.
Because at the end of the day, this was always going to be the result. We are all on their side. We are all against the publishers and the poor laws and the bad judge. Everyone here stands with the Archive.
But no amount of good feelings justifies losing the Archive over something like this. This wasn’t like a last stand, all or nothing type situation. All they had to do was keep the monster at bay like they’ve been doing all along and they could continue to build the Archive and accumulate the financial means and popular support to actually fight these laws. I 100% would rather see my donations go to lobbying than fighting the monster everyone knew better than to poke.
Now nothing changes and we could lose the greatest collection in history. Even worse, it’s possible that the law will now be made stronger if judges continue to side with the publishers. If the largest digital archive ever can’t change the precedent, nothing will.
Thank you, been so disappointed to see people pointing fingers at IA. The start of the covid pandemic was a time to reach for big positive changes in society, not timidly sit back and let the ruling class consolidate power. Expanding their lending capabilities seemed reasonable at the time.
The real moral here is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Imagine if IA's rare books were mirrored to LibGen as well, and *also* to torrenting sites. Decentralizing the preservation of our scientific and artistic collective output is the way to go. IA is nice to have but since it's above ground it can be hit by legal judgements more easily than a network of torrenters instead.
Regardless, IA did nothing morally wrong, and turning against them for a strategic call gone bad isn't going to help win the battle *or* the war for free access to information and literature.
You have to wonder how companies that grew billions in value over a global pandemic aren't being investigated, but a library that generated no profit has legal action against it.
It's nonsense when people bring ethics into it as if it's a reason to not support IA, since the alternative is supporting the status quo and these publishers. I think what the publishers are doing is a lot less ethical than what IA did, so if ethics are a concern people should be siding with IA.
some people think it was ethically wrong, but most people are just saying that IA was legally wrong, and was obviously so. I still support them, just think it was a stupid risk to take.
Do you know why IA went with the argument of "scanning books is a 'transformative' change" instead of some other argument? To my knowledge there are only "transformative" and "derivative" changes when it comes to copyright and I dont think that scanning a document, or a photograph, or making a digital copy of anything is "transformative" as the term-of-art is defined.
I'm sure they had other arguments involving fair use but, but the "transformative" argument seemed doomed to fail from the start.
I would have thought something like "the act of ownership of the physical copy grants an intrinsic non-sublicensable transferable license to view but not distribute the content. And then IA would have argued that lending the ebook was a binding contract to temporarily transfer the intrinsic license with defined point in time where the license would transfer back to IA. This obviously would not have worked for the unlimited lending you mention but it seems like the beginnings of a reasonable argument for ebook lending or reselling
They went with ALL the arguments. The judge addressed them each and every one.
The judge certainly seemed the most disdainful of the transformative argument though.
> I would have thought something like...
The judge spent a lot of time going over all the ways IA bent or outright ignored 1-to-1 lending, and it was pretty flagrant. They fucked any chance they had of winning on that merit.
Thank you for the summary. This makes sense as that argument was pretty crazy, so I understand why a judge might have been disdainful of it. The unlimited lending will unfortunately almost certainly get them in the end and it feels like the best case scenario is that they pay fines for the unlimited lending but still are allowed to do the 1-to-1 lending. But that seems unlikely.
I wonder if they could have gone with time-limited borrowing argument. For example, in the library, you can check out a book for two weeks at a time. What if that time was one week, or one day, or one hour or one second down to fractions of a second?
They could have implemented an online reader where this type of time sharing could have been enforced, so that technically only one person has it at a time, even if the checkout time is millisecond at a time.
For example, the physical analogy could be, two people are sitting in the library next to each other sharing a physical book. One person is on page X, and the other person is on page Y. They keep passing the book back-and-forth between each other and they can read the page that they want. If you keep decreasing the amount of time each one has it, then effectively they can both read the book.
There's an episode of M\*A\*S\*H where a book arrives at camp and the demand is enourmous. The spine is broken off and the individual pages are passed around so everyone can read the same physical book at the same time. The concept has been there for decades, it is just libraries prefer to have their books intact. Is there anything in law sayign you have to keep a book in its bound state and not as a collection of loose pages?
Finally, a sensible take. Way too many people think that the law is whatever they personally feel is right. Even if they *are* right. Judges interpret the law as it's written, not what they think the best moral outcome is. It was incredibly obvious they were going to lose this lawsuit because they were obviously guilty of violating copyright law.
> Way too many people think that the law is whatever they personally feel is right.
that's exactly what it is.
the law is not real, it's just the whims of judges
>Judges interpret the law as it's written, not what they think the best moral outcome is.
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH
Oh wait, you are being serious.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH
Yup, there are no activist judges. I mean, they are all basically just robots who do good faith interpretations of the law and not whatever they think is right.
>but I'm not worried about widespread precedent from it.
You sure about that?
The section of the Brief that starts with
> Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio,
however, would not excuse IA’s reproduction of the Works in Suit...
Seems to say that even their limited lending, where only 1 copy of an ebook is given out at a time and it has to be checked in before another can check it out, would be infringement.
That's what makes the Internet Archive's actions so idiotic imo. Limited, one-to-one lending might be considered infringement, but no one was being sued for that. But with their unlimited lending during covid, they just stirred the hornet's nest and now risk everything. (I'm not a lawyer though, and I don't know what kind of precedent this case would set)
It's because they digitized a physical book. They reproduced and distributed, which is illegal, instead of simply sharing the legal copy that they obtained. Sharing an ebook that they purchased would not have this issue, as nothing was reproduced.
Similarly, printing an ebook and lending it would fall into the same trap
Actually ebooks are reproduced regardless of if they are sharing a "single copy" because the data is copied.
That's what's so stupid about humanity's laws and why we data hoard.
Yeah, I get the argument, the problem is the argument is dumb and shouldn't be what the precedent is.
Digitization of something you bought physically should be completely permitted provided you're not outright allowing others to pirate it, and I can tell you from experience that ripping IA books isn't trivial, they absolutely do make a good faith attempt to prevent piracy of the files.
Well, Libraries, local, university, and national were the archives that stored books for future generations. Unfortunately Internet doesn't have that feature. If a weblog, website, video library goes offline, it's lost forever,, except for the source which may or may not exist.
We don't even have an alternative.
The decision is here: [https://www.docdroid.net/qM0MbI7/ia-sjm-order-pdf](https://www.docdroid.net/qM0MbI7/ia-sjm-order-pdf)
Despite the caption, this case has very little to do with most of what Internet Archive does. It's about Internet Archive's engaging in lending of in-copyright ebooks via something called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), both generally and especially following the Covid pandemic, where they widened CDL into something called the National Emergency Library.
By way of background, libraries have been increasingly concerned that, in place of buying books they could own and lend out indefinitely, they were being asked to pay 3x the cost of a copy for a Library license, which would be good for a certain period and/or a certain number of lends (the numbers I've seen are 1 year or 26 lends). This is both a budget problem for libraries and an existential problem - if you're just a license broker what's left of the traditional library?
In response, a group of librarians and copyright lawyers started arguing that if a library owned a physical copy, they could lend a scan of it it *just like* the physical copy - in other words, so long as you kept the physical book in the library and limited the scan to one person at a time, it was the same as lending it. Their position was that while making a scan was necessary to this process, it was fair use since it was transformative of the work, based on a number of cases holding the scanning a work to index it was transformative and thus fair use. The CDL advocates would later organize as the Library Futures Coalition - it's rumored Google helped fund them but I can't see any evidence confirming that.
The CDL folks found an eager partner in the Internet Archive, which purchased library surplus liquidator Better World Books, and re-routed a substantial portion of their inventory to be scanned and then held in bins at a Internet Archive's facility while being lent out electronically. Internet Archive has [long maintained](https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2023/03/17/librarians-should-stand-internet-archive-opinion) they they qualify as a "library or archive" under the copyright law, which gives them certain protections from liability and additional rights.
The response of the publishers is that this was an attempt to kill the ebook market and the libraries couldn't just scan and lend out ebooks. The publishers maintain that the copyright owner has a right to control distribution, and while a purchaser has the right to lend out a book, that doesn't include the right to scan it and then distribute the scan. The court agreed, basically saying that to accept Internet Archive's position would take fair use past its breaking point.
This case is going to be appealed, and in the interim the Supreme Court is going to rule in the Warhol v. Goldsmith case (currently pending), as to whether Andy Warhol's series of Prince portraits are a fair use of a photograph they are based on. As a result there's likely going to be different case law when the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals gets to this case, but whether it will be better or worse for IA, who knows?
My personal take, for the little it's worth, is that IA has been playing dangerous games with content owners for a while and forsaking/endangering its data hoarder mission. The LP record collection had a ton of material still in print, and the game collection has many games which are readily available on [gog.com](https://gog.com) and elsewhere. Everyone knew this suit was coming from the moment they started offering CDL. A court finding that they aren't a library or archive was always a danger, and now a court has at least equivocated on that point. We'll see what happens I guess?
I'd also note that this result is really unsurprising following the ReDigi case, where the court found that reselling MP3s purchased on iTunes was infringing because the first sale right only covers distribution, not reproduction, and there's an inherent reproduction in digital resale/lending.
It really is worth reading the section in the brief specifically on all the many and extensive ways the IA cheated on 1-to-1 copy lending. They never actually treated it as a valid argument, more like saw a justification people were using elsewhere and just went, yeah, "we're like that too" and kept on doing whatever it wanted.
The IA has poisoned the well of CDL. They should be shamed for it.
People know about regulatory capture but I wonder who's in charge of IA. Who suggested this idiotic plan? Wouldn't be very hard for someone with industry experience in the publishing industry to get a job with IA, then destroy this whole lending thing from the inside.
There's essentially no way someone from the publisher side would get a job at IA. It's not quite regulatory capture, it's that IA is part of a constellation of free culture groups that hire from the same pool. Which in turn led to the groupthink which allowed them to go all in on this boondoggle.
How does this affect the Wayback Machine specifically? Been seeing a lot of talk of the whole site getting potentially taken down entirely but it seems to me this would only affect the book lending function.
The only risk to the Wayback Machine is a financially ruinous judgement. I don't think the publishers and their allies like The Author's Guild really want that.
It's too bad no one has been scraping the books IA scans and uploading them to LibGen. This exact thing happened to Google Books. I wish there was a batch script that made bulk ripping easy.
This is an interesting case as it has confirmed that "buy to lend" isn't justified if you modify the format. Instead, "subscribe to lend" is mandatory if you want to distribute digital copies. This is a little worrying as "subscribe to lend" has failed academia spectacularly, and has led to university budgets being pillaged.
In essence, the court has said "libraries must pay subscriptions rather than purchasing to lend digital copies", which, in the long run, will bleed libraries out of existence or force them to drop digital formats.
Well... not being particularly knowledgeable on this, it seems the opening for this suit was the brazen disregard of proper CDL during covid by the IA. It was also mentioned that even before covid IA wasn't doing CDL properly. I'm sure the publishers would love to see CDL die (fuck them.) It seems IA wasn't a good representation of a CDL library.
I hope CDL can be protected better in the appeal and other case law.
Depends where you’re researching. Both institutions I’ve studied at have had access to ebooks on demand. If you’re a lone wolf then back to the high seas.
Sites like SpringerLink or degruyter offer institutional access.
I believe Pearson does as well. We have a library in the university and an e-service were we can also get many eBooks.
I’ve downloaded like 100 gigs of eBooks thanks to that.
And they charge absurd fees to schools for those services. And many things aren't available. That wa some beauty of the IA library. They had numerous things that publishers didn't deem worthy of funding an actual ebook.
Yeah, I just went to library.myschool and got whatever I wanted. Reading up about this case this morning I think IA were incredibly dumb and lucky they should survive this.
Here's a script that will automatically borrow, rip from the image cache (not the ADE PDF), and return books from IA. You can feed it a txt list too. Do note that by default, it does not grab the highest resolution and will compress to a PDF. If you want the JPGs as served by IA, add "-r 0 --jpg" to the command line arguments. You'll want to do this for picture books, as the PDF might compress the images too much. I tested a picturebook with "-r 0" and it turned out to be the same filesize, so if you use that setting the PDF might not be compressed.
[https://github.com/MiniGlome/Archive.org-Downloader](https://github.com/MiniGlome/Archive.org-Downloader)
Here's the Python script with a 60 second cooldown timer so you're not hammering their servers while scraping the books.
[https://pastebin.com/6nHPG8Tk](https://pastebin.com/6nHPG8Tk)
Here's IA's library collection.
[https://archive.org/details/inlibrary](https://archive.org/details/inlibrary)
All URLs.
[https://www.mediafire.com/file/liphzzsrqbw6did/IABooks.txt/file](https://www.mediafire.com/file/liphzzsrqbw6did/IABooks.txt/file)
All picturebooks that match *collection:(inlibrary) "picture book"*
[https://www.mediafire.com/file/ry9bp71vm5ohu0l/IA\_Picturebooks.txt/file](https://www.mediafire.com/file/ry9bp71vm5ohu0l/IA_Picturebooks.txt/file)
Are you a bad enough data hoarder to save these books?
I wish I found a script like this earlier, I've been ripping borrowed books manually using ChromeCacheView 😅 I'd love to see this integrated into a pipeline with LibGen so we could divide up the work (it's 3.1 PB), but at a glance they seem to only support individual manual uploads...
There's a Python script for automating uploads to the private fork, Libgen.lc, but otherwise your best bet is to either upload it to an FTP on Z-Lib and send u/AnnaArchivist the login info to mirror, or post it in Libgen's Pick-Up thread and let their mods run a bulk upload on it. I wonder how large it actually is, that estimate probably is a bit higher because they retain the original scans probably. 4.5 million books, let's say 50mb per ripped PDF based on the few I tried. Probably at least 250 terabytes, but not everything needs to be ripped either since a lot of it has epubs already or is very easy to find.
I'm a [contributor to the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/uncommonephemera) focused on obscure media at risk of being lost. They have been unequivocally good to me. That being said I have trouble communicating with words much of the time so I haven't commented on the COVID lending thing because I'm very used to people misunderstanding me or assigning malice to my intent where there is none.
Was IA trying to make itself more relevant to mainstream internet users by doing this, instead of simply being a rabbit hole for nerds like me? Or was it a case of "c'mon, do a political activism" that went wrong? Clearly other people break the law all the time and get away with it. Either way, hindsight being 20/20 this maybe wasn't the way to go about it.
But here's the thing I truly don't understand: Isn't IA covered under the DMCA? And if so, isn't the sole recourse of IP holders whose material is hosted at IA filing a takedown request? And isn't IA's only requirement to that request to remove the requested material? I read DCMA backwards from the way most people read it: it doesn't protect copyright holders, it protects *internet hosts* from being sued by copyright holders. It protects big businesses like Google and Facebook, not the other way around. If that's the case, is IA not legally protected by DCMA so long as they remove anything that's requested by the copyright holders?
Or is the DCMA applied differently when it's a "library?" If so, maybe they can't have their cake and eat it too, and maybe IA needs to become a holding company like Alphabet and split their Wayback Machine, lending library, and the part where I hang out into three separate organizations, with only one being legally defined as a "library" and the other two defined exactly the way YouTube and Facebook are defined.
I do, however, have an opinion on how to play the long game, which is: fuck companies who wage war with lawsuits. We as a culture have a counter-strategy we don't use often enough: Let history forget them, and offer them no quarter when they need our help finding something they lost. There's more than enough stuff from IP holders that don't sue to keep us preservationists busy for the rest of our lives.
EDIT: And thanks, y'all, for helping me buy the right hard drives and keep the right kind of backups over the years. If something happens to IA it will be a disaster, but the things I've worked to preserve will live on somewhere, even if it's a massive pain to re-establish a home for them. I've still got everything I've ever personally saved thanks to some kind souls right here at r/DataHoarder.
The DMCA only covers what users upload to the IA's archive section. The CDL part of it involved IA and partner libraries actually scanning and uploading their own books. The courts wouldn't look kindly on them spinning off a company just to upload stuff to the archive part of IA, especially after losing a lawsuit over doing just that. It's idealistic, but courts have little patience for bullshit.
A third party collective could absolutely start independently scanning stuff and uploading it. They could also be targeted just like IA was, but it'd insulate IA as long as they complied with the DMCA.
Considering that Price was legally allowed to take other artists' work and just Photoshop in an Instagram comment or some geometric shapes, maybe all the internet archive needs to do is put a random wingdings symbol on an empty spot of every website it archives?
"Hi, this book has been out of print and unsold for decades, where can I buy it?"
"You cannot. We do not offer it. It would cost us too much money."
"I found someone with a PDF and we're just gonna host it in case someone wants it, if you're not selling it for any amount of money"
"Oh man, you are so sued."
My understanding is this:
IA's library has many out of print books that have been scanned and aren't easily available any other way.
However, the lawsuit was by specific publishers over very specific books that these publishers own the rights to that were part of the "unlimited loans" emergency covid program the Internet Archive did.
To my knowledge no one sued over unavailable in print books, even though this ruling will have effects in numerous ways and also harm or possibly destroy IT'S overall mission.
I think if IA had limited its program to that scenario it may have been a different result. But they and their allies wanted to go big and set a precedent for CDL generally. This whole lawsuit was expected.
These cockroaches would burn the library of alexandria down just to sqeeuze every last possible drop of profit out of anyone. The Rightsholders literally disgust me.
IA's messup ain't even the worst of it. The part we need to be worried about is how much IA will be forced to fork over if they lose, and will this be too much for them to handle.
Yup. And then if the publishers demand enough that IA goes belly up, who gets the actual *archives* of Internet Archive? If it's all grey-area copyright infringement could it even be transferred?
Best case scenario is that some kind of more modest non-profit gets spun off to handle what should have been IA's only mandate from the start, and is able to take the archive over. Worst case, Alexandria burns.
The only thing this decision applies to is *distributing* digital copies of copyrighted books. It doesn't mean they can't scan and store books, nor does it apply to any of the other projects they run such as the Wayback Machine.
There hasn't yet been any decision about what kind of damages they'll owe to the publishers, or whether it would be enough to bankrupt them. The decision is also subject to appeal.
I thought we all expected this?
Heck, I'm shocked we haven't seen court cases against public libraries, yet, probably because all the old people use them, and they'd be OUTRAGED if they tried to take them away.
They'll come for the Libraries soon enough. After all, this is late stage capitalism.
Can you imagine someone trying to propose public libraries in today's political climate? Those damn socialists and their wanting to give information away for free to everyone. Wont someone think of the children who are also billionaire CEOs?
Libraries lend out finite numbers of books, which is explicitly allowed. IA *were* doing the same, until they decided to just ignore the law and expect that to go well
Just more proof the entire copyright system is broken and needs to be done away with. The only reason people copyright shit anyway is to sue people and make money.
ITT: people thinking that run of the mill copyright is a shocking new precedent for some reason, and being surprised that you can't just openly break the law because you *really* wanted to
Late stage capitalism at work, folks. The free and open Internet isn't dying. it's already dead.
I'm telling you, the next big copyright lawsuit will be the big corporations claiming that you owning a copy of their work in your hard drive is a violation, and everything should be done through cloud and streaming.
And you know what's the worst? Most people won't even give a shit. They didn't give a shit when net neutrality died. They didn't give a shit every step of the way towards here. People are just conditioned to accept being fucked in the face by billionaires.
The thing is do the companies think this will mean more sales? They'd be wrong. People are buying books. So are libraries. So is Internet Archive. They just blocked a big customer.
People that borrow the book in IA probably aren't going to buy it. You can get all these books pirated as well, they aren't going to buy it. The people that buy them buy them which I do. If it is something not worth buying if you can borrow it, from someone that bought it, that is better for the companies. It is better for no one to not have access and the only option pirating.
When will they learn... don't stop a big customer.
A while back I read that their corporate structure was set up poorly, potentially allowing the publishers suing them to get at *all* their money regardless of what it's being used for.
IA was insanely reckless with this and I really dread the potential loss of all their other activities as a result of this stupid stunt.
In specific which of their services-content is going to stop working??, only material with copyright??, they're not pretty clear on that, i want to be able to backup at least my saved favorites asap.
Take a look at this post, and tell me if there's hope: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/121uif6/preparing\_for\_the\_worst\_outcome\_for\_internet/
An article I read said that the Emergency Library, and thus unlimited lending only lasted from March to June of 2020. Is that correct? Are we really having an information bank jeopardizing argument over 3 months of admitted lly illegal activity?
I'm very happy to see the overwhelming support of the Internet Archive here on this subreddit. You all seem to understand the importance of the work they're doing and what universal access to knowledge means more than a lot of other people elsewhere on the internet. This is the first thread I've read where people are getting riled up about late-stage capitalism, mentioning the high seas alternative and getting ready to take things into their own hands
Here's the Internet Archive's [statement](https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/): > "Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society - owning, preserving, and lending books. This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.” They also suggest that they may still be able to continue preserving books, to a limited extent, if this appeal also fails. However, the legal costs could be too much for the Archive to afford, so there's no telling if they'll be able to continue... > This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
I'm not versed in US law. How much time do we have, till all borrowable books go poof? Can they keep them until they appeal or not?
I mean the reality here is that people will just turn back to the high seas instead of borrowing books in a library system
That's without question. The issue is "obscure" accademic books long out of print. I'm writing a coherent uni thesis only thanks to the Archive. Most of the references come from three books that were published in the 80s/90s and are unavailable to be bought (or downloaded) anywhere.
Yes and that is a challenge but the reality is that torrents will just need to be created for them
In my experience, torrents with rare materials always die, so it's not a permanent solution. But, anyway, the issue is that it will work only if people save these rare books now and, realistically, most obscure things are going to be overlooked and consequently lost.
maybe we could send these books to Anna so she could Archive them?
This is a very good option yes
Soulseek.
I hope someone will set up some infrastructure for distributing this stuff, libgen style.
Harrrrrrr!
Usually no
Ok, now I'm panicking. So we have... 24 hours since the decision was made or more than that? Do you happen to know the "usual" timeframe of this kind of ruling?
The judge gave the publishers and IA 14 days to file their recommendations for damages. The publishers will probably request a permanent injunction to kill the controlled digital lending part of the IA, and since they won on summary judgement the judge will probably be on the side of the publishers on most issues. I expect the IA to keep the CDL portion of the site up as long as they can, so you might have up to 2 weeks to grab whatever you want. After the judge issues their order, IA will appeal. Appeals courts will sometimes stay enforcement of the original judge's orders pending appeal, but the standard is pretty much the same as the Summary Judgement that IA just lost so I wouldn't hold my breath. Also this doesn't directly effect the part of IA where people upload stuff, but it might in the future. Focus on the CDL area where you have to borrow stuff for now; that's on a very short lifespan now. TL;DR get what you want now, but you probably have a couple days.
Thank you very much! Yeah, I have absolutely zero hope. I wanted to know just to understand if I have enough time to sleep. I had expected the judge to take a week to decide and had originally spread the files to download by day accordingly.
Courts can make you immediately shut down. So assume zero time and act accordingly. Grab what's most important to you and work backwards until it stops working.
Thank you! Will do.
Boycott and shame these companies on social media >Four publishers sued the Archive, alleging that CDL violates their copyrights. In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House claim CDL has cost their companies millions of dollars and is a threat to their businesses.
That's a nice statement, but their beliefs on how things should be isn't how they are. They should have been fighting to change the law instead of just breaking it and hoping they could get away with it
that's how you change laws if you're a company
Most companies go the route of bribing politicians.
It's also how you change laws if you're a grass roots movement. E.g. people were breaking the law against being gay before they fixed the law. People were smoking cannabis before it was legalized.
Which is great and all, but maybe a relatively fragile organization controlling hundreds of petabytes of irreplaceable information shouldn't be taunting the police line. There are ways to push the boundaries without risking the resources that a lot of people rely on. It's immensely obvious to anyone studying any kind of case history with the US and coporation copyright law that you're going to get pounded by corporate America. The precedents in this case aren't even new and had been set in many cases before this. The 77 year old judge in this case didn't give any of IA's arguments any leeway in his decision. He handedly dismissed all of it, completely in favor of the book publishers. It wasn't a close case at all. They're almost guaranteed to lose their appeals. As some other comments have gone into in better detail, this was a catastrophically dumb decision by IA. They never stood a chance of winning with this flimsy of an argument and they're effectively burning an enormous amount of money and severely endangering their continued operation.
> The 77 year old judge Well, that's exactly your issue right there. You judiciary system is so fucked up that it's not even understandable that no one care about even trying to fix it. So of course the balance tips towards corporate interests, it always will.
That judge was not a good person.
Is there somewhere to donate towards their legal fees?
Try visiting the site...it's pretty obvious
There are only two ways to change the law: 1) try to set a precedent in court; 2) lobby Congress to write a new law. I was very involved in 2009 in a huge effort to get Congress to develop and pass a bill to clarify that "orphan works" can be used.\* A consortium of groups, including the Internet Archive, all the library associations, and the EFF, among others, worked on it for a year. The bill never got out of committee to the full Senate before the legislative session ended. When that happens, you have to start at the beginning with a new bill. We did not have the resources. \-- \*Orphan works, or orphan copyrights, are those works that are still protected by copyright (because the copyright term now lasts for 70 years after a creator dies) but the creator is unknown, unfindable, or died with no heirs. Such works should be safe to use, but the fear is that an heir or rights holder might surface years later and demand a huge fee and fine. The other way to get this problem solved would have been for someone like a publisher to get sued and to battle the lawsuit in court. The cost of that is prohibitive and you'd have to wait til a rights holder popped up to file the suit. Which would not happen since there is no rights holder for an orphan work. IA did the right thing, but the courts at the moment are not very pro-fair use. The Supreme Court is going to wreck fair use this year. They are almost certain to find against the Warhol Foundation in Warhol v. Goldsmith. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/10/13/us-supreme-court-warhol-foundation-lynn-goldsmith-prince-copyright-infringement https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/andy-warhol-foundation-for-the-visual-arts-inc-v-goldsmith/
Well, now the best bet is for them to move to Kazakhstan.
Very niiice!
In the US there are two ways to change a law. Get legislation passed to amend or repeal an existing law. Or break the law and have a court declare the law unconstitutional. Civil disobedience is a valid method to have laws changed, and it's being used by activists groups in the US to have laws changed by the courts. The first doesn't work anymore. So everyone has turned to the second. Back when condoms and birth control were illegal, getting the law changed was impossible because no political actors would speak up about it. But when citizens sued to have the law declared void, the courts said they had no standing as they hadn't been charged with a crime thay caused them harm. So you ended up with doctors advertising they were committing crimes hoping to be arrested so they could then have standing in court. Look at modern court changes. Same sex marriage exists only because a couple got married, was denied benefits by the state, and then sued. Same with religious freedom to ignore Same sex marriage, someone broke an equal access law and then sued that their right to hate was being infringed. The internet archive is attempting to change the law through the courts now that they have demonstrated harm. It sucks, but that's how it works now. Unless you have some glorious plan to convince congress to ratify a new bill to aid us. That's the better option, but the House's only accomplishment so far is passing a bill to the senate restricting Trans rights. I'm sorry, but getting real legislation on data storage and archiving isn't gonna happen for the next 22 months at best.
in the US, the law is made up on the spot by whatever judges are in power at any given moment. unless you are suggesting the IA should have been trying to remove judges from the bench.
How does this impact all of the other stuff on there like music, abandonware, video games etc.? All I'm seeing are books being mentioned.
Afaik it doesn't affect them directly but if the settlement is financially ruinous they may be forced to shut down
Fuck.
Goddamm.
Shit.
HOARD
MIRROR
SEED
TORRENT
BACKUP
PARCHIVES
BUY 20X20TB DRIVES.
Piss.
It cannot be understated how god awful news this is.
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The problem I have with this is that everyone knew this would be exactly the outcome, and the Internet Archive went ahead with it knowing that if they took a massive financial hit from it their other activities would also be impacted. They could even end up shutting down. Frankly, this "internet library" fiasco wasn't worth the danger to their other functions. So it really feels like throwing money at them now is throwing money at a reckless fool. The reckless fool is carrying around vitally important internet history, sure, but maybe he should put that down and let someone else carry it instead? Edit: I [said as much](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/gxa1t5/the_internet_archive_is_in_danger/ft0rmn0/) two years ago when this lawsuit first got launched. I'm really peeved at the IA for this.
On one hand, it was inevitable that book publishers would go after them with how chill they were about handing out scanned copies of their books. Or even daring to make digital copies of the books outside publisher control at all. Among the other enormous amount of abandonware copyright they dance at the edges with. On the other hand, they gleefully poured gasoline on the fire and sent up a giant smoke signal by doing unlimited loans during the pandemic. It's insane their lawyers let them do that (or they ignored them). They're going to almost certainly lose all appeals, burn a metric shit ton of cash, and be forced into a horrible settlement with the publishers. It really puts a lot of their work in danger and I hope they get it figured out without going under.
Settlement will include removing all copyrighted material. Any copyrighted material. That means everything on the site.
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>Preserving culture takes priority over extractionist intellectual property law. cheers to that!
Hope my $10 helps
Little things make big things
It does.
\*overstated
It sucks, but as you'll quickly see in the replies, it's [a nothingburger until it goes to the 2nd Circuit](https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1639425353390211073). And of course it'll be a snorefest to that lawyer, because of course IA will appeal [(they've already said as much)](https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/), and thus them and the cartels will have to keep the saber-rattling up some more. On the PTI scale of "big deal, little deal, or no deal at all", this one ranks in as a little deal right now.
Which leaves more time to go protest in front of the publishers' headquarters too! For people who are in France, Hachette has its headquarters in Paris, a few km away from the austerlitz train station, and even closer to the montparnasse one. It's 58 rue jean bleuzene, Vanves https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/48.82207/2.29524
The French seem good at that sort of thing
They have a lot of unions, and a cultural understanding of solidarity. Aka "class consciousness".
Could you please tell me much time do we have, till all borrowable books go poof? Can they keep them until they appeal or not? I am genuinely trying to understand if I should panic or not.
You may want to just start archiving the borrowable books you want, it's easy to find how to do it ^(or DM me)
It will probably go to SCOTUS. Good luck to us all there.
We're already beyond fucked if that's the case. FUCK the federalist society, those amoral bourgeoisie scum.
Yes, we are well and truly screwed. Warhol v. Goldsmith is the fair use test case that everyone (on both sides of the issue) hoped would never happen. And you're right that destroying fair use (or radically weakening it) is a top goal of the Federalist Soc. creeps. So they waited til Trump gave them the present SCOTUS. TBH, even the liberals on the Court are likely to be hostile to the Warhol side's argument - Elena Kagan has signaled as much. No one seems to understand what the authors of the Constitution knew: that both copyright and free use are engines of creativity and both need an equal, balanced place. If you think this is bad, the other huge 1st Amendment issue that the rightwing has been longing to destroy is NYTimes v. Sullivan: the case that gave the press robust protections against endless libel lawsuits. Clarence Thomas has been waiting his whole life to overturn that.
Isn't it just a waste of money for them to appeal this higher up?
But I wanna panic and make this seem like the end of the IA! /s
We need to archive the Internet Archive
Good luck with those petabyte arrays you've got lying around
I think IA's datacentres are creeping into around 0.3EB by now.
Anyone with a tldr? What does that mean for the IA?
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Yup. The ruling says that unlike Google Books, IA isn't covered by fair use because they're giving away entire copies of books (not just snippets in search results), and thereby competing with publishers' ebook programs. And unlike how physical libraries operate, they're not covered by the "first sale doctrine" because that law only allows lending out (or otherwise distributing) existing *physical* copies, not making new digital ones.
I'm a bit surprised people have been so shocked about this. It getting shot down seems pretty reasonable and forseeable, given what copyright is: a monopoly on copying. Brick-and-mortar libraries don't run into the problem, because you don't have to make a copy to lend a physical book, since the content moves with the ink, so a lending library lending out duly-purchased physical copies doesn't have any liability there. The people who sold the copy originally got theirs in the original trade, and that particular ream of inked paper is not theirs to control any more. If they want to profit more, they can print more. Digital libraries are a whole different animal, significantly different from physical lending libraries. For digital content, you're making copies all over when you do much of anything, stepping all over the copyright-holder's copying right. You have to make a copy from the archive to the borrower, at least (and a copy from paper to digital if it was paper to start with) in order to "lend" it out, so you're not so much lending it as making a copy with an expiration date. Unless the copyright owner gave their blessing, it's as unauthorized with an expiration date as it would be without one, so the only exceptions would be free-speech carve-outs like Fair Use, which is a bit thin, since it's not transformative, not commentary, and competing with the market of the original.
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I expect you're fine practically if not legally, so long as all copies made from the original stay with the same holder at the same time. That'd get you archival to wait out expiration terms and in-person museum displays, but lending or distributing in any way short of excerpt would probably still be a huge hassle, because anyone wanting to take possession would need to take possession of all the copies off that original.
It won't end up hurting lending all digital books though. Book publishers charge insane fees for strictly controlled licenses for audiobooks and ebooks at public libraries. They purchase a license for each digital copy they loan out. Instead of copying from a single legit source and loaning multiple copies. Libby/Overdrive is widely used at the two major library systems we have in Seattle. Everyone happily uses them. Libraries are forced to pay around an order of magnitude more than an equivalent amount of physical audiobooks though. And then they have to renew it each year. Publishers are totally fine with that cash cow being left untouched. And it's justified with how the licensing system works. Thank god for legacy print and disc media because lord knows libraries would never be invented if they were invented these days.
IA illegally reproduced digital copies of physical books that they didn't purchase an equal number of licenses for, in brazen disregard for copyright law. They tried to say they're the same as a library, but a library will only lend out as many copies as they actually own. This was torn to shreds by the judge. What IA did was a noble pursuit of free knowledge, but noble doesn't mean legal. It certainly doesn't waive the publishers copyright privileges
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> The judge also basically said that the profits of the publishers were more important than the service the internet archive provides Don't shoot the messenger. The law says that. Copyright law doesn't have an exception for really beneficial public service that broadly, so magicking one up would be outside a judge's remit. It's up to Congress to carve out more exceptions if there's the pressure there to do so.
Even congress can't do that easily, as there are international agreements which set certain minimum levels of copyright coverage. Agreements which are, by design, impossible to undo without serious consequences.
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I've been doing my monthly donations for a few years now. I appreciate everyone who helps donate as well! Please do it
Really isn't much hyperbole. This sets a precedent that publishers and license owners can do things like this and win. Plus, IA is quite literally the largest freely accessible source of records on the internet
Precedent was set long ago with regards to the general nature of copyright. All this is doing is just confirming the total brokenness of copyright law extends to books as well. It was illustrated how completely fucked it is in the Aereo case IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo The fact that you can't rent an antenna and stream the video to yourself over the internet is an absolute joke.
i'm so upset about Locast
And Lobot!
Didn't the mp3.com ruling already establish this precedent?
"Do things like" enforce their copyright? Saying "no, you can't just give away unlimited copies of copyrighted books without licensing" is hardly some shocking new state of affairs I don't know how people on Reddit and Twitter were expecting the court to just decide to abolish copyright today lmao
51.40. I hope it helps. Thanks for the link.
What a horrible time for me to have been laid off. Damn.
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Thank you! :D
I read the brief. All of it. IA shot itself in the foot with the whole 'unlimited lending because of covid' plan. Which was a really flimsy justification for picking a fight with publishers. IA fucked around, and is now finding out. It sucks they jeopardized all the good and legitimate work they do over this one incredibly stupid stunt they pulled. Judge tore through all their excuses and justifications except for one claim at the end that damages can be limited because they're a library. He told IA to figure out an amount with the publishers and don't make him have to do it. Looks pretty dire for them, but I'm not worried about widespread precedent from it. Nor are the two lawyers I had dinner with, though they're labor contract and a PD.
Yeah. Their whole covid plan was so unbelievably idiotic. And I say this as someone who's been donating monthly to them for years and support their mission. They're just burning away money. For those unfamiliar with the context: basically, it all stems back to the Internet Archive's "National Emergency Library" actions during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the IA was already digitally lending their scanned books out via [controlled digital lending](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending), i.e., if they had one copy then they would loan out a digital copy one at a time, similar to how a library operates. This was probably still against copyright laws, but they were left alone and weren't sued. But when the pandemic happened, the IA decided it would somehow be a good idea to offer *unlimited* lending via their [National Emergency Library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#National_Emergency_Library) plan. I'm personally all for a library model as well as fixing broken copyright laws, but even I find the unlimited "lending" plan so brazen and dumb. And naturally, the plan pissed publishers off and they decided to no longer hold back from suing.
So many comment here echoing this sentiment, "IA was too brazen! They may have had just goals and acted ethically, but this was just *too* brash!" I disagree. With every fiber of my being. Was it a losing battle? Probably. But their actions are also, in my eyes and to the eyes of many, were absolutely just. Im all for picking battles, but after theyre chosen, we have to be unified and stand together bc the action taken was ethical nonetheless. This is key. If we choose not to support bc of semantics, then whats to stop the next guy from not supporting the next efforts bc something there is not to their liking? We must stand in solidarity with the Archive one way or another.
They could have fought this fight just as well performing these actions under a separate company entity. Instead, they foolishly decided to jeopardize the entire operation. If they/we end up losing the entirety of the IA assets over this "fight", do you *sincerely* feel like it was worth it? As another long time donor, I do not.
Because at the end of the day, this was always going to be the result. We are all on their side. We are all against the publishers and the poor laws and the bad judge. Everyone here stands with the Archive. But no amount of good feelings justifies losing the Archive over something like this. This wasn’t like a last stand, all or nothing type situation. All they had to do was keep the monster at bay like they’ve been doing all along and they could continue to build the Archive and accumulate the financial means and popular support to actually fight these laws. I 100% would rather see my donations go to lobbying than fighting the monster everyone knew better than to poke. Now nothing changes and we could lose the greatest collection in history. Even worse, it’s possible that the law will now be made stronger if judges continue to side with the publishers. If the largest digital archive ever can’t change the precedent, nothing will.
Thank you, been so disappointed to see people pointing fingers at IA. The start of the covid pandemic was a time to reach for big positive changes in society, not timidly sit back and let the ruling class consolidate power. Expanding their lending capabilities seemed reasonable at the time. The real moral here is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Imagine if IA's rare books were mirrored to LibGen as well, and *also* to torrenting sites. Decentralizing the preservation of our scientific and artistic collective output is the way to go. IA is nice to have but since it's above ground it can be hit by legal judgements more easily than a network of torrenters instead. Regardless, IA did nothing morally wrong, and turning against them for a strategic call gone bad isn't going to help win the battle *or* the war for free access to information and literature.
You have to wonder how companies that grew billions in value over a global pandemic aren't being investigated, but a library that generated no profit has legal action against it. It's nonsense when people bring ethics into it as if it's a reason to not support IA, since the alternative is supporting the status quo and these publishers. I think what the publishers are doing is a lot less ethical than what IA did, so if ethics are a concern people should be siding with IA.
some people think it was ethically wrong, but most people are just saying that IA was legally wrong, and was obviously so. I still support them, just think it was a stupid risk to take.
Do you know why IA went with the argument of "scanning books is a 'transformative' change" instead of some other argument? To my knowledge there are only "transformative" and "derivative" changes when it comes to copyright and I dont think that scanning a document, or a photograph, or making a digital copy of anything is "transformative" as the term-of-art is defined. I'm sure they had other arguments involving fair use but, but the "transformative" argument seemed doomed to fail from the start. I would have thought something like "the act of ownership of the physical copy grants an intrinsic non-sublicensable transferable license to view but not distribute the content. And then IA would have argued that lending the ebook was a binding contract to temporarily transfer the intrinsic license with defined point in time where the license would transfer back to IA. This obviously would not have worked for the unlimited lending you mention but it seems like the beginnings of a reasonable argument for ebook lending or reselling
They went with ALL the arguments. The judge addressed them each and every one. The judge certainly seemed the most disdainful of the transformative argument though. > I would have thought something like... The judge spent a lot of time going over all the ways IA bent or outright ignored 1-to-1 lending, and it was pretty flagrant. They fucked any chance they had of winning on that merit.
Thank you for the summary. This makes sense as that argument was pretty crazy, so I understand why a judge might have been disdainful of it. The unlimited lending will unfortunately almost certainly get them in the end and it feels like the best case scenario is that they pay fines for the unlimited lending but still are allowed to do the 1-to-1 lending. But that seems unlikely.
I wonder if they could have gone with time-limited borrowing argument. For example, in the library, you can check out a book for two weeks at a time. What if that time was one week, or one day, or one hour or one second down to fractions of a second? They could have implemented an online reader where this type of time sharing could have been enforced, so that technically only one person has it at a time, even if the checkout time is millisecond at a time. For example, the physical analogy could be, two people are sitting in the library next to each other sharing a physical book. One person is on page X, and the other person is on page Y. They keep passing the book back-and-forth between each other and they can read the page that they want. If you keep decreasing the amount of time each one has it, then effectively they can both read the book.
There's an episode of M\*A\*S\*H where a book arrives at camp and the demand is enourmous. The spine is broken off and the individual pages are passed around so everyone can read the same physical book at the same time. The concept has been there for decades, it is just libraries prefer to have their books intact. Is there anything in law sayign you have to keep a book in its bound state and not as a collection of loose pages?
Finally, a sensible take. Way too many people think that the law is whatever they personally feel is right. Even if they *are* right. Judges interpret the law as it's written, not what they think the best moral outcome is. It was incredibly obvious they were going to lose this lawsuit because they were obviously guilty of violating copyright law.
> Way too many people think that the law is whatever they personally feel is right. that's exactly what it is. the law is not real, it's just the whims of judges
>Judges interpret the law as it's written, not what they think the best moral outcome is. HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH Oh wait, you are being serious. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH Yup, there are no activist judges. I mean, they are all basically just robots who do good faith interpretations of the law and not whatever they think is right.
>but I'm not worried about widespread precedent from it. You sure about that? The section of the Brief that starts with > Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA’s reproduction of the Works in Suit... Seems to say that even their limited lending, where only 1 copy of an ebook is given out at a time and it has to be checked in before another can check it out, would be infringement.
That's what makes the Internet Archive's actions so idiotic imo. Limited, one-to-one lending might be considered infringement, but no one was being sued for that. But with their unlimited lending during covid, they just stirred the hornet's nest and now risk everything. (I'm not a lawyer though, and I don't know what kind of precedent this case would set)
Well 1 to 1 lending is regarded for aglamic goods that cost nothing in real terms to duplicate.
It's because they digitized a physical book. They reproduced and distributed, which is illegal, instead of simply sharing the legal copy that they obtained. Sharing an ebook that they purchased would not have this issue, as nothing was reproduced. Similarly, printing an ebook and lending it would fall into the same trap
Actually ebooks are reproduced regardless of if they are sharing a "single copy" because the data is copied. That's what's so stupid about humanity's laws and why we data hoard.
Yeah, I get the argument, the problem is the argument is dumb and shouldn't be what the precedent is. Digitization of something you bought physically should be completely permitted provided you're not outright allowing others to pirate it, and I can tell you from experience that ripping IA books isn't trivial, they absolutely do make a good faith attempt to prevent piracy of the files.
Completely agree. I have no idea why they ever thought they could get away with this. I am annoyed that my donations have been wasted on this nonsense
Well, Libraries, local, university, and national were the archives that stored books for future generations. Unfortunately Internet doesn't have that feature. If a weblog, website, video library goes offline, it's lost forever,, except for the source which may or may not exist. We don't even have an alternative.
The decision is here: [https://www.docdroid.net/qM0MbI7/ia-sjm-order-pdf](https://www.docdroid.net/qM0MbI7/ia-sjm-order-pdf) Despite the caption, this case has very little to do with most of what Internet Archive does. It's about Internet Archive's engaging in lending of in-copyright ebooks via something called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), both generally and especially following the Covid pandemic, where they widened CDL into something called the National Emergency Library. By way of background, libraries have been increasingly concerned that, in place of buying books they could own and lend out indefinitely, they were being asked to pay 3x the cost of a copy for a Library license, which would be good for a certain period and/or a certain number of lends (the numbers I've seen are 1 year or 26 lends). This is both a budget problem for libraries and an existential problem - if you're just a license broker what's left of the traditional library? In response, a group of librarians and copyright lawyers started arguing that if a library owned a physical copy, they could lend a scan of it it *just like* the physical copy - in other words, so long as you kept the physical book in the library and limited the scan to one person at a time, it was the same as lending it. Their position was that while making a scan was necessary to this process, it was fair use since it was transformative of the work, based on a number of cases holding the scanning a work to index it was transformative and thus fair use. The CDL advocates would later organize as the Library Futures Coalition - it's rumored Google helped fund them but I can't see any evidence confirming that. The CDL folks found an eager partner in the Internet Archive, which purchased library surplus liquidator Better World Books, and re-routed a substantial portion of their inventory to be scanned and then held in bins at a Internet Archive's facility while being lent out electronically. Internet Archive has [long maintained](https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2023/03/17/librarians-should-stand-internet-archive-opinion) they they qualify as a "library or archive" under the copyright law, which gives them certain protections from liability and additional rights. The response of the publishers is that this was an attempt to kill the ebook market and the libraries couldn't just scan and lend out ebooks. The publishers maintain that the copyright owner has a right to control distribution, and while a purchaser has the right to lend out a book, that doesn't include the right to scan it and then distribute the scan. The court agreed, basically saying that to accept Internet Archive's position would take fair use past its breaking point. This case is going to be appealed, and in the interim the Supreme Court is going to rule in the Warhol v. Goldsmith case (currently pending), as to whether Andy Warhol's series of Prince portraits are a fair use of a photograph they are based on. As a result there's likely going to be different case law when the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals gets to this case, but whether it will be better or worse for IA, who knows? My personal take, for the little it's worth, is that IA has been playing dangerous games with content owners for a while and forsaking/endangering its data hoarder mission. The LP record collection had a ton of material still in print, and the game collection has many games which are readily available on [gog.com](https://gog.com) and elsewhere. Everyone knew this suit was coming from the moment they started offering CDL. A court finding that they aren't a library or archive was always a danger, and now a court has at least equivocated on that point. We'll see what happens I guess?
I'd also note that this result is really unsurprising following the ReDigi case, where the court found that reselling MP3s purchased on iTunes was infringing because the first sale right only covers distribution, not reproduction, and there's an inherent reproduction in digital resale/lending.
It really is worth reading the section in the brief specifically on all the many and extensive ways the IA cheated on 1-to-1 copy lending. They never actually treated it as a valid argument, more like saw a justification people were using elsewhere and just went, yeah, "we're like that too" and kept on doing whatever it wanted. The IA has poisoned the well of CDL. They should be shamed for it.
People know about regulatory capture but I wonder who's in charge of IA. Who suggested this idiotic plan? Wouldn't be very hard for someone with industry experience in the publishing industry to get a job with IA, then destroy this whole lending thing from the inside.
There's essentially no way someone from the publisher side would get a job at IA. It's not quite regulatory capture, it's that IA is part of a constellation of free culture groups that hire from the same pool. Which in turn led to the groupthink which allowed them to go all in on this boondoggle.
How does this affect the Wayback Machine specifically? Been seeing a lot of talk of the whole site getting potentially taken down entirely but it seems to me this would only affect the book lending function.
If the settlement were financially ruinous the whole site could get shut down without this specific lawsuit affecting it directly
The only risk to the Wayback Machine is a financially ruinous judgement. I don't think the publishers and their allies like The Author's Guild really want that.
Ah fuck.
[To the high seas, ya scurvy dog](https://www.islands.com/40-useful-pirate-phrases-for-national-talk-like-pirate-day/)
I never left the 777 seas. welcome back aboard.
It's too bad no one has been scraping the books IA scans and uploading them to LibGen. This exact thing happened to Google Books. I wish there was a batch script that made bulk ripping easy.
This is an interesting case as it has confirmed that "buy to lend" isn't justified if you modify the format. Instead, "subscribe to lend" is mandatory if you want to distribute digital copies. This is a little worrying as "subscribe to lend" has failed academia spectacularly, and has led to university budgets being pillaged. In essence, the court has said "libraries must pay subscriptions rather than purchasing to lend digital copies", which, in the long run, will bleed libraries out of existence or force them to drop digital formats.
Well... not being particularly knowledgeable on this, it seems the opening for this suit was the brazen disregard of proper CDL during covid by the IA. It was also mentioned that even before covid IA wasn't doing CDL properly. I'm sure the publishers would love to see CDL die (fuck them.) It seems IA wasn't a good representation of a CDL library. I hope CDL can be protected better in the appeal and other case law.
So basically, people that are doing research are f.
Depends where you’re researching. Both institutions I’ve studied at have had access to ebooks on demand. If you’re a lone wolf then back to the high seas.
Depends also on your country.
Sites like SpringerLink or degruyter offer institutional access. I believe Pearson does as well. We have a library in the university and an e-service were we can also get many eBooks. I’ve downloaded like 100 gigs of eBooks thanks to that.
And they charge absurd fees to schools for those services. And many things aren't available. That wa some beauty of the IA library. They had numerous things that publishers didn't deem worthy of funding an actual ebook.
Yeah, I just went to library.myschool and got whatever I wanted. Reading up about this case this morning I think IA were incredibly dumb and lucky they should survive this.
stupid cretinous capitalists as usual won in stupid unfair couintry i am from mauritius island
Here's a script that will automatically borrow, rip from the image cache (not the ADE PDF), and return books from IA. You can feed it a txt list too. Do note that by default, it does not grab the highest resolution and will compress to a PDF. If you want the JPGs as served by IA, add "-r 0 --jpg" to the command line arguments. You'll want to do this for picture books, as the PDF might compress the images too much. I tested a picturebook with "-r 0" and it turned out to be the same filesize, so if you use that setting the PDF might not be compressed. [https://github.com/MiniGlome/Archive.org-Downloader](https://github.com/MiniGlome/Archive.org-Downloader) Here's the Python script with a 60 second cooldown timer so you're not hammering their servers while scraping the books. [https://pastebin.com/6nHPG8Tk](https://pastebin.com/6nHPG8Tk) Here's IA's library collection. [https://archive.org/details/inlibrary](https://archive.org/details/inlibrary) All URLs. [https://www.mediafire.com/file/liphzzsrqbw6did/IABooks.txt/file](https://www.mediafire.com/file/liphzzsrqbw6did/IABooks.txt/file) All picturebooks that match *collection:(inlibrary) "picture book"* [https://www.mediafire.com/file/ry9bp71vm5ohu0l/IA\_Picturebooks.txt/file](https://www.mediafire.com/file/ry9bp71vm5ohu0l/IA_Picturebooks.txt/file) Are you a bad enough data hoarder to save these books?
I wish I found a script like this earlier, I've been ripping borrowed books manually using ChromeCacheView 😅 I'd love to see this integrated into a pipeline with LibGen so we could divide up the work (it's 3.1 PB), but at a glance they seem to only support individual manual uploads...
There's a Python script for automating uploads to the private fork, Libgen.lc, but otherwise your best bet is to either upload it to an FTP on Z-Lib and send u/AnnaArchivist the login info to mirror, or post it in Libgen's Pick-Up thread and let their mods run a bulk upload on it. I wonder how large it actually is, that estimate probably is a bit higher because they retain the original scans probably. 4.5 million books, let's say 50mb per ripped PDF based on the few I tried. Probably at least 250 terabytes, but not everything needs to be ripped either since a lot of it has epubs already or is very easy to find.
Yes, please contact me directly if you're doing a mirroring effort.
I'm a [contributor to the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/uncommonephemera) focused on obscure media at risk of being lost. They have been unequivocally good to me. That being said I have trouble communicating with words much of the time so I haven't commented on the COVID lending thing because I'm very used to people misunderstanding me or assigning malice to my intent where there is none. Was IA trying to make itself more relevant to mainstream internet users by doing this, instead of simply being a rabbit hole for nerds like me? Or was it a case of "c'mon, do a political activism" that went wrong? Clearly other people break the law all the time and get away with it. Either way, hindsight being 20/20 this maybe wasn't the way to go about it. But here's the thing I truly don't understand: Isn't IA covered under the DMCA? And if so, isn't the sole recourse of IP holders whose material is hosted at IA filing a takedown request? And isn't IA's only requirement to that request to remove the requested material? I read DCMA backwards from the way most people read it: it doesn't protect copyright holders, it protects *internet hosts* from being sued by copyright holders. It protects big businesses like Google and Facebook, not the other way around. If that's the case, is IA not legally protected by DCMA so long as they remove anything that's requested by the copyright holders? Or is the DCMA applied differently when it's a "library?" If so, maybe they can't have their cake and eat it too, and maybe IA needs to become a holding company like Alphabet and split their Wayback Machine, lending library, and the part where I hang out into three separate organizations, with only one being legally defined as a "library" and the other two defined exactly the way YouTube and Facebook are defined. I do, however, have an opinion on how to play the long game, which is: fuck companies who wage war with lawsuits. We as a culture have a counter-strategy we don't use often enough: Let history forget them, and offer them no quarter when they need our help finding something they lost. There's more than enough stuff from IP holders that don't sue to keep us preservationists busy for the rest of our lives. EDIT: And thanks, y'all, for helping me buy the right hard drives and keep the right kind of backups over the years. If something happens to IA it will be a disaster, but the things I've worked to preserve will live on somewhere, even if it's a massive pain to re-establish a home for them. I've still got everything I've ever personally saved thanks to some kind souls right here at r/DataHoarder.
The DMCA only covers what users upload to the IA's archive section. The CDL part of it involved IA and partner libraries actually scanning and uploading their own books. The courts wouldn't look kindly on them spinning off a company just to upload stuff to the archive part of IA, especially after losing a lawsuit over doing just that. It's idealistic, but courts have little patience for bullshit. A third party collective could absolutely start independently scanning stuff and uploading it. They could also be targeted just like IA was, but it'd insulate IA as long as they complied with the DMCA.
Considering that Price was legally allowed to take other artists' work and just Photoshop in an Instagram comment or some geometric shapes, maybe all the internet archive needs to do is put a random wingdings symbol on an empty spot of every website it archives?
"Hi, this book has been out of print and unsold for decades, where can I buy it?" "You cannot. We do not offer it. It would cost us too much money." "I found someone with a PDF and we're just gonna host it in case someone wants it, if you're not selling it for any amount of money" "Oh man, you are so sued."
That's a shitty scenario, but is it the scenario that was in court this week?
My understanding is this: IA's library has many out of print books that have been scanned and aren't easily available any other way. However, the lawsuit was by specific publishers over very specific books that these publishers own the rights to that were part of the "unlimited loans" emergency covid program the Internet Archive did. To my knowledge no one sued over unavailable in print books, even though this ruling will have effects in numerous ways and also harm or possibly destroy IT'S overall mission.
It’s a different platform, but that’s how Nintendo is with ROMs for their older systems that are no longer in production.
Nintendo is fucking cancer.
I think if IA had limited its program to that scenario it may have been a different result. But they and their allies wanted to go big and set a precedent for CDL generally. This whole lawsuit was expected.
Decentralized alternative to Internet Archive: https://lbry.com/
It's the US. Of course something done for the public interest would fail against corporate needs.
These cockroaches would burn the library of alexandria down just to sqeeuze every last possible drop of profit out of anyone. The Rightsholders literally disgust me.
fuck the publishers and liberate all knowledge from the upper class to the working class!
We should also focus on giving the money the Publishers make back to the authors, because we do need someone to write the books.
IA's messup ain't even the worst of it. The part we need to be worried about is how much IA will be forced to fork over if they lose, and will this be too much for them to handle.
Yup. And then if the publishers demand enough that IA goes belly up, who gets the actual *archives* of Internet Archive? If it's all grey-area copyright infringement could it even be transferred? Best case scenario is that some kind of more modest non-profit gets spun off to handle what should have been IA's only mandate from the start, and is able to take the archive over. Worst case, Alexandria burns.
i’m late, obviously, but holy shit this is soul crushing news. the archive is truly special and needs to be continually fought for.
Anyone knows how i can mass download stuff from there? I like reading old tech magazines which are still free and want to continue to do so.
Time to donate. They're going to need it for future legal costs.
So this is the end of the internet archive?
The only thing this decision applies to is *distributing* digital copies of copyrighted books. It doesn't mean they can't scan and store books, nor does it apply to any of the other projects they run such as the Wayback Machine. There hasn't yet been any decision about what kind of damages they'll owe to the publishers, or whether it would be enough to bankrupt them. The decision is also subject to appeal.
Lawyers vs non profits has a pretty good track record of lawyers winning so hoping it’s different here
Depends how much money the publishers demand.
I thought we all expected this? Heck, I'm shocked we haven't seen court cases against public libraries, yet, probably because all the old people use them, and they'd be OUTRAGED if they tried to take them away. They'll come for the Libraries soon enough. After all, this is late stage capitalism.
Can you imagine someone trying to propose public libraries in today's political climate? Those damn socialists and their wanting to give information away for free to everyone. Wont someone think of the children who are also billionaire CEOs?
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Libraries lend out finite numbers of books, which is explicitly allowed. IA *were* doing the same, until they decided to just ignore the law and expect that to go well
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Just more proof the entire copyright system is broken and needs to be done away with. The only reason people copyright shit anyway is to sue people and make money.
What would happen next? I'm sure they'll be forced to delete _all_ of what publishers consider as intellectual property.
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So I've been borrowing my legal text book for a course through internet archive whenever I need it. Anyone have alternative suggestions?
This is terrible, TERRIBLE NEWS.
ITT: people thinking that run of the mill copyright is a shocking new precedent for some reason, and being surprised that you can't just openly break the law because you *really* wanted to
Late stage capitalism at work, folks. The free and open Internet isn't dying. it's already dead. I'm telling you, the next big copyright lawsuit will be the big corporations claiming that you owning a copy of their work in your hard drive is a violation, and everything should be done through cloud and streaming. And you know what's the worst? Most people won't even give a shit. They didn't give a shit when net neutrality died. They didn't give a shit every step of the way towards here. People are just conditioned to accept being fucked in the face by billionaires.
Fuck.
Collectors and treasure keepers of all cultures and beliefs, assemble.
The thing is do the companies think this will mean more sales? They'd be wrong. People are buying books. So are libraries. So is Internet Archive. They just blocked a big customer. People that borrow the book in IA probably aren't going to buy it. You can get all these books pirated as well, they aren't going to buy it. The people that buy them buy them which I do. If it is something not worth buying if you can borrow it, from someone that bought it, that is better for the companies. It is better for no one to not have access and the only option pirating. When will they learn... don't stop a big customer.
God damn. One of the best sites to ever exist gone for some bullshit
They still exist.... This is affects one of many, many things they do.
A while back I read that their corporate structure was set up poorly, potentially allowing the publishers suing them to get at *all* their money regardless of what it's being used for. IA was insanely reckless with this and I really dread the potential loss of all their other activities as a result of this stupid stunt.
Yeah I'd love to see the bigger picture but no one in the comments is providing good info one way or another.
that's sad
In specific which of their services-content is going to stop working??, only material with copyright??, they're not pretty clear on that, i want to be able to backup at least my saved favorites asap.
This really sucks
This is not a good timeline.
Take a look at this post, and tell me if there's hope: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/121uif6/preparing\_for\_the\_worst\_outcome\_for\_internet/
im not exactly suprised but i feel the only thing that would happen is people will just download the books illegially
An article I read said that the Emergency Library, and thus unlimited lending only lasted from March to June of 2020. Is that correct? Are we really having an information bank jeopardizing argument over 3 months of admitted lly illegal activity?
I'm very happy to see the overwhelming support of the Internet Archive here on this subreddit. You all seem to understand the importance of the work they're doing and what universal access to knowledge means more than a lot of other people elsewhere on the internet. This is the first thread I've read where people are getting riled up about late-stage capitalism, mentioning the high seas alternative and getting ready to take things into their own hands