My wife is a librarian. The elephant in the room here is that patrons are shifting toward a preference for digital distribution. However, Fair Use has not caught up. So, libraries end up spending a large portion of their operating budget "leasing" ebooks from publishers at extraordinary markup over the print copies. These leases are only good for so many "check outs" -- often as few as 4-6 -- after which point, the lease must be renewed at a price that can be 2X or 3X the cost of the print book. It's downright predatory.
IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
I’m glad to see this near the top of this post. The reality of what’s been happening to libraries in the shift to the digital age keeps getting ignored by everyone. For those of us who grew up only being able to afford reading books by borrowing from libraries, I’ve been dismayed to see so little discussion around this. Like other commenters have said, libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today and I think that points to a fundamental problem with legislation.
An unfortunate consequence of internet piracy is that noncommercial activity has been pushed out of mainstream policy. The library was way more crucial when I couldn't just illegally pirate a book on the internet. In turn I was way more willing to fight for it.
> libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today
And it would be more or less irrelevant that they didn't, because the massive amount of information made voluntarily available for free on the internet vastly outweighs the initial few centuries of libraries' existence by several orders of magnitude.
> I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
I find it extremely bizarre the people make posts like this, essentially conceding that controlled digital lending should be legal, but then claiming that they shouldn't win. Why shouldn't they win? They're doing something reasonable, meritorious and not at all clearly prohibited.
IA seems to be arguing that society needs a way to archive and access all printed works.
The library model is one that has a long history and is therefore helpful as a way to accomplish that mission. The “controlled” part of controlled digital lending is only there as a way to try to appease rights-holders (who would otherwise argue in court that there should be no lending, only licensing (or not) under their complete control).
The unfortunate thing that happened is they decided upon themselves to freely and openly distribute copyrighted works at scale which is clearly prohibited and confirmed by precedent. This is the point that they should lose. No library is allowed to reprint books in full and simply hand them out to people who ask.
I believe the issue was that they weren't doing controlled digital lending. They allowed an unlimited number of people to check out an individual book digitally & then took donations for doing so. The original envision, where a book can be checked out digitally (and then is reserved until "returned", and mare available again), is way more defensible.
It’s not normally the courts’ job to change the laws. People need to get Congress involved. I doubt very few people write to their representatives about fair use.
Fair use is a defense against infringement, but what we could really use is copyright reform to enable building the digital library of alexandria without it being burned down immediately by infringement claims.
For this to happen, libraries might need something like:
1) first sale doctrine for ebooks
2) explicitly legalizing the distribution (and non-infringing use) of digital copying and transcoding technology with substantial non-infringing uses, similarly to the analog domain (see: photocopiers, VCRs, etc.)
This is your friendly reminder that, if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright. Even given that libraries are clearly legal, copyright owners still try their utmost to make them illegal, because they're seen as lost purchases.
If I were only allowed to change one thing about copyright, what I would change is not the length of copyright terms, but the treatment of digital works. Kill this stupid pretend game that you don't buy anything digital, you merely lease it, and therefore the creator gets to jerk you around to their heart's content because contract law supersedes all. No, make a digital sale a sale, and then we get to have the First Sale Doctrine kick in. And hopefully we get to sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as they repeatedly go to SCOTUS as the printer manufacturers do with some new harebrained attempt to work around First Sale Doctrine and SCOTUS goes "lol, nope, doesn't work."
But truly, fuck the ebook lending practices. It's downright predatory and it just makes me never want to actually buy an ebook (unless it's from one of the few publishers that goes all-in on DRM-free ebooks).
what's your timeline on libraries? i guess you're counting ancient, private collections. public libraries happened well after copyright was established and just had to go to court and make their case. first sale doctrine indeed saved the day.
the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act
> if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright.
Before the advent of digital media, the meaning of copyright could be cleanly derived from the words it is compounded from.
Any publisher arguing that to lend a purchased item to another person infringes on their exclusive right to produce copies, would have been laughed right out of the courtroom.
Maybe it's time for libraries to focus on the physical aspect... and education, for example teaching people how to pirate digital copies without getting malware.
For ebooks, pirates can provide the public library service.
The economics of it seem quite different for rare books that might be checked out once a year versus popular books that are in constant demand.
It seems like for academic research, storing a large collection of unpopular books is what matters. Making best-sellers available to many local readers is a different function.
> My wife is a librarian. The elephant in the room here is that patrons are shifting toward a preference for digital distribution. However, Fair Use has not caught up. So, libraries end up spending a large portion of their operating budget "leasing" ebooks from publishers at extraordinary markup over the print copies. These leases are only good for so many "check outs" -- often as few as 4-6 -- after which point, the lease must be renewed at a price that can be 2X or 3X the cost of the print book. It's downright predatory.
> IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
Very unlikely that would happen and libraries would inevitably pay the ultimate price in the long run in a period where they're under attack and most at risk of extinction from all fronts (politicians, governments, publishers, copyright cartel, list goes on all hate libraries and this would be a huge win for those groups as a sign to cripple them even more).
Whatever happened to the idea of legal peer-to-peer lending? If I buy a book, it's my property to give away or resell. Why is it any different with an ebook?
I think this is a lot less clear than just a yes or no. Imagine you have a library where you can't touch the books so you have to look at them through glass and turn the pages with some type of robotic arm. That probably wouldn't be an issue. What if you replace the glass with a computer monitor? So you are sitting in a room next to the book you are viewing. Then what if you extend the wire and sit in the building next door? What if you replace the wire with the internet? At what point did you start infringing on the copyright?
Imagine a video rental service where you can go in, and they will play whatever movie you want on a DVD player in the back room. How long can that wire be between the DVD player and the person watching before it starts being copyright infringement?
Libraries are able to loan under the first sale doctrine, that is to say that the copyright holder exhausts their right to control the distribution of a copy after the first sale. However, they retain a monopoly on the production of copies.
yes, but apparently the law hasn't been updated to allow for that, and legal people get confused by it. what is it that triggers the process of reviewing and revising/removing an outdated law when an entity breaks it? it's obvious that there could be thousands of laws that were made, that are now out of date because of advances in technology or scientific understanding. so isn't there some regular procedure for, when someone sues someone, allowing for the opportunity to consider if the particular violated law is still applicable? maybe if it hasn't been applied in a while and/or was made a long time ago?
It makes me incredibly sad to see the Internet Archive continue to argue that a DRM system (which is what controlled digital lending is) is a liberatory technology whose usage should be expanded. Libraries should stop lighting money on fire buying expensive short-lived licenses from publishers, and start referring patrons to LibGen, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub, etc.
That's not a legal argument; you're arguing that crime should be officially encouraged by libraries and the Internet Archive. That's essentially an argument that they should commit suicide in protest of the entire idea of copyright.
I'm not saying that speciously. If it's fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, there's no need for the public to go to shadow libraries; because they've then become de facto legal and the libraries might as well distribute the material directly (or aid with access and provide resources for the shadow libraries.) If it's not fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, when they do it they've called their own distribution of copyrighted materials into question by implying that they do the same thing as shadow libraries.
DRM is an overlay over copyright which gives copyright owners some security that they'll be able to hold on to most of the distribution of what they own. It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all.
If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. The giant multinational companies that own the vast majority of copyrights are begging you to stake the entire IA on such a sucker bet.
Do you think the authors and editors should be compensated for their work? Charging for use seems to be a pretty straight forward way to reward the people who create good books.
Digital distribution is already the norm, it's already superior to all other technologies. The elephant in the room is copyright. It's the cause of all the problems and limitations we presently encounter.
It makes no sense to even speak of "leasing" what's actually trivially copyable data. That's working within the conceptual framework of monopolists. There is no "cost", any costs associated with digital distribution can and will be so efficiently distributed among all users they might as well be zero. All the monopolists need to do is get out of our way.
The only solution to this problem is abolishing it all straight up. Just get rid of copyright. It's holding us all back.
The "National Emergency Library" was obviously a huge mistake, and I'm surprised that IA continues to defend it. The problem is, their online book lending is far from the most important part of the Internet Archive, and by continuing to fight for it, they risk losing everything, including the entire rest of the archive which seems to me to be far more important.
The Internet Archive has become the de-facto default location to upload anything rare, important, or valuable, and a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence if it were brought down.
You are directing your ire at the wrong party. Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit, the only possible outcome (as you correctly state) is the world becomes a worse place. The behavior they object to has already stopped, and they've got a judgment to prevent it happening again. Hachette could drop enforcement of the judgment, both parties can dismiss the appeal, and no one loses anything.
Hachette's owners see an opportunity here to destroy a public good, and they are taking it. Hachette are the bad actors trying to destroy what you find valuable, not the IA.
> You are directing your ire at the wrong party. Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit, the only possible outcome (as you correctly state) is the world becomes a worse place.
Hachette obviously benefits from teaching would-be unlimited "lenders" a lesson. Even anti-DRM, "buy my books only if you can afford" authors were against this hare-brained lending scheme because the IA didn't even bother to buy a single copy of the books they were "lending".
The blame squarely falls at the IA's feet; being an idealist doesn't give you the rights to delve into illegal behavior, regardless of the righteousness of your cause or the depth of your conviction. If the world is better with an org in it, and it jeopardizes it's own ability to remain a going concern, it's clear to me who is culpable. "Too good to die" doesn't exist.
Everything you allege here is misinformed as to the current state of the lawsuit and stakes.
You demonize Hachette et al (4 major publishers) as seeking to destroy a public good. In fact, they've already settled with the IA, as of last August 2023, in a manner that caps costs to IA at a survivable level and sets clear mutually-acceptable rules for future activity.
You imply IA would dismiss the appeal if the plaintiffs "could drop enforcement of the judgement". In fact, there were never any assessed damages, the parties have already reached a mutually-acceptable settlement per above, and despite that – in fact, as part of the settlement! – the IA has retained the right to appeal regarding the fair-use principles that are important to them.
>On August 11, 2023, the parties reached a negotiated judgment. The agreement prescribes a permanent injunction against the Internet Archive preventing it from distributing the plaintiffs' books, except those for which no e-book is currently available,[3] as well as an undisclosed payment to the plaintiffs.[25][26] The agreement also preserves the right for the Internet Archive to appeal the previous ruling.[25][26]
>Because this case was limited to our book lending program, the injunction does not significantly impact our other library services. The Internet Archive may still digitize books for preservation purposes, and may still provide access to our digital collections in a number of ways, including through interlibrary loan and by making accessible formats available to people with qualified print disabilities. We may continue to display “short portions” of books as is consistent with fair use—for example, Wikipedia references (as shown in the image above). The injunction does not affect lending of out-of-print books. And of course, the Internet Archive will still make millions of public domain texts available to the public without restriction.
We reasoned. We begged. We screamed at IA not to do what they did, that this would be the inevitable outcome. This is like someone left a bear trap on my front lawn and because I should have the right to do whatever I want on my property I refuse to listen to the crowd of people telling me not to stick my dick in the bear trap. The controlled digital lending was already completely illegal but the IA was making headway on making it a culturally accepted practice. Then they burned it to the ground. The loss of the IA would be one of if not the greatest Internet-tragedy in history, but the fools in charge of it don't deserve anyone's sympathy.
>Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit
They do: Legal precedent.
IA made themselves into an easy, prominent target by doing something everyone else agreed to not do via Gentlemens' Agreements(tm) and precedents set by lesser transgressions, so now they're reaping what they sowed.
The book publishers stand to gain legal precedent that doing what IA did can and will result in legal consequences severe enough to ruin you.
> The Internet Archive has become the de-facto default location to upload anything rare, important, or valuable, and a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence if it were brought down.
Here's the related discussion: Stop using the Internet Archive as the sole host for preservation projects | 87 points by yours truly | 27 days ago | 27 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
> a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence
One response to that is the "The Offline Internet Archive" [0], which includes software to crawl Internet Archive collections and store them to a local server [1].
While I agree that the book lending is only a small portion of the value provided by the IA, it makes sense that they're making a stand here. Losing this battle would establish precedent that format-shifting legally aquired copies of media is not protected under fair use, which would be disastrous to preservation efforts of all kinds going forward.
This has nothing to do with format shifting at all. The IA's normal book-lending service works that way, but the "emergency library" allowed more copies of a book to be "borrowed" than they actually physically owned.
This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
I think it's a serious mistake that they allowed unlimited borrowers at a time, because that shifts from fair-use format shifting to effectively making multiple copies of the format-shifted document.
That said, IANAL and I don't know what actual legal conclusions were arrived at from the trial or appeals.
I think they're intentionally tying it all together because they know that the "emergency library" was a heap of shit (you can't argue you can digitally lend the same document multiple times simultaneously, it makes no sense).
They're basically holding the Internet Archive hostage to try to force this thing through.
The lawsuit is not about the “National Emergency Library”.
It’s about, as the IA calls it, “Controlled Digital Lending” - which the IA was doing before and after the “emergency”, and is still doing now. The idea that, if they have a physical copy of a book, they can lend, one-for-one, a digital copy.
The “National Emergency Library” was basically uncontrolled - they were ‘lending’ digital copies of books they did not have physical copies of. But there are no lawsuits about that - presumably because they stopped and it would be bad publicity fore book companies to pursue them about it now. I do wonder if it’s what precipitated the book companies’ ire - but I also think a lawsuit about “Controlled Digital Lending” was coming sooner or later anyway.
No, the publishers' lawsuit also took issue with the "NEL".
It's just that the lower court's judgement didn't really focus much that issue, because they found the broader/simpler and more-foundational "can you loan a format-shifted ebook 1:1 from your physical book" issue against IA, which then makes an anti-NEL conclusion almost automatic.
So NEL-related arguments haven't yet been the focus of the rulings, despite being part of the original lawsuit.
Thus, also, IA's appeal is mostly about that foundational finding – though section II of the IA appeal brief says that if the appeal succeeds on "ordinary controlled digital lending", the NEL ruling should also be rejudged:
>Il. THIS COURT SHOULD REMAND FOR RECONSIDERATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY LIBRARY
Publishers do not deny that the district court’s NEL ruling depends entirely on its analysis of ordinary controlled digital lending. Resp.Br. 61-62. If the Court reverses the latter, then it should also reverse and remand the former. It need not address Publishers’ arguments about the justifications for NEL (Resp.Br. 62), which should be left for the district court in the first instance.
That doesn't make sense. Of course it's a "single point of failure". I don't think anyone could have ever thought otherwise. A competing archive service would undoubtedly be great for humanity.
My problem with the "rest of the archive" is that it's arguably 98% unchecked mass piracy that their own people seem to be ok with, in the form of "we're not copyright police, so just upload whatever you want and let companies deal with it later." which is exactly what Jason Scott has said.
Of course it is piracy. This coloring of "bad" piracy with "good" things like libraries and preservation is an important step in dispelling the broadly pro-copyright culture we live in. It draws a clear picture of what copyright robs us of by presenting a case were violating it has a sense of moral righteousness.
> The problem is, their online book lending is far from the most important part of the Internet Archive,
I disagree. Archiving information for future researchers is valuable, but giving access to information to people right now is also very valuable. Most people's access to texts for research is very shallow, unless they are part of a research university. Google Books hosts many works that are out of copyright, but there is a century-long dead zone that is inaccessible.
I write a history of technology blog and the Internet Archive lending service has saved me thousands of dollars and many hours that it would have taken to track down the same research materials on eBay. Realistically, I just wouldn't have bothered, and the material I write would be of lower quality or not get written at all.
(That said I do agree that the emergency library was a strategic and legal mistake.)
Great, now you get access but then the year this free access is established is the year NEW information stops being created and/or the quality goes down hill (funny how making something free stops a lot of people from doing it for a living). Now everyone's content is 'lower quality or not get written at all' because the content that makes your's not 'lower quality' is no longer produced (most people/businesses don't work for free).
"last-ditch effort to save itself" is the title, "things aren't looking good for the Internet's archivist" the subtitle. But no mention of what losing the lawsuit actually means for IA: is it actually existential as the title and subtitle are alluding to? That's the only thing I care about if we assume (1) the IA is important and (2) they're gonna lose, both of which I think virtually everyone thinks are realistic statements. Bit disappointed by the article because it's rehashing what we know
Edit: found the answer
> per Wikipedia, as of eight months ago (August 2023), the lawsuit parties already reached & had the court approve a negotiated settlement that caps the potential costs to the IA at a survivable level
^from another comment, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203627>, nearly at the very bottom of the thread (perhaps because it looks like a wall of text at first glance? But the most important info is first). Thanks, gojomo!
I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is. Sounds like it will soon again be a good time to donate to the IA: they survive, plaintiffs see there is nothing more to take, then we fund their regular operations and hope for no more "emergency" ideas
> I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is.
Sadly, it will get worse. There will be more lawsuits like this opening up once this is over. They're already in a lawsuit from the music publishing industry which threatens to wipe out the Great 78 project and I'm sure the video game industry are prepping for one of their own as well:
[1] > They already have an unresolved pending lawsuit from the music publishing industry which threatens to wipe out the Great 78 project though this lawsuit, IMO, is much more dubious because so many of recordings digitized were originally published prior to 1928 and should in theory be public works. The publishers claim that because they still sell modern versions of those recordings, they are still actively covered under copyright but as long as the IA is sourcing from media pressed before 1928 I don't think that argument is valid but again this is a country ran by corporations, its entirely possible the IA gets shafted just to keep some corporate donors happy.
[2] > Now that the book publishers lawsuit is nearing finalization (I don't see this making it up to the Supreme Court, and even if it does the current supreme court is probably the most corporate friendly court in history) and there has been almost nothing in the way of meaningful public outcry (no, normal people do not care about random people/bots screaming on twitter from their moms basement) we are going to see more lawsuits from other industries which feel like they have been harmed in some way by the Internet Archive. One which I PROMISE is coming, and I am amazed it hasn't yet, is a lawsuit from the video game publishing industry. Archive.org has, over the last decade or so, become a hub for hosting ROMS for basically every video game platform ever made. The IA, at one time, was very good about quickly removing things like REDUMP romsets but has over the years seemingly embraced hosting them. I cannot fathom why they thought that was a good idea, or necessary. Retro gaming isn't a niche hobby anymore, its a billion dollar business they've put themselves firmly in the crosshairs of. Gaming corporations are some of the most litigious corporations on the face of the earth, and the kicker is these files are not in any danger at all. Literally any commercially released game for a commercially released video game platform has 10000 websites that are hosting those files, and those websites continue to exist because they get enough traffic to be profitable through ad revenue, and they are easy enough to quickly dismantle in the even of a cease and desist and then have spring back up 10 days later under a new name with a slightly different layout. The IA does not have that luxury.
Regardless of the legal merits of the Internet Archive's case, and regardless of Hachette Book Group's insistence otherwise, it's clear from Hachette's arguments and public statements that they would be happiest if public libraries altogether didn't exist and fair use was erased from law.
And regardless of what the law is, the Internet Archive an other libraries should be allowed to lend out a digitized copy of a physical book they own while the physical book is not in use (i.e. controlled digital lending). This is especially true for books without an official digital edition. Hachette doesn't want this, because they want to extract as much revenue from libraries as possible through continuing subscription fees for digital catalogs.
Finally, while I agree that the Internet Archive's arguments that the National Emergency Library's unlimited lending should be fair use were always tenuous, I'm still saddened that the arguments failed, and think the precedent their failure sets is much worse for society than the precedent from their success would have been.
"At bottom, [the Internet Archive’s] fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book. But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction."
First of all, why isn't that supported? Why shouldn't they be allowed to distribute that book digitally at a 1:1 ratio?
Secondly, isn't this part of what their case is arguing for though? Wouldn't this be the case that sets that precedent?
Of particular relevance is subsection (g) which explicitly states distributing the one copy permitted under this law multiple times simultaneously is illegal.
The section I quoted from the article (which is a direct quotes from the ruling) makes it sound like it's illegal regardless of the number of simultaneous copies being distributed, while your link explicitly states that 1:1 is legal.
Well, hold on. They are allowed to make one copy. Then g specifically says they are allowed to distribute one copy. Doesn't say it always has to be the same copy. It is in fact their one copy.
> Maybe you and I are on the side of The Internet Archive. Maybe we are such big fans of Archive.org that we want to come to their defense.
> But feelings don't matter here. Only facts. And the facts are simple. The Archive's actions and statements (and questionable legal defense) have all but ensured a loss in this case.
This is what has surprised me about people's defense of IA. When you look at the facts and ignore the admittedly good work they do elsewhere, it's clear that they not only ran afoul of the law but thumbed their noses at it. But so many people are quick to come to its defense because they love IA so much for the other stuff they do and don't want it to go away.
I don't even think this law is bad, other than maybe being too harsh. If this was allowed, why would anyone ever buy a book? I'm not going to pay any amount of money for a book I can legally digitally download for free. I realize physical books have an attractive quality, but I don't think that's enough to support an entire industry.
I think you're framing this as a novel angle, but everyone has already arrived at this angle. Yes, it's admirable that they're fighting the good fight, but there is a terrible price: the potential of losing IA. For not just us, but future generations. IA is essential to historical research right now, and holding a match to it unless some relatively-trivial copyright changes are made is questionable, is it not?
> When laws are bad, people should thumb their nose at them
When the electrical code says that there should be no voltage in the light sockets, then people should stick their fingers into them - regardless of what numbers the voltmeters show.
Yeah, this is my issue with it too. The Wayback Machine is awesome, Controlled Digital Lending is cool, becoming a host for Abandonware and/or Lost Media is definitely great, but I think a lot of people don't seem to realize that IA is sort of becoming a piracy website.
I mean, it's trivial to find entire MAME romsets for download [1], Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder roms [2], the entire season 1 of Hilda from Netflix [3], huge collections of PS4 games [4], and the list goes on.
Just to be clear, this required nearly zero effort on my part, I just looked up "Internet Archive PS4" on Kagi and found this in about four seconds. You can do this with basically any media and find something.
IA needs to do something about this stuff, because it's a matter of "when", not "if", for these companies taking legal action, and I cannot imagine a future where IA wins. They're a huge target with a lot of public exposure, and data harboring laws only get you so far.
I genuinely don't understand why they're not making any serious attempt to clean it up (also how Nintendo hasn't gone after them, they cease and desist their own paying fans!). Maybe moderation would cost more than the storage/bandwidth so they can leave cleaning it for when legal issues happen.
The "emergency library" is at least understandable as a special case.
Call me out if I'm misremembering this, but I think the vast majority of comments were of the same opinion (then and now) and not "so many people are quick to come to its defense because they love IA so much for the other stuff". I'm sure there was a lot of "I love the IA so much for the other stuff" but then it was also followed by something like "but wtf is this risk they're taking"
I wanted to write a piece of FOSS that would allow dissemination of a large dataset. It would basically work kind of like a torrent swarm, you'd have a "tracker" (the Internet Archive) deciding what it wants each person to store (usually the rarest content would get stored preferentially), and the user could say "I want to donate 2 TB of space to the Internet Archive" and would download whatever files the IA thought were most at risk of being lost.
This would have the added benefit that, if the IA went down, the public could reconstruct (some of) the dataset from this swarm.
I spoke to a few archiving organizations about whether they'd find it useful, but there wasn't much interest. Too bad, I think a lot of people would like to donate some disk space right about now.
You could also do some kind of distributed proof that they still have it: ask every host that claims to have a file compute the hash(prefix+content) of the file, where prefixes differ: distributed k prefixes to each client, and then compare them to get a proof that at least some number of copies exist.
It's an improvement over regular BitTorrent because it sounds like there's some coodination about how to spread the data across contributing nodes. BitTorrent doesn't do that out of the box.
It has quite a few differences, namely it's not one swarm, each file (or collection) is its own torrent. This allows for easy updates (clients can get new files without having to re-download everything), it has protection against some attacks, etc.
IPFS is meant for this, you could also use torrents with RSS (a lot of clients support downloading torrents from a feed, but there's no signaling for replacement/removal).
Hopefully in the far future the IA will be distributed over many individual user nodes, but that doesn't seem feasible right now. What we need right now are 2-4 high powered individuals or companies building local mirrors. Hopefully the IA would cooperate in setting these up. These mirror organizations should be distributed around the globe in different jurisdictions, and they need to take the negative lessons from IA into account: for example, they should probably be structured such that the legally precarious data-serving arm is a different entity from the organization that owns the server space.
We absolutely need this kind of resilience, and we need it now. Otherwise this time will retroactively be dubbed the digital dark ages because so very little information actually survived and made it out.
Someone in this thread was estimating about USD 2M investment in hardware, then 1M facilities and a small team of people for initial setup, plus connectivity costs and maintenance - let's say 4M initially and about 1M ongoing costs yearly. A single wealthy individual could fund one of these sites. You don't even have to be "rich" to fund this, being well off would be enough.
If you fit this description and you're feeling altruistic or are looking for a lasting legacy that will benefit humanity far into the future, use a portion of your capital to make this happen.
Readit News
IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
All that’s fine and good, but isn’t going to help them negotiate with publishers, or get better copyright legislation.
I also think liberties have been branding themselves as politically progressive for a long time - since long before the digital age.
This has left them with few friends, as progressivism returns to its roots as an upper middle-class ideology.
This is so sad. I spend so much time growing up in libraries. Been locked up there accidentally more than once.
And it would be more or less irrelevant that they didn't, because the massive amount of information made voluntarily available for free on the internet vastly outweighs the initial few centuries of libraries' existence by several orders of magnitude.
I find it extremely bizarre the people make posts like this, essentially conceding that controlled digital lending should be legal, but then claiming that they shouldn't win. Why shouldn't they win? They're doing something reasonable, meritorious and not at all clearly prohibited.
The library model is one that has a long history and is therefore helpful as a way to accomplish that mission. The “controlled” part of controlled digital lending is only there as a way to try to appease rights-holders (who would otherwise argue in court that there should be no lending, only licensing (or not) under their complete control).
The unfortunate thing that happened is they decided upon themselves to freely and openly distribute copyrighted works at scale which is clearly prohibited and confirmed by precedent. This is the point that they should lose. No library is allowed to reprint books in full and simply hand them out to people who ask.
For this to happen, libraries might need something like:
1) first sale doctrine for ebooks
2) explicitly legalizing the distribution (and non-infringing use) of digital copying and transcoding technology with substantial non-infringing uses, similarly to the analog domain (see: photocopiers, VCRs, etc.)
If I were only allowed to change one thing about copyright, what I would change is not the length of copyright terms, but the treatment of digital works. Kill this stupid pretend game that you don't buy anything digital, you merely lease it, and therefore the creator gets to jerk you around to their heart's content because contract law supersedes all. No, make a digital sale a sale, and then we get to have the First Sale Doctrine kick in. And hopefully we get to sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as they repeatedly go to SCOTUS as the printer manufacturers do with some new harebrained attempt to work around First Sale Doctrine and SCOTUS goes "lol, nope, doesn't work."
But truly, fuck the ebook lending practices. It's downright predatory and it just makes me never want to actually buy an ebook (unless it's from one of the few publishers that goes all-in on DRM-free ebooks).
the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act
Before the advent of digital media, the meaning of copyright could be cleanly derived from the words it is compounded from.
Any publisher arguing that to lend a purchased item to another person infringes on their exclusive right to produce copies, would have been laughed right out of the courtroom.
Dead Comment
For ebooks, pirates can provide the public library service.
It seems like for academic research, storing a large collection of unpopular books is what matters. Making best-sellers available to many local readers is a different function.
If you haven't read this, now's the time to: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit...
> IA may have gone beyond pushing the envelope and well into stepping over the line on this one, but it is an important legal challenge. I don't think IA will or should win, but I do hope that their loss shifts the needle of public opinion a bit toward actual Fair Use.
Very unlikely that would happen and libraries would inevitably pay the ultimate price in the long run in a period where they're under attack and most at risk of extinction from all fronts (politicians, governments, publishers, copyright cartel, list goes on all hate libraries and this would be a huge win for those groups as a sign to cripple them even more).
I have to say I've never seen anti-library sentiment from politicians or governments.
Many people misunderstand and think it is just about the temporary unlimited lending. It was motivated by that, but went further.
Imagine a video rental service where you can go in, and they will play whatever movie you want on a DVD player in the back room. How long can that wire be between the DVD player and the person watching before it starts being copyright infringement?
Libraries are able to loan under the first sale doctrine, that is to say that the copyright holder exhausts their right to control the distribution of a copy after the first sale. However, they retain a monopoly on the production of copies.
I'm not saying that speciously. If it's fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, there's no need for the public to go to shadow libraries; because they've then become de facto legal and the libraries might as well distribute the material directly (or aid with access and provide resources for the shadow libraries.) If it's not fine that they encourage the public to go to shadow libraries, when they do it they've called their own distribution of copyrighted materials into question by implying that they do the same thing as shadow libraries.
DRM is an overlay over copyright which gives copyright owners some security that they'll be able to hold on to most of the distribution of what they own. It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all.
If you want to fight copyright, fight it directly, don't gamble the IA for it. The giant multinational companies that own the vast majority of copyrights are begging you to stake the entire IA on such a sucker bet.
Should your books destroy themselves after you've read them once?
It makes no sense to even speak of "leasing" what's actually trivially copyable data. That's working within the conceptual framework of monopolists. There is no "cost", any costs associated with digital distribution can and will be so efficiently distributed among all users they might as well be zero. All the monopolists need to do is get out of our way.
The only solution to this problem is abolishing it all straight up. Just get rid of copyright. It's holding us all back.
The Internet Archive has become the de-facto default location to upload anything rare, important, or valuable, and a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence if it were brought down.
Hachette's owners see an opportunity here to destroy a public good, and they are taking it. Hachette are the bad actors trying to destroy what you find valuable, not the IA.
Hachette obviously benefits from teaching would-be unlimited "lenders" a lesson. Even anti-DRM, "buy my books only if you can afford" authors were against this hare-brained lending scheme because the IA didn't even bother to buy a single copy of the books they were "lending".
The blame squarely falls at the IA's feet; being an idealist doesn't give you the rights to delve into illegal behavior, regardless of the righteousness of your cause or the depth of your conviction. If the world is better with an org in it, and it jeopardizes it's own ability to remain a going concern, it's clear to me who is culpable. "Too good to die" doesn't exist.
You demonize Hachette et al (4 major publishers) as seeking to destroy a public good. In fact, they've already settled with the IA, as of last August 2023, in a manner that caps costs to IA at a survivable level and sets clear mutually-acceptable rules for future activity.
You imply IA would dismiss the appeal if the plaintiffs "could drop enforcement of the judgement". In fact, there were never any assessed damages, the parties have already reached a mutually-acceptable settlement per above, and despite that – in fact, as part of the settlement! – the IA has retained the right to appeal regarding the fair-use principles that are important to them.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive#F...
>On August 11, 2023, the parties reached a negotiated judgment. The agreement prescribes a permanent injunction against the Internet Archive preventing it from distributing the plaintiffs' books, except those for which no e-book is currently available,[3] as well as an undisclosed payment to the plaintiffs.[25][26] The agreement also preserves the right for the Internet Archive to appeal the previous ruling.[25][26]
IA's August 2023 statement on how much will continue despite the injunction & settlement limits: https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/17/what-the-hachette-v-inte...
>Because this case was limited to our book lending program, the injunction does not significantly impact our other library services. The Internet Archive may still digitize books for preservation purposes, and may still provide access to our digital collections in a number of ways, including through interlibrary loan and by making accessible formats available to people with qualified print disabilities. We may continue to display “short portions” of books as is consistent with fair use—for example, Wikipedia references (as shown in the image above). The injunction does not affect lending of out-of-print books. And of course, the Internet Archive will still make millions of public domain texts available to the public without restriction.
They're probably just making sure that the next place that wants to pull something funny, doesn't.
Ye old "lets make an example out of them" thing.
They do: Legal precedent.
IA made themselves into an easy, prominent target by doing something everyone else agreed to not do via Gentlemens' Agreements(tm) and precedents set by lesser transgressions, so now they're reaping what they sowed.
The book publishers stand to gain legal precedent that doing what IA did can and will result in legal consequences severe enough to ruin you.
Quite possibly on behalf of some other entities in their same bed that don't like information to be free and preserved.
Here's the related discussion: Stop using the Internet Archive as the sole host for preservation projects | 87 points by yours truly | 27 days ago | 27 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
One response to that is the "The Offline Internet Archive" [0], which includes software to crawl Internet Archive collections and store them to a local server [1].
[0] https://archive.org/about/offline-archive
[1] https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror
This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
That said, IANAL and I don't know what actual legal conclusions were arrived at from the trial or appeals.
They're basically holding the Internet Archive hostage to try to force this thing through.
It’s about, as the IA calls it, “Controlled Digital Lending” - which the IA was doing before and after the “emergency”, and is still doing now. The idea that, if they have a physical copy of a book, they can lend, one-for-one, a digital copy.
The “National Emergency Library” was basically uncontrolled - they were ‘lending’ digital copies of books they did not have physical copies of. But there are no lawsuits about that - presumably because they stopped and it would be bad publicity fore book companies to pursue them about it now. I do wonder if it’s what precipitated the book companies’ ire - but I also think a lawsuit about “Controlled Digital Lending” was coming sooner or later anyway.
It's just that the lower court's judgement didn't really focus much that issue, because they found the broader/simpler and more-foundational "can you loan a format-shifted ebook 1:1 from your physical book" issue against IA, which then makes an anti-NEL conclusion almost automatic.
So NEL-related arguments haven't yet been the focus of the rulings, despite being part of the original lawsuit.
Thus, also, IA's appeal is mostly about that foundational finding – though section II of the IA appeal brief says that if the appeal succeeds on "ordinary controlled digital lending", the NEL ruling should also be rejudged:
>Il. THIS COURT SHOULD REMAND FOR RECONSIDERATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY LIBRARY Publishers do not deny that the district court’s NEL ruling depends entirely on its analysis of ordinary controlled digital lending. Resp.Br. 61-62. If the Court reverses the latter, then it should also reverse and remand the former. It need not address Publishers’ arguments about the justifications for NEL (Resp.Br. 62), which should be left for the district court in the first instance.
Context?
I disagree. Archiving information for future researchers is valuable, but giving access to information to people right now is also very valuable. Most people's access to texts for research is very shallow, unless they are part of a research university. Google Books hosts many works that are out of copyright, but there is a century-long dead zone that is inaccessible.
I write a history of technology blog and the Internet Archive lending service has saved me thousands of dollars and many hours that it would have taken to track down the same research materials on eBay. Realistically, I just wouldn't have bothered, and the material I write would be of lower quality or not get written at all.
(That said I do agree that the emergency library was a strategic and legal mistake.)
Edit: found the answer
> per Wikipedia, as of eight months ago (August 2023), the lawsuit parties already reached & had the court approve a negotiated settlement that caps the potential costs to the IA at a survivable level
^from another comment, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203627>, nearly at the very bottom of the thread (perhaps because it looks like a wall of text at first glance? But the most important info is first). Thanks, gojomo!
I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is. Sounds like it will soon again be a good time to donate to the IA: they survive, plaintiffs see there is nothing more to take, then we fund their regular operations and hope for no more "emergency" ideas
It cannot. The IA already basically got the worst possible judgment.
This is also not an existential threat to the IA, and payment has already been agreed upon. The reporting on this is extremely sensationalist.
Why bother appealing then? Seems to just be wasting lawyers fees on both sides.
Sadly, it will get worse. There will be more lawsuits like this opening up once this is over. They're already in a lawsuit from the music publishing industry which threatens to wipe out the Great 78 project and I'm sure the video game industry are prepping for one of their own as well:
[1] > They already have an unresolved pending lawsuit from the music publishing industry which threatens to wipe out the Great 78 project though this lawsuit, IMO, is much more dubious because so many of recordings digitized were originally published prior to 1928 and should in theory be public works. The publishers claim that because they still sell modern versions of those recordings, they are still actively covered under copyright but as long as the IA is sourcing from media pressed before 1928 I don't think that argument is valid but again this is a country ran by corporations, its entirely possible the IA gets shafted just to keep some corporate donors happy.
[2] > Now that the book publishers lawsuit is nearing finalization (I don't see this making it up to the Supreme Court, and even if it does the current supreme court is probably the most corporate friendly court in history) and there has been almost nothing in the way of meaningful public outcry (no, normal people do not care about random people/bots screaming on twitter from their moms basement) we are going to see more lawsuits from other industries which feel like they have been harmed in some way by the Internet Archive. One which I PROMISE is coming, and I am amazed it hasn't yet, is a lawsuit from the video game publishing industry. Archive.org has, over the last decade or so, become a hub for hosting ROMS for basically every video game platform ever made. The IA, at one time, was very good about quickly removing things like REDUMP romsets but has over the years seemingly embraced hosting them. I cannot fathom why they thought that was a good idea, or necessary. Retro gaming isn't a niche hobby anymore, its a billion dollar business they've put themselves firmly in the crosshairs of. Gaming corporations are some of the most litigious corporations on the face of the earth, and the kicker is these files are not in any danger at all. Literally any commercially released game for a commercially released video game platform has 10000 websites that are hosting those files, and those websites continue to exist because they get enough traffic to be profitable through ad revenue, and they are easy enough to quickly dismantle in the even of a cease and desist and then have spring back up 10 days later under a new name with a slightly different layout. The IA does not have that luxury.
[1] [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bswhdj/if_the...
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
And regardless of what the law is, the Internet Archive an other libraries should be allowed to lend out a digitized copy of a physical book they own while the physical book is not in use (i.e. controlled digital lending). This is especially true for books without an official digital edition. Hachette doesn't want this, because they want to extract as much revenue from libraries as possible through continuing subscription fees for digital catalogs.
Finally, while I agree that the Internet Archive's arguments that the National Emergency Library's unlimited lending should be fair use were always tenuous, I'm still saddened that the arguments failed, and think the precedent their failure sets is much worse for society than the precedent from their success would have been.
First of all, why isn't that supported? Why shouldn't they be allowed to distribute that book digitally at a 1:1 ratio?
Secondly, isn't this part of what their case is arguing for though? Wouldn't this be the case that sets that precedent?
Of particular relevance is subsection (g) which explicitly states distributing the one copy permitted under this law multiple times simultaneously is illegal.
So I'm a bit confused.
> But feelings don't matter here. Only facts. And the facts are simple. The Archive's actions and statements (and questionable legal defense) have all but ensured a loss in this case.
This is what has surprised me about people's defense of IA. When you look at the facts and ignore the admittedly good work they do elsewhere, it's clear that they not only ran afoul of the law but thumbed their noses at it. But so many people are quick to come to its defense because they love IA so much for the other stuff they do and don't want it to go away.
When laws are bad, people should thumb their nose at them
Good on them for using the platform they have to try and push for real change, at personal risk to themselves and their operations too
You (and Internet Archive) are about to learn what happens when the courts fail to be persuaded regarding the 'badness' of the law in question.
Sure. But use some intelligence and risk management when you're doing it.
This was just outright stupidity, and there's no excuse for it. :( :( :(
When the electrical code says that there should be no voltage in the light sockets, then people should stick their fingers into them - regardless of what numbers the voltmeters show.
Right?
“One has a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.” —MLKJ
I mean, it's trivial to find entire MAME romsets for download [1], Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder roms [2], the entire season 1 of Hilda from Netflix [3], huge collections of PS4 games [4], and the list goes on.
Just to be clear, this required nearly zero effort on my part, I just looked up "Internet Archive PS4" on Kagi and found this in about four seconds. You can do this with basically any media and find something.
IA needs to do something about this stuff, because it's a matter of "when", not "if", for these companies taking legal action, and I cannot imagine a future where IA wins. They're a huge target with a lot of public exposure, and data harboring laws only get you so far.
[1] https://archive.org/details/mame-merged [2] https://archive.org/download/street-fighter-30th-anniversary... [3] https://archive.org/details/hilda-season-complete-episodes [4] https://archive.org/download/CG_Sony_PlayStation_4
This would have the added benefit that, if the IA went down, the public could reconstruct (some of) the dataset from this swarm.
I spoke to a few archiving organizations about whether they'd find it useful, but there wasn't much interest. Too bad, I think a lot of people would like to donate some disk space right about now.
Are you asking for coordination of which parts are most rare? I though bittorrent already prioritized the least common parts in a swarm.
We absolutely need this kind of resilience, and we need it now. Otherwise this time will retroactively be dubbed the digital dark ages because so very little information actually survived and made it out.
Someone in this thread was estimating about USD 2M investment in hardware, then 1M facilities and a small team of people for initial setup, plus connectivity costs and maintenance - let's say 4M initially and about 1M ongoing costs yearly. A single wealthy individual could fund one of these sites. You don't even have to be "rich" to fund this, being well off would be enough.
If you fit this description and you're feeling altruistic or are looking for a lasting legacy that will benefit humanity far into the future, use a portion of your capital to make this happen.