Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly.
Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date.
I wish a fraction of the people who are upset about this would actually commit a portion of their time to lobbying and organising for copyright reform. Copyright terms are too damn long, by half a century and then some. This isn't some iron law of nature, this could easily be changed if there were enough of a push for it.
Are you a lawyer? Can you point to the relevant statutes? I don't ask this flippantly as there exist many forms (private / public / academic) of library which allow for both physical and digital lending of owned assets and are not subject to lawsuits like this. It's not at all obvious that IA's interpretation of the law is in error.
The relevant statute provision is 17 U.S.C. § 501.
On March 24, 2023, the Internet Archive was found liable for copyright infringement under that section by a federal court, in an order granting a motion for a summary judgment.[0] A summary judgment means that there is no genuine dispute about facts, and the plaintiffs (the people suing the Internet Archive) are entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.[1]
It is your prerogative to feel that you're better qualified to interpret federal law than a federal court is, but it is fairly misleading to say that it is not at all clear what the law is here, when a court decision exists on these exact facts.
Should the law be changed? Yes, in my opinion. Is there much dispute over what the law is? No, not really.
[1] Other common law jurisdictions use clearer language to describe summary judgments: in the UK and Australia, for example, a summary judgment is granted when a party has "no reasonable prospects of success" and there is no point in going to trial. These exact words aren't used in the US, but they give a reasonable indication of how summary judgments are used in practice.
You really don't need to be a lawyer to understand the extent to which Internet Archive really screwed up here. For starters they lost on Summary Judgment, which means they couldn't come up with a single issue of fact that the judge thought deserved a trial. Read the Order, the Judge obviously has it straight. Then check archive.org's Form 990s and see how little money they run on, how much they pissed away on legal fees so far, and also infer the amount they had to pay in damages, which was obviously very tiny.
You are welcome to argue it as a matter of culture (and I'm inclined to agree and cheer you on) but from a legal perspective, Brewster should be removed and they need to find competent people to put on the board because they really did put the entire organization at risk over an idiotic decision. And the ramifications continue.
Internet Archive's "we own a copy of a book, we scan it and loan out one digital copy" policy was already on shaky ground. When Covid hit and everyone lost their minds, letting homeless people sleep on the stairs of their building apparently wasn't enough so they just turned into The Pirate Bay and loaned out infinite copies of everything.
In discovery for the case, it turned out they weren't even tracking the "we own one copy" part to begin with correctly. None of this should be surprising to anyone who actually attempts to use the site. The whole thing is duct tape and string.
They have a tiny budget and the do amazing things with it, but it really deserves to be treated like a business and not be run like an art project. If they wanna stick your neck out and push for CDL reform, great. Just do it under a different LLC so you don't tank the 50 other important things you've got going on. And it's time for Brewster to move on. In any other non-profit he'd be gone by now.
Are you aware of a form of library subject to US law that lends copyrighted digital assets without either a license from the copyright holder or legal trouble from the copyright holder?
This is about sound recordings rather than books, but one of the more insane features of US copyright law is that the copyright status of sound recordings made before 1972 is governed by state rather than federal law, and many states are thought to have no applicable statute. Some of these states determine copyright status for these works by deferring to federal law, which does not cover them.
> It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date.
Agreed. But the problem here is not the daring action but linking it to a sadly unique resource.
> You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail.
You can however still protest robin hood being sent to jail and you can shame the fat nobles calling for robin hood to be hanged and you can grab the pitchforks and make sure they loose more than they gain. The law is meaningless if it doesn't have the support of the people. Copyright is already routinely ignored by almost everyone when its convenient (outside commercial activity).
Lobbying is all well and good but that's the corporations' turf. Nothing wrong with deciding not to play their game and choose other ways to fight the absurd copyright laws.
Actually, the digitising part is what I find the most acceptable. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do this? Would you have the same problem if they bought ebooks in MOBI, converted them and then lent out EPUB versions.
The lending out more copies than they bought part is what there are some good arguments against.
> "I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston.
This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA. It's not like these publishers are losing any money from books that literally nobody can purchase.
>If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA
What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions.
And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
> What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works?
Too bad. Once you publish it the first time, the cat is out of the bag. Eventually it's going to go into the public domain whether you like it or not.
> And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
Good question but can definitely be decided. $100 is probably fine. Regulators can decide. Yes. Not good enough. Not good enough.
We have frameworks for mandatory music licensing, we can do more things like that.
> There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions.
This is actually exactly why I agree with OP. See also the changes made to Roald Dahl books. Future generations deserve to be able to read the content that their forebears produced as they produced it.
I'm supportive of an author's right to not initially publish something that they at the time are uncomfortable with being made public. There should be protections for that. But once something has entered into the public consciousness in a particular form, I'm not okay with a cultural censorship wave being able to memory hole the original copy and replace it with a sanitized version (or wipe it out entirely). They shouldn't be obliged to print content that they find objectionable, but that content needs to be accessible or we lose our history.
Messy and uncomfortable as it is, future generations have a right to see us as we were and are, not as the second-generation holder of our too-long copyright wishes we had been.
Authors should have that inalienable right, and it should not transferable via contract or any other means. Publishers, on the other hand, should have no such rights: they own the presses, their inalienable right should be to refrain from using them.
No, it really isn't. That person, and you, don't understand how publishing - or mass production of any kind, it seems - works.
A publisher "stopping printing" of a book is completely normal - books are like any other mass-produced good, in that there are fixed and variable costs to production and a factory can't economically crank out more than a certain number of different things at once.
Sp, there are "printings" - ie a production run - and then that inventory is sold to distributors. When the inventory is sold out, it is "out of print." That does not mean it's not available - there's still stock at distributors. And likely on shelves.
When it sells out at distributors, then it is backordered.
It is completely normal for a publisher to wait until they feel there is enough pent-up demand for another printing - increasing the size of the printing to improve per-copy profit (or make it economically viable at all), and then sell it to distributors because the distributors think they can sell the inventory at a high enough rate.
Distributors don't want to keep around books that don't sell very fast, because that means they don't have warehouse space for books that do sell quickly. And if they have books that don't sell and need the warehouse space, the books might get remaindered (sold to a low-budget distributor for sale at well below original price) or destroyed (cover stripped as proof of destruction and the rest destroyed/recycled.)
Things have changed with digital press technology improvements, opening the door to more print-on-demand books - but printing one copy will never be anywhere close to as cheap as printing, say, 1000 copies.
There are also other reasons it might not be for sale, despite the author trying / wanting to sell it.
If you know nothing about how book printing, publishing, distribution, buying, and retail works - you probably shouldn't be forming opinions on how it should be subject to radically different regulation, much less offering them up.
Internet Archive isn't printing books, they are lending out digital copies. A publisher would have no reason not to sell a digital copy of their own. There are no production runs necessary on digital copies.
I never said the books have to be physically printed. Digitize the book and sell it online. Make it available through a kindle unlimited subscription. It doesn't matter, as long as it's readily available. Until then, they should have no right to sue to remove the books from IA.
Also keep in mind that, for many of the books, the authors are dead.
LibGen/IPFS is heavily biased toward books from the past ~3 decades, especially books that are cracked EPUB's and PDF's.
IA seems to be much more scans of library books from ~1930-1980, many of which are out of print and probably only available to you via interlibrary loan, which you might wait a month for.
IA is a huge boon for academic research when you need to go back to midcentury books. I don't know which 500K the IA is being required to remove, but I'm very worried.
Even being good for it I can’t stand how most books are like $19.99, knowing I can find it in very good condition on ebay for $6 and get it from the library for free. If they want to sell a lot more books out of the little shops at the airports or wherevers left that books are sold today, make them cheap enough to be a spontaneous purchase again. I have some old paper backs that were like 99 cents new.
Not sure why this is being downvoted because it is correct.
The product of public domain materials can be copyrighted. For example, if someone were to publish a new book of Tom Sawyer whose text is in the public domain, that book can be copyrighted. Everyone can still publish their own new books of Tom Sawyer using the public domain materials, but noone can copy that book of Tom Sawyer.
Does your theory apply to the content consumed during the training of LLMs? If not why not? Where should we draw the line regarding intellectual property rights?
3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.
The view across both is the same: people should be paid for their labour. So authors should be paid for the books they write. The line isnt that hard to draw.
The issue here isnt the IA's provision of brand new books that are still being published; this few would say should be legal. We're talking dead authors, books no longer in print, or books published so long ago that the second-hand market (which offers no pay to the author) is the place to find them.
As soon as works transition to "second-hand markets" we're no longer talking about the labour of the author being remunerated. At this point, it's pretty clear that it's a net benefit to society to make creative works publically available.
2. LLMs are an incredible step forward in humanity's progression.
3. 10 years from publishing, then public domain afterwards. The content must be commercialised to have copyright; if it's available for free, it should already be public domain, because copyright is supposed to help you make money, not help you control the use of information.
Readit News
Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date.
I wish a fraction of the people who are upset about this would actually commit a portion of their time to lobbying and organising for copyright reform. Copyright terms are too damn long, by half a century and then some. This isn't some iron law of nature, this could easily be changed if there were enough of a push for it.
On March 24, 2023, the Internet Archive was found liable for copyright infringement under that section by a federal court, in an order granting a motion for a summary judgment.[0] A summary judgment means that there is no genuine dispute about facts, and the plaintiffs (the people suing the Internet Archive) are entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.[1]
It is your prerogative to feel that you're better qualified to interpret federal law than a federal court is, but it is fairly misleading to say that it is not at all clear what the law is here, when a court decision exists on these exact facts.
Should the law be changed? Yes, in my opinion. Is there much dispute over what the law is? No, not really.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
[1] Other common law jurisdictions use clearer language to describe summary judgments: in the UK and Australia, for example, a summary judgment is granted when a party has "no reasonable prospects of success" and there is no point in going to trial. These exact words aren't used in the US, but they give a reasonable indication of how summary judgments are used in practice.
None of this is legal advice.
You are welcome to argue it as a matter of culture (and I'm inclined to agree and cheer you on) but from a legal perspective, Brewster should be removed and they need to find competent people to put on the board because they really did put the entire organization at risk over an idiotic decision. And the ramifications continue.
Internet Archive's "we own a copy of a book, we scan it and loan out one digital copy" policy was already on shaky ground. When Covid hit and everyone lost their minds, letting homeless people sleep on the stairs of their building apparently wasn't enough so they just turned into The Pirate Bay and loaned out infinite copies of everything.
In discovery for the case, it turned out they weren't even tracking the "we own one copy" part to begin with correctly. None of this should be surprising to anyone who actually attempts to use the site. The whole thing is duct tape and string.
They have a tiny budget and the do amazing things with it, but it really deserves to be treated like a business and not be run like an art project. If they wanna stick your neck out and push for CDL reform, great. Just do it under a different LLC so you don't tank the 50 other important things you've got going on. And it's time for Brewster to move on. In any other non-profit he'd be gone by now.
IANAL, but:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
What the Internet Archive did (loan many digital copies based on one physical copy) is illegal as the law stands today.
This is about sound recordings rather than books, but one of the more insane features of US copyright law is that the copyright status of sound recordings made before 1972 is governed by state rather than federal law, and many states are thought to have no applicable statute. Some of these states determine copyright status for these works by deferring to federal law, which does not cover them.
Dead Comment
Agreed. But the problem here is not the daring action but linking it to a sadly unique resource.
> You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail.
You can however still protest robin hood being sent to jail and you can shame the fat nobles calling for robin hood to be hanged and you can grab the pitchforks and make sure they loose more than they gain. The law is meaningless if it doesn't have the support of the people. Copyright is already routinely ignored by almost everyone when its convenient (outside commercial activity).
Lobbying is all well and good but that's the corporations' turf. Nothing wrong with deciding not to play their game and choose other ways to fight the absurd copyright laws.
No, not “almost certainly.”
I think they pushed the limit of what should be legal, especially since they were digitizing print books and lending those out as ebooks.
The lending out more copies than they bought part is what there are some good arguments against.
This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA. It's not like these publishers are losing any money from books that literally nobody can purchase.
What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions.
And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
Too bad. Once you publish it the first time, the cat is out of the bag. Eventually it's going to go into the public domain whether you like it or not.
> And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
Good question but can definitely be decided. $100 is probably fine. Regulators can decide. Yes. Not good enough. Not good enough.
We have frameworks for mandatory music licensing, we can do more things like that.
This is actually exactly why I agree with OP. See also the changes made to Roald Dahl books. Future generations deserve to be able to read the content that their forebears produced as they produced it.
I'm supportive of an author's right to not initially publish something that they at the time are uncomfortable with being made public. There should be protections for that. But once something has entered into the public consciousness in a particular form, I'm not okay with a cultural censorship wave being able to memory hole the original copy and replace it with a sanitized version (or wipe it out entirely). They shouldn't be obliged to print content that they find objectionable, but that content needs to be accessible or we lose our history.
Messy and uncomfortable as it is, future generations have a right to see us as we were and are, not as the second-generation holder of our too-long copyright wishes we had been.
Then they should lose the rights of the originals. The point of copyright is to enrich society not to satisfy any want of the author.
Which is basically how trademarks are. So we even already have a system in place to manage something like this.
A publisher "stopping printing" of a book is completely normal - books are like any other mass-produced good, in that there are fixed and variable costs to production and a factory can't economically crank out more than a certain number of different things at once.
Sp, there are "printings" - ie a production run - and then that inventory is sold to distributors. When the inventory is sold out, it is "out of print." That does not mean it's not available - there's still stock at distributors. And likely on shelves.
When it sells out at distributors, then it is backordered.
It is completely normal for a publisher to wait until they feel there is enough pent-up demand for another printing - increasing the size of the printing to improve per-copy profit (or make it economically viable at all), and then sell it to distributors because the distributors think they can sell the inventory at a high enough rate.
Distributors don't want to keep around books that don't sell very fast, because that means they don't have warehouse space for books that do sell quickly. And if they have books that don't sell and need the warehouse space, the books might get remaindered (sold to a low-budget distributor for sale at well below original price) or destroyed (cover stripped as proof of destruction and the rest destroyed/recycled.)
Things have changed with digital press technology improvements, opening the door to more print-on-demand books - but printing one copy will never be anywhere close to as cheap as printing, say, 1000 copies.
There are also other reasons it might not be for sale, despite the author trying / wanting to sell it.
If you know nothing about how book printing, publishing, distribution, buying, and retail works - you probably shouldn't be forming opinions on how it should be subject to radically different regulation, much less offering them up.
https://pinestatepublicity.substack.com/p/book-distribution-...
Also keep in mind that, for many of the books, the authors are dead.
> Publishers want
> Distributors want
So? I too want a golden goose protected with force by the government at no cost to me. What does the rest of society gain from this deal?
Makes you wonder: Do they even have data on their business growth factors? I don't but I'd guess that:
1. nobody is printing downloaded books
2. instead, people like me _buy_ printed books after browsing through them online
LibGen/IPFS is heavily biased toward books from the past ~3 decades, especially books that are cracked EPUB's and PDF's.
IA seems to be much more scans of library books from ~1930-1980, many of which are out of print and probably only available to you via interlibrary loan, which you might wait a month for.
IA is a huge boon for academic research when you need to go back to midcentury books. I don't know which 500K the IA is being required to remove, but I'm very worried.
Like this: https://archive.org/details/landau-and-lifshitz-physics-text...
Where LibGen only has the first volume in French and Portuguese only...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084 (4 days ago, 48 comments)
If you are upset about this, commit to seeding as many of these as you can until the IA service is restored.
Very different sets of books. I don't see how this will help. LibGen isn't going away, not that I'm aware of.
IA is mostly full-color scans of old library books.
I've never come across an IA scan on Libgen. Libgen is mostly EPUB's, native PDF's, and the occasional black-and-white high-contrast PDF scan.
Is this some legal angle I’m missing which benefits the plaintiffs in some way?
The product of public domain materials can be copyrighted. For example, if someone were to publish a new book of Tom Sawyer whose text is in the public domain, that book can be copyrighted. Everyone can still publish their own new books of Tom Sawyer using the public domain materials, but noone can copy that book of Tom Sawyer.
One of my books is on Anna's Archive. Since I give them away for nothing on my website, it's more flattering than anything. :)
2. Information and knowledge is for all.
3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.
The issue here isnt the IA's provision of brand new books that are still being published; this few would say should be legal. We're talking dead authors, books no longer in print, or books published so long ago that the second-hand market (which offers no pay to the author) is the place to find them.
As soon as works transition to "second-hand markets" we're no longer talking about the labour of the author being remunerated. At this point, it's pretty clear that it's a net benefit to society to make creative works publically available.
2. LLMs are an incredible step forward in humanity's progression.
3. 10 years from publishing, then public domain afterwards. The content must be commercialised to have copyright; if it's available for free, it should already be public domain, because copyright is supposed to help you make money, not help you control the use of information.
It's a great source of English books for us. Our city library is good, but it doesn't have thousands of picture books.
Libby has about 15 books. We borrow them often enough that it gives the error message that they are unavailable to borrow :/