To some degree I think that with the increase in use of digital media there needs to better rights and methods for sharing like one can with physical media.
However, it's not fair use to copy material and redistribute it. Furthermore, the creator should be able to determine the format of the release of their work. If someone wants to alter their work, they must do so in a transformative manner and not pass it off as the creator's work.
Someone who makes a book with formatting specific to say a PDF, could be unfairly reviewed or judged by readers who borrowed distributed copies that are formatted to epub, for example.
This is a real problem with discussions about copyright, because this is a great example of something that is a mic drop on a message board that will get you tossed out on your ear in a court of law.
we need to stop looking at accessibility as something we add occasionally to a product when things are going well and we want to feel nice about ourselves.
the best way to do it is through things like this, where the content is available to you and you can choose how to consume it - dark mode, but maybe also reader mode, large fonts, wide screens, text search, etc - these should be considered the basic necessities, and then anything you want to do to make it look nice and feel creative is on top, as an option - even the default option if you really care about marketing over content.
Re-read my comment, I said that anyone can do whatever they want with their own copy. But once they start distributing a modified copy is when their is a problem.
> However, it's not fair use to copy material and redistribute it.
You mean permanent copies, right? Then the IA doesn't disagree. They just want to loan out one digital copy while the original is locked up, in an attempt to emulate not making copies as closely as possible in a digital world.
> Furthermore, the creator should be able to determine the format of the release of their work. If someone wants to alter their work, they must do so in a transformative manner and not pass it off as the creator's work.
> Someone who makes a book with formatting specific to say a PDF, could be unfairly reviewed or judged by readers who borrowed distributed copies that are formatted to epub, for example.
I can get behind forced marking in some circumstances, but shifting between digital and physical should fall under first sale doctrine and the author should not have control over it.
It does not help the situation here that IA went to war with publishers in the US courts with a system that did not in fact enforce that invariant, but rather declared unilaterally that the pandemic justified them taking a single copy of a book and lending it an arbitrary number of times --- something cited in the opinion of the court, IIRC!
Someone who borrows my poorly stored record collection may get the wrong impression about an artist. Or the book they borrow may be missing packages, making the story not make sense.
All of that is irrelevant. I own those copies and am free to share them as a please. That the copy I own is digital versus physical should not change that.
> Similar to a photocopy or resale of a book, the publisher and author were paid when their work was purchased or acquired. What do the big publishers want to come after next – used bookstores?
Do they not understand what copyright means? They are not allowed to make a _copy_ of a book without permission. Traditional libraries and bookstores do not do that... it is a very important distinction that they either seem completely oblivious to, or are intentionally playing dumb. Or they're somehow trying to get the actual definition of a "copy" changed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for IA and don't have anything against them... but in this case the court upholds that digital copies are still copies, and thus this is still copyright infringement.
This is why copyright strains to match its intention in a digital environment. It's all copies, out here: the number of transformations, duplications and mutations of this sentence to make it from my keyboard to your screen is well-nigh uncountable. So we end up with intuition-bending exceptions and judgements, some attempting to protect the spirit of the law, some enforcing some broad conception of intellectual property or duplication.
You can think about copyright that way, but as well as making the equivalent of lending a book online immoral and illegal, it also throws up all kinds of other strangeness. Why do we exempt caching? Should we pay extra for our backups? Should Zoom be paying for the posters on my wall, or my videoconferencee colleagues? And how many times?
Do you want to make backups unlawful? Or to require Zoom to police licensing for poster on walls? Because the strat IA is using here seems like a great way to get that to happen. Doing literally nothing --- or at least stopping when they lost in the district court and not appealing --- would have been strictly better for the rights of Internet users than what they actually did, which more or less torpedoed CDL everywhere in the country. Bad facts make bad law! They teach this in law school!
They're trying to engage in impact litigation to enshrine the "DRM ebook ~= physical book" equivalency into case law. Committing fully to that equivalency looks a lot like playing dumb, particularly to an observer that thinks it's a false equivalency.
Personally, I want less DRM in the world, not more.
I don't think this case is actually related to DRM... they are making digital photocopies of existing physical books and then lending those out, regardless of whether any DRM is applied by IA themselves.
If you're talking about DRM ebooks purchased legally under license and then copying those, I think that's a separate issue that would have to be addressed later in another lawsuit.
You're going to have to be more rigorous when defining "copy" in the digital age. The process of moving or reading any digital media necessitates copying in a way that physical media does not. Rights holders deal with this by employing DRM (taking control of your computer to make sure you're not making copies the wrong way). So what? Because the format people prefer to consume media on has changed we suddenly lose the right to resell or lend media we purchase? We decided that was fair before, why should development of new technology reduce the scope of consumer rights?
I think the definition being used in this court case is any method that allows someone to see and read an equivalent (or substantially similar) representation of the original book in digital form.
I mean, right there is the attempted rhetorical trick that gives the game away. A photocopy is completely unlike resale of a used book, and is only considered “fair use” under specific, practical circumstances.
It’s hard to seriously argue that you could lawfully photocopy books whole, then make a lending library out of the copies, or that such a thing has any similarity to reselling used books.
> It’s hard to seriously argue that you could lawfully photocopy books whole, then make a lending library out of the copies, or that such a thing has any similarity to reselling used books.
Suppose you have a rare book, so to keep the book from being damaged while allowing people to read it, you make one photocopy and then store the book in a vault and allow patrons to read the photocopy. That seems entirely reasonable, doesn't it?
Alternatively, could their business model be understanding it and naking the wrong choice anyway? They've been e-begging of this lengthy ordeal something fierce the whole time, and now that they've lost seem to have straightaway launched into setting the whole thing up again. Putting their archive materials in perpetual danger seems to generate perpetual sympathy after making themselves the far and away leader in their sector. Reminds of what a lot of other sites have been doing.
> Controlled Digital Lending replicates the print lending process digitally in a way that respects copyright by maintaining this ratio.
Maintaining an owned-to-loaned ratio does not respect copyright.
The core concept of copyright is very simple: only you have the right to make copies. It doesn't matter if you destroy a copy beforehand, making the new copy is still illegal. Copyright is about permission, not equivalence, and you can't resell or loan out permission.
Or at least that's what the Second Circuit said when ReDigi was trying to sell used MP3s.
The thing is, the true core concept of copyright law is "whatever enables America's cultural empire to be cutthroat ruthless assholes that can devour other countries' competing cultural empires[0]". Free speech backed[1] by government-granted monopolies on that speech is the path it took to build such an empire, which is why copyright law became what it is today. The US government, in a sense, is perfectly willing to see its own library system grow increasingly irrelevant to curry favor with its domestic cultural industry.
The fact that said cultural industry is perfectly willing to censor itself to get market access in China probably means we've given them way too much free reign. China does not respect copyright. It doesn't respect freedom of speech, human rights, multiculturalism, feminism[2], gay rights[3], antiracism, or anything else the American people value, or even what the cultural industries themselves pretend to value. Hell, it doesn't even respect socialism[4].
Anyway, we should consider compulsory licensing. It's closer to respecting copyright than Controlled Digital Lending's lip service. Just have the government set a price to be paid by libraries for loaning out e-books, and let them manage their own services and e-book files.
[0] This is why, for example, Japanese media companies tend to be more litigious towards US fans than Japanese ones. Any author or publisher outside the US is at constant risk of cultural gentrification, and has fought tooth and nail just to gain a beachhead into US culture.
[1] To be clear I am NOT one of those "copyright backstops 1A" people, but the judicial system is full of judges who think it does
We already do this for songs; anyone can pay the mechanical rate and record their own cover of a song.
It is an imperfect comparison, since a cover is its own recording, and ongoing royalties are involved, but the point is that there are some precedents for setting a price.
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However, it's not fair use to copy material and redistribute it. Furthermore, the creator should be able to determine the format of the release of their work. If someone wants to alter their work, they must do so in a transformative manner and not pass it off as the creator's work.
Someone who makes a book with formatting specific to say a PDF, could be unfairly reviewed or judged by readers who borrowed distributed copies that are formatted to epub, for example.
the best way to do it is through things like this, where the content is available to you and you can choose how to consume it - dark mode, but maybe also reader mode, large fonts, wide screens, text search, etc - these should be considered the basic necessities, and then anything you want to do to make it look nice and feel creative is on top, as an option - even the default option if you really care about marketing over content.
Deleted Comment
You mean permanent copies, right? Then the IA doesn't disagree. They just want to loan out one digital copy while the original is locked up, in an attempt to emulate not making copies as closely as possible in a digital world.
> Furthermore, the creator should be able to determine the format of the release of their work. If someone wants to alter their work, they must do so in a transformative manner and not pass it off as the creator's work.
> Someone who makes a book with formatting specific to say a PDF, could be unfairly reviewed or judged by readers who borrowed distributed copies that are formatted to epub, for example.
I can get behind forced marking in some circumstances, but shifting between digital and physical should fall under first sale doctrine and the author should not have control over it.
On the contrary, fair use often involves copying materials and redistributing them.
All of that is irrelevant. I own those copies and am free to share them as a please. That the copy I own is digital versus physical should not change that.
The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758
Do they not understand what copyright means? They are not allowed to make a _copy_ of a book without permission. Traditional libraries and bookstores do not do that... it is a very important distinction that they either seem completely oblivious to, or are intentionally playing dumb. Or they're somehow trying to get the actual definition of a "copy" changed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for IA and don't have anything against them... but in this case the court upholds that digital copies are still copies, and thus this is still copyright infringement.
You can think about copyright that way, but as well as making the equivalent of lending a book online immoral and illegal, it also throws up all kinds of other strangeness. Why do we exempt caching? Should we pay extra for our backups? Should Zoom be paying for the posters on my wall, or my videoconferencee colleagues? And how many times?
(Those may be a little throwaway example, but I wrote a little bit more about the practical economic connection between copying and copyright back in 2008, here: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2008/08/07/copyright-fraud-and-... )
This EU directive actually places caching in the same boat as "browsing" itself... does that mean if you can view a book online, it's not copying?
>(33) "...this exception should include acts which enable browsing as well as acts of caching to take place"
Personally, I want less DRM in the world, not more.
If you're talking about DRM ebooks purchased legally under license and then copying those, I think that's a separate issue that would have to be addressed later in another lawsuit.
I mean, right there is the attempted rhetorical trick that gives the game away. A photocopy is completely unlike resale of a used book, and is only considered “fair use” under specific, practical circumstances.
It’s hard to seriously argue that you could lawfully photocopy books whole, then make a lending library out of the copies, or that such a thing has any similarity to reselling used books.
Suppose you have a rare book, so to keep the book from being damaged while allowing people to read it, you make one photocopy and then store the book in a vault and allow patrons to read the photocopy. That seems entirely reasonable, doesn't it?
Maintaining an owned-to-loaned ratio does not respect copyright.
The core concept of copyright is very simple: only you have the right to make copies. It doesn't matter if you destroy a copy beforehand, making the new copy is still illegal. Copyright is about permission, not equivalence, and you can't resell or loan out permission.
Or at least that's what the Second Circuit said when ReDigi was trying to sell used MP3s.
The thing is, the true core concept of copyright law is "whatever enables America's cultural empire to be cutthroat ruthless assholes that can devour other countries' competing cultural empires[0]". Free speech backed[1] by government-granted monopolies on that speech is the path it took to build such an empire, which is why copyright law became what it is today. The US government, in a sense, is perfectly willing to see its own library system grow increasingly irrelevant to curry favor with its domestic cultural industry.
The fact that said cultural industry is perfectly willing to censor itself to get market access in China probably means we've given them way too much free reign. China does not respect copyright. It doesn't respect freedom of speech, human rights, multiculturalism, feminism[2], gay rights[3], antiracism, or anything else the American people value, or even what the cultural industries themselves pretend to value. Hell, it doesn't even respect socialism[4].
Anyway, we should consider compulsory licensing. It's closer to respecting copyright than Controlled Digital Lending's lip service. Just have the government set a price to be paid by libraries for loaning out e-books, and let them manage their own services and e-book files.
[0] This is why, for example, Japanese media companies tend to be more litigious towards US fans than Japanese ones. Any author or publisher outside the US is at constant risk of cultural gentrification, and has fought tooth and nail just to gain a beachhead into US culture.
[1] To be clear I am NOT one of those "copyright backstops 1A" people, but the judicial system is full of judges who think it does
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_China#Arrest_of_Fe...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_China#Censorsh...
[4] If labor unions are illegal, you're not socialist.
It is an imperfect comparison, since a cover is its own recording, and ongoing royalties are involved, but the point is that there are some precedents for setting a price.