I think most people here saw this coming. Unfortunately this isn't a question of whether the law is good, it's a question of whether IA broke the current laws we have.
IA can and should lobby for copyright law to change. But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
how does a library get away with it.... they have to purchase the book first? is that how it works? how is internet archive different from a library, A lot of libraries are online right now and do the same thing.... It seems like a real harm if internet archive is forced offline because of a decision like this
>how does a library get away with it.... they have to purchase the book first? is that how it works?
Yes. And they can lend those books to people due to the first-sale doctrine, which allows the legal owners of a work to lease, lend or sell it without the copyright owner's permission.
this definition also seems to fit what libraries were doing, lending out their copy, sometimes digitally, sometimes in person, always only 1 copy at a time
the judge said the conversion to digital was not transformative, so I don't see why it should constitute another work versus the original one
Legally speaking, what the Internet Archive was doing is exactly what copyright law prohibits: making and distributing an unauthorized copy of the book.
The first sale doctrine (which libraries depend on) says you're allowed to to sell, rent out or give away your own physical property, even if that property happens to be an embodiment of a copyrighted work. It doesn't say anything about it being legal to make another copy of a work, and then distribute it while you keep the original one for yourself.
Google never lent out entire copyrighted books without the publisher’s permission. Books.google.com consisted of 1) old public domain books that can be fully downloaded, 2) limited preview books that the publisher opted into putting online partially, and 3) snippet view books that only showed a sentence of context in response to search queries. The Authors’ Guild sued over 3), Google argued that they transformed the book into a search index, not a reading experience, and Google won.
This made me chuckle pretty hard. When lobbying enters the picture there's only a small, selective group of people that are going to constitute the greater good.
I think you're referring to financial aspects of today's lobbying alone, but I think it's impossible to suggest you could have any sort of consideration of the greater good without taking into account different people's view on what that is, which means them trying to persuade you of it, which is the exact definition of lobbying.
> should be pretty obvious where the greater good lies
Is this facetious? What constitutes the greater good is the entire point of government. Many things you think are obvious are lines another would die to prevent--this is the basis of civics.
There is actually no such disagreement. The corporations and copyright mafia are very open about the fact that their profits are more important to them than the common good.
How would that be accomplished? What are the options here?
1) an elected legislature that's supposed to consider the greater good?
2) a generally non-elected judiciary that is supposed to consider the greater good to override the legislature?
3) a hopefully-benevolent dictator to consider the greater good?
Obviously any of these methods can fail; the first of them is the easiest to "edit," as it were. Things like term limits would likely improve it, though.
We're kinda taught that we choose representatives which reflect our values through the process of election and that those elected officials should they not reflect our values, are at the mercy of the electorate in the next election.
Instead, few elections are competitive and the representation happens through the lobbying process.
In short, the accountability story we're taught isn't true and money talks more than votes. It's this bait and switch that has the unintended consequence of fueling populism and the disbelief that representatives represent us, and that institutions work.
Here's a dumb idea. Create and advocate for a congressional proportional representation interstate compact in the same vein as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[1]. Then advocate for pooled campaign financing as a function of proportional representation[2].
The nice thing about interstate compacts is that they can eventually capture a majority given election variability over time. They divide and conquer the problem into actionable tasks that effectively aggregate.
Citing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact indicates you have no understanding of the political organization of the United States of America.
I implore you to do your homework, but I will tell you the compact would only serve to reduce the voice of the people (that is to say, reduce democracy) rather than increase them.
Please look into responding with empathy and grace instead. You took a chance to educate and threw it away. What would you hope to gain from such an interaction?
Alright then: The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (hereafter "the Compact") would reduce democracy by reducing and eventually destroying the sovereignty of each individual State.
The United States of America is exactly what it says on the tin: A Union of States. Each State is equal to all the others, united somewhat loosely as a Federal Republic.
With regards to the consequences of the Compact, it would destroy the democratic right of the people of each State to decide, for themselves, who will represent their State in the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The President of the United States represents the States in the Union and is elected by the States, the States in turn determine who they elect as President by respectively asking for their people to vote who their State should vote for.
You might ask who in the Executive Branch of government represents the peoples of each State directly, that role falls upon the Governor of each respective State.
The Compact would reduce the voice of the people and the sovereignties of States by removing their right to decide, for themselves, who to elect for President of the United States. People from one State would be able to overrule the people of another State, and vice versa. You're in California and voted for Bob? Tough shit, someone in North Dakota voted for Alex and your vote quite literally does not matter.
Citing and supporting the Compact indicates you have no understanding of who, and more accurately what, the President of the United States represents. It indicates you have no understanding what powers and rights each State and their respective peoples hold. If you are in a larger State, it indicates you have no care for what your fellow Americans and Statesmen think; if you are in a smaller State, it indicates you are fine with forfeiting your right to vote in deference to the nationwide majority.
If you sincerely think the Compact would improve democracy in the United States of America, at best you are misguided and were misled, and at worst you are disingenuous with ulterior motives.
Again, can you please take the ad hominem out of it? It's getting in the way of having a productive discussion.
> The United States of America is exactly what it says on the tin: A Union of States. Each State is equal to all the others, united somewhat loosely as a Federal Republic.
This is simply counter-exampled with the proportional representation of the US House. If states were equal then population would play no part in representation.
> With regards to the consequences of the Compact, it would destroy the democratic right of the people of each State to decide, for themselves, who will represent their State in the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The President of the United States represents the States in the Union and is elected by the States, the States in turn determine who they elect as President by respectively asking for their people to vote who their State should vote for.
Again untrue. This doesn't reflect reality. People don't behave like that or believe that. Most people are in fact in favor of abolishing the electoral college[1].
> You might ask who in the Executive Branch of government represents the peoples of each State directly, that role falls upon the Governor of each respective State.
I'm not asking that. We're discussing Federal elections and representation.
> The Compact would reduce the voice of the people and the sovereignties[sic] of States by removing their right to decide, for themselves, who to elect for President of the United States. People from one State would be able to overrule the people of another State, and vice versa. You're in California and voted for Bob? Tough shit, someone in North Dakota voted for Alex and your vote quite literally does not matter.
This literally describes how Electoral College operates. It's a well known point of discussion when critiquing the electoral college. Surely, you must be familiar with that line of reasoning.
> Citing and supporting the Compact indicates you have no understanding of who, and more accurately what, the President of the United States represents. It indicates you have no understanding what powers and rights each State and their respective peoples hold. If you are in a larger State, it indicates you have no care for what your fellow Americans and Statesmen think; if you are in a smaller State, it indicates you are fine with forfeiting your right to vote in deference to the nationwide majority.
This confuses a personal subjective experience with the objective truth of reality. You've extrapolated a genuine question and comment into a malevolent and sinister plot. I truly urge you to find the best in people.
> If you sincerely think the Compact would improve democracy in the United States of America, at best you are misguided and were misled, and at worst you are disingenuous with ulterior motives.
Questioning people's character and motives distracts from productive discussion.
Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine meeting someone who had this take. Can you point me in the direction of Constitutional scholars who share the same opinions you do?
I urge you to familiarize yourself with The Federalist Papers : No. 68[2]. It covers the motivations for the construction of the electoral college all which are not reflected in your assessment of it. If you wish to continue belaboring this point, please just quote from No68 where it agrees with you.
>This is simply counter-exampled with the proportional representation of the US House. If states were equal then population would play no part in representation.
This is a compromise because not all States have the same population (obviously). The Senate, where all States have equal representation, decides matters which are considered de facto of higher importance such as government appointments and diplomatic matters, among many others. All bills must also pass both the House and the Senate, meaning a bill must pass the test of equal representation voting; larger States cannot simply force their way through, especially if smaller States come together.
>Again untrue. This doesn't reflect reality. People don't behave like that or believe that. Most people are in fact in favor of abolishing the electoral college[1].
Abolishing the Electoral College (which in my humble opinion is rooted in ignorance and party politics more than anything) has nothing to do with the fact that the President of the United States represents the States and is elected by the States. The Governors are who represent the peoples of the respective States in the Executive branch of government.
Congress will act as a failsafe in the event the Electoral College deadlocks, and in such an event the House will vote for President-elect along State lines with the Representatives of each State voting in unison with fellow State Congressmen as a bloc, just like the Electoral College, with each State bloc getting 1 vote. The Senate will likewise vote per-Senator on who will become Vice President-elect.
It is very clear that the intent is the Presidency (and Vice Presidency) will be decided by the States, with or without the Electoral College by an equal representation vote. The Presidency is voted in at the pleasure of the States, derived from the pleasure of the people of each State respectively.
>I'm not asking that. We're discussing Federal elections and representation.
The President of the United States does not represent the people, at least not directly. In that context, you are in fact asking that because you, by citing and supporting the Compact, are arguing the President of the United States should represent the people directly rather than the United States.
>This literally describes how Electoral College operates. It's a well known point of discussion when critiquing the electoral college. Surely, you must be familiar with that line of reasoning.
The Electoral College (or Congress in the event of failsafe) votes, either officially or de facto, according to the will of the people of the respective States that the Electors (or Congressmen) hail from. The Electoral College (or Congress) quite literally represents the direct will of the people in each State.
The Compact instead proposes to not represent the direct will of the people in each State, instead deferring to whatever is the majority vote of the nation as a whole.
The very nature of the Compact means that if the nationwide majority votes for Bob, then any States that voted for Alex or Charlie or Dave effectively have their votes uncounted; this is because the Electors of States whose people voted for Alex or Charlie or Dave will instead vote for Bob in absolute defiance of that State's peoples' votes for the others.
The Compact effectively legalizes unfaithful Electors answering to the will of States they do not represent.
This is an attack on the sovereignties and democracies of the States and their peoples thereof and should never be accepted, let alone tolerated.
>This confuses a personal subjective experience with the objective truth of reality. You've extrapolated a genuine question and comment into a malevolent and sinister plot. I truly urge you to find the best in people.
>Questioning people's character and motives distracts from productive discussion.
Explain yourself how the Compact would improve democracy, then. What the Compact...
It's giving everyone in the country the same amount of voting power. That's not defying the will of anyone.
Stop focusing in on exactly how individual electors would supposedly defy things, because the point of the compact is to make electors irrelevant, and the overall outcome follows people's will perfectly fine.
Consider this: If states traded pairs of electors with each other your logic would call that defying the will of the people, even though it would change nothing about the outcome. Because now they're not voting directly based on what their state said. Your logic is wrong.
You are neglecting to understand that the States are separate from each other, with a right to decide their affairs themselves. The nationwide popular vote is meaningless because the United States of America does not operate on nationwide popular votes, it operates on Statewide Popular Votes which are represented at the Federal level of politics by the States' respective Governors, Congressmen, and Electors.
Consider another example of Federal matters being decided by votes by the States: Constitutional amendments. Amendments require ratification from 2/3rds of all the States to become part of the Constitution, not 2/3rds of the nationwide popular vote.
The Compact argues for the people of one State dictating the decision of the people of another State, in this case the question of who shall become President of the United States of America. Destroying State rights like that is not how you improve democracy.
It is a politically convenient misrepresentation stemming from a lack of understanding regarding how the United States is structured politically.
First and foremost, the Electoral College (and Congress, whose numbers are the basis for the College's numbers) are determined by a popular vote within the respective States. The ballots in a presidential election are asking the voters "Which candidate should your State vote for?".
This means California determines by popular vote who to vote for President, likewise Wyoming. The State tallies their votes, and the State then decides according to the results who to vote for President. If the voters in California voted for Bob, California will vote for Bob in the Electoral College; if the voters in Wyoming voted for Dave, Wyoming will vote for Dave in the Electoral College.
We should also note that Nebraska and Maine both allot their Electors proportionally according to vote results, unlike all other States where the winner of the State gets all Electors.
I reiterate for emphasis: The basis for the Electoral College (and Congress) is a popular vote within the respective States.
As regards the "disproportionate voter power" itself, the Electoral College's roster of 538 Electors is derived from the following numbers in Congress:
* 435 House Representatives.
* 100 Senators.
* Equivalents of 2 "Senators" and 1 "House Representative" for the District of Columbia.
All States are guaranteed a minimum of 1 House Representative, with more allotted according to population as determined by the Census. All States are guaranteed 2 Senators. The District of Columbia has no representation in Congress (D.C. is not a State!) but is represented in the Electoral College with representation equivalent to the smallest State in the Union.
The "disproportion" comes from all States being guaranteed at least 1 House Representative and 2 Senators (this is where "all States have at least 3 Electors" comes from), and this is necessary in order to make sure that all States are represented no matter how small they are.
The ability of smaller States banding together to override a larger State is the system working as intended, it is a safeguard against a tyranny of the masses. The United State is a Union of States, not a Union of Peoples.
Oh, I get it. You think that my disagreement stems from a lack of understanding and that if I disagree it is because I don't understand what you're saying.
Most of the cries for abolishing the Electoral College come around election time from the losing side, of which both sides of the political aisle have been guilty of. Republicans cried for it when Clinton won, Democrats cried for it when Bush won, Republicans cried for it when Obama won, Democrats cried for it when Trump won, Republicans cried for it when Biden won, etc.
This indicates most of it is all politically motivated, enabled by a lack of understanding for the political system among most Americans. It's a gross violation of Chesterton's Fence, crying for the Electoral College (the "fence") to be abolished ("torn down") because who needs such a seemingly convoluted and meaningless system, amirite?
As for you specifically, you obviously still aren't understanding how American democracy is structured, no. We are a representative democracy and a federal republic. The people vote along State lines to determine delegations whom we respectively send to the Federal political table. The United States operates on Statewide Popular Votes, not nationwide popular votes, because we are a Union of individual, otherwise independent States.
> because we are a Union of individual, otherwise independent States
That's the original reason, but it doesn't have any real benefit. Everyone knows why this fence was built. You're not specially enlightened among a bunch of fools.
But it causes people's votes for president to have different strengths, which is bad. And nudging the presidential vote up or down by 5% doesn't do jack shit against the tyranny of the masses.
It's a complication with no upsides and mild downsides.
The NPVIC could be a great advancement for democracy but since the side advantaged by the current system has zero incentive to agree to it, the idea is counterproductive without a mandate requiring the entire country to participate.
>the side advantaged by the current system has zero incentive to agree to it
You are absolutely right that the States, particularly the smaller and weaker States, would have zero incentive to agree to surrender their sovereignties in deference to the other States.
The United States of America is a Union of States, and the first step to further democracy in this country is respecting the sacred fact that each State and the people within them each have the right to decide their own path. Violating their sovereignties is destructive for democracy.
>You are absolutely right that the States, particularly the smaller and weaker States, would have zero incentive to agree to surrender their sovereignties in deference to the other States.
Except that they already have. Each of Vermont(3), Delaware(3), Hawaii(4), Rhode Island(4), New Mexico(5), Connecticut(7), and Oregon(8) has already ratified legislation agreeing to the compact. That's seven counter examples.
I'll point out that there are in fact enough states pending ratification that will obsolete the EC should they be confirmed. In a twist of irony, a sacred duty to represent states could be foiled by state legislatures themselves.
Term limits are predicated on the notion that our so-called legislators legislate. They do not. They merely sign off on the bills their principals give them. While for the tv issues the two parts of our bifactional ruling party are happy to pretend to be at odds, when it comes to the real priorities of those who are actually in charge they inevitably fall in line.
that's like saying the washing machine should fold my socks after it's done washing them. That would be nice, but when you're running a large organization like IA you should be less concerned with how things should be and more concerned with how things are.
> But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
As I recall, this is precisely how British Columbia got Sunday shopping. Stores and shopping malls broke the law repeatedly. There were fines, but Sunday shopping was popular. Eventually, public pressure led governments to legalize Sunday opening.
I didn't agree with it then and I don't fully agree with it now, but it can work.
I am from BC and the Sunday no shopping was a bit before my time but my dad talks about how stupid it was. If you had a problem and needed something in an emergency well too bad. Didn’t realize you were low on bread and forgot to get it Saturday oh well kids are not getting a sandwich in their lunches for Monday morning school. Like you say eventually people realized the fines were actually just the cost of doing business. Those who opened up sundays made a killing because that is what the people wanted. I know a guy who did the same for opening a marijuana shop. Did it just before it was legal and was getting a $150 fine each day from the city. He said just a cost of business as he was making several thousand or more each day.
> Didn’t realize you were low on bread and forgot to get it Saturday oh well kids are not getting a sandwich in their lunches for Monday morning school.
Probably not the best example, because it's not like a sandwich is the only lunch option (the lazy one for sure), but I take your point. Migraine and no painkillers, period and no pads, sex and no condom, alcoholic and no alcohol (with risk of lethal DTs)? Too bad...
The logic you use to dismiss the sandwich example extrapolates to your own examples. "Shut off the lights and go to bed or go to the ER" "Stuff a cloth in your underwear" "Don't have sex" "Don't you have any sterno or mouthwash?!"
Why even do this to someone if you understood their meaning and more or less agree?
So your argument is that no shopping is an inconvenience, not an imposition? I ask because you did the same thing you're arguing against, and yet failed to provide any counter examples.
I take it your dad want a low wage retail employee working Sundays? Not sacrificing everything to the grass good consumerism isn’t “stupid”.
> “Didn’t realize you were low on bread and forgot to get it Saturday oh well kids are not getting a sandwich in their lunches for Monday morning school.”
It is possible to make bread. And to eat other things. And to buy school lunches. And to borrow or trade food with neighbours.
High wage employees have leverage, and can afford to quit. They are less pushed into the position "we're allowed to open on Sunday so you're working Sundays now".
What makes Sunday so special? Why not just pass worker protection laws that prevent people from overworking, rather than dictating a magical day that nobody can work.
It's a stupid idea and a dumb law that it only makes sense if your worker protection laws are too weak.
> "Why not just pass worker protection laws that prevent people from overworking"
Provide your own answer here: why did the system which exists to exploit humans for profit do away with a free day instead of "just" passing worker protection laws? (Why did you frame it as "prevent people from overworking" instead of "prevent people from being overworked"?)
> "It's a stupid idea and a dumb law that it only makes sense if your worker protection laws are too weak."
Humans exist for more than just buying things. You may not like "A Sabbath for God" but "A day for something in life other than shopping" is an important idea. When September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks happened - great big terrorist attacks on American soil for pretty much the first time - President George Bush told Americans to "go shopping" in response. When many American teenagers grew up, they hung out at a shopping mall.
Are you not lamenting the increasing feeling that you can't go out in public without being charged to be somewhere these days? Or the gradual turning of all walks of life into advertising and subscription services? Is any pushback on it "stupid and dumb" to you?
> Why did you frame it as "prevent people from overworking" instead of "prevent people from being overworked"?
I'm sorry I used the wrong words.
> Humans exist for more than just buying things
Yea, duh
> "A day for something in life other than shopping" is an important idea
That's fine. Why does it have to be the _same_ day for everyone? That's the stupid idea. Pass a law that says everyone must be given a full day off every week, I'm with you. Pass a law saying that day _must_ be Sunday, and I'm walking away.
Hell, pass a law that says everyone must be given three full days off every week, I'm with you. Pass a law that says you have to pay someone 3x for every hour they work beyond 30 hours, I'm with you. Pass a law that says everyone must work 9am-3pm and I'm walking away.
> Are you not lamenting the increasing feeling that you can't go out in public without being charged to be somewhere these days?
Irrelevant to the conversation, but generally, no.
> Or the gradual turning of all walks of life into advertising and subscription services?
Irrelevant to the conversation, but yea, it's a hellscape.
entertainment venues, museums, restaurants, etc are usually getting an exception here. public transport and emergency services too. can't shut the country down.
i am actually curious how they do that in israel where the jewish law not to work on sabbath is taken much more seriously.
And why should they? Why should not those workers get same rights? Are they somehow lesser? Just give them also mandatory time off on same day. And then they like others can take some other time free to go to those places.
well, i don't know about the specific rules for work on sunday in these places, but generally, when you accept a job there you know in advance that there will be work on sundays, so if you don't want that, don't take that kind of job.
So, should this be extended to all workers? And all places that people might spend leisure time? Let's say restaurants and bars, cinemas, public swimming pools, markets, amusement parks.
As those people should have same exact rights to spend leisure time with their families and friends.
I feel like this is the best argument for it but… it leaves a lot of holes? What about Saturdays, or other non-school days?
And… just protection for retail workers? Is there a reason it wouldn’t apply to all workers below a certain pay range (or maybe it did, and the “no shopping” rule is just a shorthand?)
and actually, in germany for example, the rule is not that shops must be closed. you can open your shop if you can run it yourself, without any employees help.
depending on the country, saturdays can be school days, but generally nowadays, the rule extended to saturday as well, actually, with the exception of retail. it used to be that saturdays were half work days. and of national holidays are equal to sundays.
Not everyone cares about working Sunday. Why is it Sunday? Why not Saturday? Right - one set of religious beliefs that aren't universal. Why should the state be mandating this? Isn't it better to use state power to prevent employers from being able to coerce employees into working excessively or being unable to negotiate the days off that are important to them?
> "Why should the state be mandating this? Isn't it better to use state power to prevent employers from being able to coerce employees into working"
Remember when Arkansas rolled back some child labour laws? Hopefully you do, it was last week[1]. The reason why not "just do something good for workers instead" is because companies want cheaper employees with fewer options to leave, not better protections for workers.
> "Why is it Sunday? Why not Saturday?"
Great, well done, you've bikeshedded it from "mandatory day off" to "no mandatory day off" because you can't see a difference between them. Religion bad, Atheism good, therefore roll back labour protections?
No. Those laws were made to curtail drunkenness and the numerous social woes that come with it. Same reason we passed total prohibition. Those religious minorities were negligible in the times and places where they passed blue laws and the only groups that were negatively associated with alcohol were Christian.
Huh? I described a side effect of these laws—not theoretical, but an actual side effect that happened. You counter by saying… that that wasn’t the intent of the law? Sure, I agree with you: blue laws in the United States were not (usually) put in place with the intent of oppressing seventh‐day Sabbatarians, a relatively insignificant group. But oppression of Sabbatarians is in fact what they led to.
The post I was replying to specifically indicated "Sunday".
I didn't say religion bad. I said that Sunday was chosen because of it's alignment with many Christian religions, and this is true: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law
There are many other religions that do _not_ have Sunday as a day of rest; other abrahamic religions choose Friday (Islam) or Saturday (Judaism, 7th day Adventist). Non-abrahamic religions and atheists feature further diversity.
Consider:
> California twice passed Sunday closing laws, in 1858 and in 1861. The first was found unconstitutional just five months after it was enacted. It was used to convict and imprison a Jewish clothing merchant who closed his business on Saturday, and opened it on Sunday.
One could simply mandate that businesses offer employees one or more consistent day of rest instead of having the state pick religious winners and losers.
I'm not really a fan of stores being closed on Sundays here but there is an argument for not just having a consistent day of rest but also a common day of rest between family members/friends. Really though, we should all have at least three days of rest per week - then not having enough overlap would be unlikely.
Oh. There were a small number of corner stores that were allowed to be open. I don't know how they decided that. But you could always get the basics on a Sunday.
Gas stations were also allowed to be open although they rarely had convenience stores attached to them back then.
For some it might. What if one is a practising member of a religion that has their Sabbath on Friday or Saturday? They are put at a competitive disadvantage if they are forced to be closed for 2 days instead of 1.
Yes: if it’s the sabbath, that’s an argument with which I’m familiar. My counter-argument is that I don’t want to be forced to practice someone else’s religion. If your religion already imposes those rules on its followers, why does it need a secular government to assist?
If it’s not the sabbath, then I’m intrigued and want to learn more.
It's literally forcing a tenet of a religion on everyone. It's like making it illegal to sell beef on Fridays during Lent or making alcohol illegal in an Islamic country.
Somewhat pedantic, but I would note that Sunday isn't the Sabbath, Saturday is. Most Christians don't observe the Sabbath (citing Jesus's defense of the woman who was supposed to be stoned because she had collected wood on the Sabbath). Instead, they rest on the Lord's day, commemorating Jesus's resurrection the day after the Sabbath, while still recognizing that their god rested after creating the world on a Saturday.
Not OP, but I think having one day where nearly everyone (except restaurants, attractions, hospitality and essential services) has off is good for family cohesion. It gives everyone a guaranteed weekly timeslot to spend time together.
You didn't split out essential services, and it seems dead-obvious to me that shutting those down would cause more harm than good even when you value all families exactly the same. There's no way they're saying the families of essential service providers are less important.
And it seems pretty clear they're grouping those other things in with essential services, which you could disagree with, but is a very different thing from saying those families are less important.
I am genuinely curious how a person reconciles two seemingly opposing views:
"It gives everyone a guaranteed weekly timeslot to spend time together."
where everyone is everyone except:
"except restaurants, attractions, hospitality and essential services".
I could easily give in on essential services, because a lot will ride on how broadly they are defined, but if the goal is 'family cohesion' building for everyone then as few groups should be excluded as possible ( which also means that businesses that people, who usually have even less leisure time than most of us -- restaurants, attractions, hospitality -- can recharge ).
I will be honest. For me it the line drawing always tends to be the most interesting piece, because it tends to indicate what the individual really values. In this case, and this is not a shot, because it is very human thing to do, they value 'their family cohesion' and 'their ability to participate in various leisure activities' over those who have to serve them, while they bond with their loved ones.
For the record, the line listed by parent is not unreasonable, but can you give me an argument as to why it is not amazingly selfish way of looking at society ( Sunday for me, but not for thee ).
> For the record, the line listed by parent is not unreasonable, but can you give me an argument as to why it is not amazingly selfish way of looking at society ( Sunday for me, but not for thee ).
Sure, that's easy enough. Even if some people can't participate, it's a big benefit to have most people share a day, and everyone that's taking those sunday work slots should be getting paid significantly extra and also probably on rotation. And the other poster might be in one of those businesses.
If someone in a restaurant/attraction/hospitality business has less leisure time, you could improve that by valuing Sunday higher. Let them trade two Sundays in a month for 3-4 non-Sundays.
Essential services I think should be in different pool. They are needed to run modern world. But they should be limited to bare needed staff. Just so that emergency cases can be handled and emergency actions taken.
And I btw, do not count public transport as essential service. People have plenty of time to walk, and emergency can include ambulances for medical problems.
What irked me was that a lot of major corporations got together to subvert the law out of self-interest. If the people wanted to change the law, fine. Call a referendum.
Same in England. In Scotland there were no strong laws against Sunday shopping, apparently because nobody thought any shop would even think about opening. So when they did, and everyone went shopping, folks in England complained that they wanted what Scotland had.
Are you sure? It sounds vaguely convincing but unlikely in practice:
Scotland - Largely Presbyterian ie rather more Catholic than us southern softies wot do Church of Eng. Your Catholic is rather more concerned about Sabbath behaviour than your Protestant except when they don't. Mind you we have some laughable nonsense available regardless of denomination - for example otters were once classed as fish hereabouts for Fish Friday. lol! It is quite hard to get more than 50 miles away from the sea in Britain. We also have quite a lot of rivers/streams/brooks/burns/cultured waterways - canals. Those ribbons of water contain quite a lot of fish. Yes, the UK might be quite as mad as you imagine it - we seem to require mammals to be classified as fish to ensure we make a God happy (one day in seven).
I recall shopping on Sunday becoming a thing here around the late 80s/early 90s but hours were not too conservative here in the UK compared to the rest of europe. We never had formal lunchtime closing for example, which is bloody annoying. I lived in W Germany for a few years back in 70s-90s and it was tricky buying stuff around 1200-1400 depending on where you were and the time. Nowadays I note that Italy, Spain, Portugal int al still have some pretty patchy midday work practices. That's fine but caveat emptor!
In Central Scotland, during the 70s and 80s, lunch time closing was the norm. Half day Wednesday was also very popular in some trades (butchers, grocers etc.) as it allowed working on a Saturday morning.
Back then, nothing was open on a Sunday.
In some parts of Scotland (the Western Isles for example) doing any work, hanging your washing out, cutting your grass etc. on a Sunday, to be violating the Sabbath. No laws. Just peer pressure from your neighbours. As you'd expect this is stronger in smaller villages than larger towns.
>"I didn't agree with it then and I don't fully agree with it now, but it can work."
I actually do agree with it. Same reason as jury nullification. If enough people (jury members in this case) believe that the law / particular application is unjust then fuck it. In nullification the government must give in. I do not see why it should be any different in general. The key here should be what constitutes "enough"
Alternatively we can call it restraining our masters when they run amok. They're the same mob that we are. If the law goes against common sense / justice then the fuck with it. Why should we suffer a consequence of some lunatic with damaged brain.
Listing a place a law was broken to advocate for repeating it is not good advice. The proper metric is to see how many times laws are broken and how often that works out for the lawbreaker.
I didn't advocate for breaking the law. I said I disagreed with the whole thing. I was pointing out that the approach had worked in the past, because the previous poster had argued that "breaking [the law] before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good."
The previous poster made a more defensible statement given the totality of outcomes when breaking the law.
If I told someone smoking is bad forr their health, would you follow with "I know a person that smoked till 98" as reasonable advice? This is the same argument.
And in this case, the actions of IA may well end them for all of us. That's not such a good outcome for breaking the law, is it?
Not many lawbreakers are doing it to change the law either.
And we're seeing the IA possibly going to end because they wanted to break the law, and not completely for some moral cause, but because breaking it helps them. There was plenty of reasonable calling out Brewster's ignorant and self-serving choices on this issue for some time. He didn't need to do this, and he put the entire operation at unnecessary risk, as his critics claimed would happen.
Precedent for federal cases is typically first set at the appellate level. If you're working your activism through the courts, you usually have to lose before you can win.
While this was the southern district of new York, the 9th circuit court of appeals ruled on a similar issue with Vidangel on 2016. They would buy DVDs and let people pay to watch a censored version, even going so far as to purchase a physical version for every one that was streamed for censorship, and they claimed fair use. They were ruled against and filed for chapter 11.
Not with such a completely one sided court case. If anything, this will probably kill the Open Libraries (lending digital books backed 1:1 by real copies of them) model of lending entirely (the court decision mentions no right to digitally lend copyrighted material). Publishers seemed to not really care about it before the IA covid library stunt, but now it might very well die.
If the publishers could push the button and kill digitally lending at their whim then there isn't a reason to pretend it was actually alive and well, in any real sense. I believe Machiavelli observed, "War is never avoided, only delayed for the benefit of one participant or another." Librarians have always had a zealous faction that has even frustrated United States Federal Agents, often at the least convenient time for the librarians who did so. Given the money and influence wielded by the publishers, how would the digital librarians fair better in the future? They're better off winning or losing here and letting the natural consequences of the publisher's decisions come to bite them in the ass than building further efforts on a rug the publishers can yank from beneath them at any time.
Just to clarify, what are the consequences of their actions? It appears to be a clear case of copyright infringement. Therefore, I assume that the legal penalties listed on this website (https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/infringement) can be applied in this case:
- The infringer paying the monetary damages and profits.
- The law offering a range from $200 to $150,000 for each infringed work.
- The infringer paying for all lawyers' fees and court costs.
Is it more likely for the case to be resolved outside the court? I am worried about their future.
The consequences may be the loss of the entire Internet Archive, if it can't afford to both pay the fines of deciding to ++++ around and find out with book publishers and running its servers at the same time.
You can say "fuck". Not doing so just makes your comment less clear, and forces the reader to go "what's with the pluses, is it a keyboard issue? Oh wait, the commenter is just censoring the word 'fuck' here, which I as a reader know since since 'fuck around and find out' is a common English expression".
I can, but I choose not to. :) It's a bit more obvious with asterisks instead of plusses, but asterisks tend to be consumed by markdown-like parsing behaviors, and then I have to figure out escaping syntax, etc.
Libraries are exempted from statutory damages if they had a good faith belief that their usage was Fair Use. The published opinion defers the question of exemption.
Statutory damages are the most significant risk to IA's finances, both in this case but also wrt other potential plaintiffs who might be waiting in the wings. Exemption almost certainly figured into IA's risk assessment when designing and deploying their loan program. The argument for exemption is, naturally, stronger than for Fair Use.
It's a little amusing to compare the reactions here to Internet Archive breaking the law ("The law is the law…") to Uber/AirBnB breaking the law ("Newcomers challenging the system! Ambitious, bold disruption!").
To me those are similar. Uber is addressing the universally reviled criminal organisation slash medieval guild that taxis are in every single city they operate. AirBnB really never was illegal to begin with. Internet Archive is breaking copyright law which needs a huge reform.
I constantly see people still complaining about what Uber and AirBnB do/did. And, likewise, there are plenty of comments here saying the same positive things about IA.
It's never a question of existence/nonexistence. One can always cite some minor example.
It's a question of proportion, and I'd go further say that it's quite disingenuous to pretend that this contradiction, in this website, isn't heavily tilted in favour of predatory corporations and against public good services (i.e. libertarian).
This of course makes sense. Innumerably more people here used Uber than IA, and what's more, many were literal employees of Uber, AirBnB, etc. and its competitors. It would be silly to expect anything else. But it's still amusing.
I don’t know about Airbnb. But you realize that before Uber existed, people ran businesses which were entirely, “you call us up, we’ll send you a car and take you where you want to go,” (And that driver was an independent contractor)
I really don’t see the angle that Uber was doing something fundamentally new, except to the extent that they dramatically lowered the price and a lot more people used the service.
>Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
>So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect libraries to do.
>To counter this, publishers (and their supporters, which unfortunately include some authors) argue that (1) this interferes with the market for licensed ebooks, and (2) that there is a real difference in lending out the digital scans: that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do.
You’re assuming they don’t agree with the hypothetical you suggest. These sort of people back then would have unequivocally supported her arrest and persecution. They defend the status quo and not much else. After all the status quo likely led to their own prosperity. I can only assume these sort people would have attempted to condemn something like the French resistance since it was “against the law” as long as they they benefited from occupation.
IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid, when more people were trying to use their services due to being stuck inside.
Also of note is that the is only the district court. We'll have to see if the EFF appeals to the circuit next.
This lawsuit covers the limited lending they did before COVID, but that either flew under the publishers' radar or perhaps they knew but didn't care enough to respond until IA started doing the more blatant "unrestricted lending"
> IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid
That's the excuse the publishers are pushing, but ultimately they disagree with, and have successfully argued in court it seems, against the entire principle.
Ultimately, controlled digital lending should be as lawful as format shifting an album: this is format shifting from a physical book to an ebook.
> Also of note is that the is only the district court
But in this case, it wasn't controlled, right? Even with DRM to "expire" the lent ebook after a certain amount of time, they still ended up distributing the books without restriction on availability.
I don't really care about the publishers, but I still wouldn't expect to seriously get away with arguing that I wasn't distributing copyrighted material if I started offering movies online for free in unlimited numbers... because it was just controlled lending since the movie files were set up to probably become unreadable in 3 weeks.
I'm sure they have competent lawyers that would've predicted an outcome like this, which makes the decision to do it even more baffling. Especially for an organization that ought to be conservative by design, considering they want to be a very long-term archive.
>That's the excuse the publishers are pushing, but ultimately they disagree with, and have successfully argued in court it seems, against the entire principle.
Which is why it's really dumb that the IA pushed it blatantly violating copyright laws.
It does suck, but it was self-inflicted. I love the IA, I've even done volunteer work for the Physical Archive, but the "emergency library" was mad. I can't imagine how they justified it.
Locked inside with "nothing" to do, one guy probably got high and had this "revelation" that would "help" everyone else locked inside /s.
It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels when in reality they were doing just fine flying (somewhat) under the radar.
I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Because of donations, the scrutiny is 1000x more for non-profits vs regular companies.
Because IA is causing a risk that the donations aren’t paying for that, but could end up right in the publishers pockets, and shutting down those 100 other projects.
Didn't google do almost exactly this with google books - making agreements with libraries and digitising their collections without paying the publishers or the authors? Maybe I misunderstood.
Ahh, you're right. They copied the full books, but they don't let the public view more than snippets unless they have rights to do so. That must be the 'transformative use'.
It's a four factor test (but the second factor rarely counts).
the purpose and character of your use
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
the effect of the use upon the potential market.
The court found that Google copied the entirety of the work into their search index, but that this (taking into account the strict result snippet restrictions) didn't effect the market because no one would decide they didn't need the book now they had the snippet.
...and then the court threw out the settlement as unfair, and then the court ruled in Google's favor.
But the court noted that
Google was right on the edge of fair use. Google notably prevented the previews from being usable as a replacement for an original purchase by only displaying 1/8 of a page snippets, blacklisting 1 snippet per page, blacklisting every tenth page completely, and blacklisting works where a single snippet could be all you wanted such as dictionaries and recipe books.
I still feel like if I'd done something similar as an individual I would not have got away with it.
Say I downloaded z-library and wrote a search system that only showed me snippets (for searching). How likely do you think courts would find in my favour?
> The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit previewed as
much in HathiTrust and Google Books, cases that “test[ed] the
boundaries of fair use.” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 206. The
defendant in HathiTrust scanned whole copies of millions of
books, including those protected by valid copyrights, to create a
database on which the general public could search for particular
terms across the scanned works. 755 F.3d at 91. The creation of
this “full-text searchable database [was] a quintessentially
transformative use,” the court held, because “the result of a
word search is different in purpose, character, expression,
meaning, and message from the page (and the book) from which it
is drawn.” Id. at 97. Importantly, the database did not “allow
users to view any portion of the books they [were] searching” and
therefore, unlike IA’s Website, “d[id] not add into circulation
any new, human-readable copies of any books” or “merely repackage
or republish the originals.” Id.
> Google Books similarly found transformative use in Google’s
scanning of copyrighted books to create a database that included
a “snippet view” search function that allowed readers to view a
few lines of text containing searched-for terms. 804 F.3d at 208.
The snippet view showed the searcher “just enough context
surrounding the searched term” to help the searcher evaluate
whether the book fell within the scope of the searcher’s interest
“without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright
interests.” Id. at 208, 216. But the Court of Appeals cautioned
that “[i]f Plaintiffs’ claim were based on Google’s converting
their books into a digitized form and making that digitized
version accessible to the public,” precisely what the Publishers
allege in this case, the “claim [for copyright infringement]
would be strong.” Id. at 225. If HathiTrust and Google Books
demarcated the boundaries of fair use, this case shows what
conduct remains squarely beyond fair use.
Wow, reading the article this seems like a clear cut case. Did IA really think they could win this?
Edit: reading other sources, it seems like the crux of the idea is they would only lend out books where they had the same number of physical copies. I can see the reasoning for that, but it seems hard for fair use to get you there.
The original idea was to only lend out digital copies that are backed by a physical copy, so if challenged the Internet Archive could reasonably argue that they're protected under the same laws that physical libraries are, but when the pandemic kicked off IA launched an "emergency library" which waived the lending limits so any number of copies could be lent out regardless of how many physical copies they have.
My assumption is that publishers probably weren't happy about the original model but it was legally murky enough that they didn't pursue it for risk of losing and setting the wrong (from their perspective) precedent, but the emergency library made for an extremely easy case against IA.
> IA also argues that it made fair use of the Publishers’ copyrights during the National Emergency Library. The analysis above applies even more forcefully to the NEL, during which IA amplified its unauthorized lending of ebook versions of the Works in Suit by lifting the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. IA’s defense of fair use with respect to the NEL therefore also fails.
Nonetheless, its still the sort of thing that can colour opinion. If you want to change things with a precedent, it is usually best to try and be a perfect angel in every other way possible.
During the pandemic, libraries closed and weren't lending out physical books at all. Did the emergency policy lend more digital books than the number of physical books locked in libraries? We'll probably never know, but I think that was the logic.
The scanned books are not so much fun to read, it is definitely less ergonomic than a Kindle. I would expect those using the program likely needed it.
>Did the emergency policy lend more digital books than the number of physical books locked in libraries?
We'll probably never know, but I think that was the logic.
The most checked out book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, had ~850 check outs. I think it's safe to assume they didn't come close to the amount of physical books locked in libraries.
Not that it's very important, the pandemic policy is barely mentioned in this ruling.
This is a justification that makes sense in theory, but the Internet Archive doesn't own those books and can't track them. If they had asked libraries to explicitly send parts of their collection to the IA for this, that might've held some weight.
If anything, their "first sale doctrine" route seems like a stronger argument than fair use here. When you purchase a copy of a work, you have the right to lend, sell, or share that copy without any additional payment or permission required to the creator. This is how libraries have operated for centuries.
I think what IA was doing, making sure they only lend out as many copies as they physically own, was clearly within the spirit of that doctrine. But in the digital era, lending anything over the web necessarily means making a copy of it somewhere along the way, which laws haven't adequately adapted to yet.
Exactly. I'm not a lawyer but I'm baffled they went the fair use route -- fair use has nothing to do with it.
The argument that this is no different from lending temporarily to a friend seems to be much more reasonable. Especially since no money is changing hands.
The judge disagreed with that too. Companies have tried and failed to set up a streaming service backed by physical copies and they were struck down so this really didn’t have any chance either.
I don’t understand the reasoning there though. Like, I can get on board with sayibg fair-use is silly, but lending a book that I own —either digitally or physically— should be protected.
The concept of "owning" a book digitally is already on shaky ground, since most large publishers only sell licenses for accessing ebooks. You're not actually purchasing a copy in perpetuity like a physical book. Naturally these licenses are entirely on the publishers' terms.
In practice this means publishers can revoke access licenses for all sorts of arbitrary reasons, alter the content of ebooks already purchased, or plenty of other shady practices, with little recourse available to the reader.
Plus it means they can force libraries to keep paying repeated, marked-up licensing fees for the privilege of lending out ebooks. Much better deal for the publishers than the physical library lending model!
I don't blame IA for trying to find a way to liberate library lending from that racket.
You can sell or lend the physical copy you own. You can’t make a copy and then loan that. Copyright is the right to control making copies.
You could sell or lend virtual copy if the platforms supported that. You are allowed to make a copy for backup purposes, and no one will ever know if you use that or even lend it. But if you make business of it, then they will notice and sue you.
It makes me so sad -- it reminds me of Aereo, when the Supreme Court ruled against it in 2014 that it wasn't allowed to stream public broadcast TV over the internet, despite having a separate radio receiver for each viewer.
I can understand why Congress hasn't changed law to allow digital 1-for-1 reuse of previous physical/analog sources -- because there will be too much lobbying against it from corporations.
But it really seems like the Supreme Court had a chance to set new precedent in an area that hadn't been foreseen in law so really was undefined. And they chose corporations over consumers back in 2014, just like a federal judge did again now.
I can only imagine how much better if the Supreme Court had sided with consumers here. Congress could have overturned it through law, of course, but only in the face of massive voter dissatisfaction, and so I'm not sure they would have.
The first-sale doctrine was also covered in the ruling. According to the letter of the law (17 USC § 109) it specifically only covers the distribution of existing authorized physical copies; it doesn't grant you permission to make a copy and lend that to a friend.
> I think what IA was doing, making sure they only lend out as many copies as they physically own,
Part of this points out that they weren’t even doing that; there was no process to ensure that the “partnered” library wasn’t simultaneously lending out their copy.
The thing is IA wasn't lending the copy they purchased, they were lending a reproduction of the copy. The question here is if it was legal for them to make that copy which is where the fair use argument comes in. I wonder if they could buy ebooks and lend those instead of starting with a physical copy.
America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time, unless forced to do otherwise by external circumstances.
Famously it only went against segregation because "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." (Attorney General James P. McGranery)
> America will rule in favour of private property and against the common good every single time
Thankfully that's the best outcome. Unless you mean you support eminent domain.
I'd pay hell to the country that even plans on using it against me, and I'll follow and protect others who this happens to as well. Anyone who decides they can steal my resources will have to fight for it.
I don't own a single digital book, nor am I deluded to think that the internet was going to solve the issue of ownership in the first place.
You are free to demand that publishers provide you unlimited access to their servers so you can download your books perpetually. Publishers need not give in to alternative access methods to their material.
If you want to own books, have it actually in your possession, which is not the internet.
In the very near future America as a country will have to fight a lot harder to loot the resources of other nations, so I imagine as resource scarcity encroaches upon everyone's lifestyle you'll probably begin to see yourself less as an independent frontiersman and more as a member of society. But not one moment sooner.
Aaron Swartz founding the Open Library with IA was a shining moment in web history. Sad to see giant corporations stomping on his vision of a web that offers free access to information for all.
Personally, I've had good luck with HathiTrust Digital Library [0] for old books in the public domain. A majority of the books that I've cared to check are mirrored on both IA and HathiTrust. It has an arbitrary restriction that you can't download full PDFs, but at least the contents are all available.
In the face of senseless copyright law, avoiding to fund the organizations responsible is a moral imperative, and piracy is typically the way to do that.
> avoiding to fund the organizations responsible is a moral imperative
I never thought about it that way. I avoided getty and other stock media publishers out of principle. In their deranged quest to subjugate google, they made image search worse for me. I think it's about time I started applying this logic to other publishers as well. Copyright is completely out of control. There has to be accountability, even if it's insignificant and only on a personal level.
For any authors reading this: I intend to continue paying for books and will gladly do so but only if it's to you directly. Either self-publish or put a donation link on your site. If I'm interested in your book, I will search for your personal website prior to taking any action.
I would agree with this if the issue were movies or games, but most people know that you can Google "[book title] pdf" and get a free copy. The small file sizes mean that piracy sites don't need to rely on torrents and can just offer a direct download. I frequently see piracy sites in search results just from searching the title of a book. The barrier to pirating a book is extremely low.
Yikes. I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds.
Any idea if this means IA has to shut down lending by when? Tomorrow? Next month?
Any chances for appeal here? Or any chance they relocate the books division to another country or something?
It's just so sad if something so valuable is forced to go "poof". A real loss.
> the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books
Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA.
The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51.
There's a good chance IA will be exempted from statutory damages. See 17 USC § 504(c)(2),
> The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords
The opinion (p46) defers this matter,
> At this point, IA’s statutory remittance argument is premature. IA may renew the argument in connection with the formation of an appropriate judgment.
> I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds.
This is the one use case where the blockchain/web3 is useful.
Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
Torrents cannot be updated. Furthermore, torrents are subject to the sites that advertise them getting banned. You will constantly be on the hunt for new trackers.
Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.
I personally don't think it's necessary, but the Blockchain creates an effectively irreversible collectivization of the work: Removal would also undo whatever other work was committed.
It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...
IPFS has some theoretical merits, such as not relying on discrete trackers (which is a point of failure), and at present we have a bunch of mirrors that speeds it up. However, BitTorrent has a better track record regarding resilience against interference (from copyright mafia) or other bad actors. IPFS has so far not openly supported this usage.
That's not neccesarily a bad thing. Once you release something you shouldn't be able to gaslight people by silently updating it - instead, release a new verson with a new torrent.
Blockchains don't really do this well though. A blockchain is useful when you need a publicly accessible, canonical shared record of a consensus, obfuscated or otherwise. They're not for storing arbitrary data. If you want to store arbitrary data, and you want peer to peer decentralized kind of features and you want identities obfuscated, currently you're looking at BitTorrent over Tor. I don't know if i2p or Tor or anyone else is working on any sort of swarm like file sharing internally over those networks, but it needs to be done and these shadow libraries need to begin using it.
Blockchains can absolutely be used for storing arbitrary data (see Filecoin.)
Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned.
What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
Filecoin doesn't store data on the blockchain. Filecoin is a blockchain payment network for a monetized IPFS storage network. The two were developed in concert, IPFS was built for filecoin.
IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic.
But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
This was going to be my next question with basic assumption that the entire gathered information will either vanish, get moved to torrents or splintered across various believers of the cause.
IA and Signal are two nonprofits I donate to and recommend everyone donate to regardless of their political or religious convictions (or lack thereof).
The Internet Archive very well may be the only way to know a lot of important things from the past -- things that libraries used to keep track of but can't in the internet age.
I would add FSF and/or EFF. FSF is more uncompromising with respect to their original principles of defending digital freedom, whereas EFF sort of shifts with time (gradually giving up grounds).
Unfortunately IA lost all credibility in my eyes, when they decided that one journalist in particular gets to decide that none of their (awful) tweets should be archived[1].
I understand not allowing certain things to be archived, but the tweets of a public person, especially one who works as a news-maker, should certainly be in the allowed list.
E: And just to be clear, this was before said writer set their tweets to private.
If the IA loses all appeals and the lending library is totally destroyed, is there a firewall between that and the entity that is archiving the internet, or does the whole thing live and die together?
Yes, IA has followed a similar tragic arc as Google Books, another martyr to the dream of a truly 21st century library.
What's most tragic about it to me is that that vast majority of works affected are "zombie" copyright works that have no actual commercial value. Someone, somewhere holds the copyright, but no one has sold a copy in years or decades. For the sake of protecting the tiny sliver of commercially valuable works, access to all of this other knowledge will be lost.
Has there been any kind of movement towards a law that would automatically put zombie works into the public domain?
It really doesn't seem unreasonable that if a book, film, recording, or video game hasn't been generally available for sale over the past 5 or 10 years it becomes public domain. Use it or lose it, in other words.
Although it might really only apply to past works. Because while physical books go out of print, e-books will probably be available forever, no?
But then they would make such works paying public domain (the type of public domain that you have to pay royalties to the state) rather than FFA public domain.
Not in the public domain, no, but some countries such as the Nordics have mandatory schemes for orphan works where a collection society is able to authorise their use and has legal protection to do so, and will pay out said royalties should someone come forward to claim ownership at a later date.
Most of Europe was going to do this at some point but the photographer's unions pushed back in very strong terms so they were often watered down.
Not in the public domain, no, but some countries such as the Nordics have mandatory schemes for orphan works where a collection society is able to authorise their use and has legal protection to do so, and will pay out said royalties should someone come forward to claim ownership at a later date.
Most of Europe was going to do this at some point but the photographer's unions pushed back in very strong terms so they were often watered down.
Just shortening copyright would mostly mitigate this issue. If it was 10 years after creation then the most you have to wait is a decade. It may be nice to also have a specific exception for "abandoned" works but at least 10 years would be a solid fallback with no need to do difficult research like finding the authors and if they have died or proving that a work qualifies as abandoned.
But does the artist deserve to retain the value of their work seventy years after their death?
Given the very large proportion of orphaned works, a very large proportion of living authors don't think their existing corpus has any residual value to them.
If artists deserve money every time you read a book then your plumber should get paid every time you take a shit. Copyrights have been abused to the point of absurdity. They should last no longer than patents.
A writer/artist/whatever can make some money off a work for two decades and then their work goes to the society that enabled its creation.
> A writer/artist/whatever can make some money off a work for two decades and then their work goes to the society that enabled its creation.
-- Signed, Not an Artist.
(Most artists are paid an absolute pittance for their work. Most work at least one other job. Almost none make even a basic income. I feel artists should have the benefit of the income from their work for their natural life, unless they waive their rights. That said, companies have sorely abused and influenced copyright law to the point that the advantage is highly asymmetric in their favour and that certainly needs to be addressed).
Why doesn't the plumber deserve a payment every time you shit then? Effective sewage systems prevent devastating diseases like cholera and typhus. Surely that's a higher social utility than a trashy Harlequin novel or any of the works of Kevin Federline?
Also, fuck you for assuming I've never made any art. I'd be fine if anything I've drawn, painted, or written became public domain after twenty years. If I wanted to sell it that's plenty of time. Works entering public domain doesn't preclude me from selling the physical artifact even after its public domain. It doesn't preclude me from making new art to sell. A musician's work becoming public domain doesn't preclude them performing it for pay.
It would be ridiculous if twenty years from now some poor bastard got sued into destitution because they downloaded some dumb thing I wrote twenty years ago.
> Why doesn't the plumber deserve a payment every time you shit then?
Pretty sure the plumber is getting (very) decently paid for their work. Pretty sure the people who planned and installed the sewage system were well remunerated.
Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
> Also, fuck you for assuming I've never made any art.
And thank you for speaking up on behalf of all artists and kindly telling us all that we should expect 20 years worth of almost nothing out of efforts, instead of a lifetime.
> It would be ridiculous if twenty years from now some poor bastard got sued into destitution because they downloaded some dumb thing I wrote twenty years ago.
So licence it CC-0. Or release it to the Public Domain. Knock yourself out.
> Pretty sure the plumber is getting (very) decently paid for their work. Pretty sure the people who planned and installed the sewage system were well remunerated.
These are generally not considered desirable jobs so why are you so sure they are paid their due? After all you are using the result of their labour every day, so why are you unwilling to pay more.
> Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
Medical costs don't affect artists more than others and in some countries we have come up with other ways to pay for them collectively.
> And thank you for speaking up on behalf of all artists and kindly telling us all that we should expect 20 years worth of almost nothing out of efforts, instead of a lifetime.
And you can speak for all artsts then? Of course the idea that only copyright holders should have a say about copyright policy is ridiculous in the first place - it has always been a deal between creators and everyone else. If one "side" (and really, these aren't separate sides but mostly overlapping groups) feels that they are getting less out of the deal then the other side can't just say "but I want to be paid forever".
> So licence it CC-0. Or release it to the Public Domain. Knock yourself out.
Or argue for copyright reform. We don't owe it to you to support your choice to make a living off of art - you could always work as a plumber if you thing they are very decently paid.
> Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous. Copyrights lasting as long as patents gives an artist plenty of time to monetize their work. It then becomes public domain to serve the public that gave them that monopoly in the first place.
Billions of dollars changed hands every year due to patent licensing. If two decades wasn't enough time to monetize something that wouldn't happen.
The length of copyright protections in the US are ludicrous. It's especially egregious as the company that's done the most to extend copyrights, Disney, made their fortune absolutely pillaging public domain fairy tales. Thousands of pop songs have been riffing Johann Pachelbel for nearly a century.
There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
> So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
1. Why should the plumber be paid-per-flush? A toilet is infrastructure, a permenant part of a house. You may as well argue that we should pay a carpenter, a landlord, or a bank to use our front doors.
2. I actually don't have a flushing toilet. The compost toilet I have was not installed by a plumber.
> As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous.
When a plumber installs a toilet, they get paid. When a musician releases a song they might hope to get enough money for a beer, if they're lucky. Nobody requires art. Try and get a house plan through planning without a toilet. So plumbers and other trades have a certain expectation of being able to make a living. Artists do not, and the very, very, very that are lucky enough to just make a minnimum wage are doing better that 99% of their peers.
I do art too. Yeah, I'm never going to get money for it, and I do it for my own entertainment and my friends. If society values my art, and wants me to release it out to people, you better believe you'll be paying for it. Plumbers don't install toilets as recreation. They do so to get paid.
Artists have the option, at any time, of releasing their works to the public domain. If they felt strongly that they should profit from their works for only 20 years, they have the absolute power to make that happen.
> There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
The artist does deserve to retain value for some time, but the question is how long should that be such that all interests are balanced?
As an author myself, I think the proper copyright term is ~15 years from the copyright inception. (Disclosure: I give my stuff away for free online--people buy paper copies if the want them, so I'm not a publisher's idea of a model author.)
A relative handful of publishers/authors will lose out (e.g. Dune, Van Gogh), but the public domain will be well-served. 15 years seems like a good balance point.
> The artist does deserve to retain value for some time
Hard disagree. We have chosen to allow the artist to retain a monopoly for a limited time because we though it would encoruage the cration of more art. The only valid argument for copyright is one that shows it benefits society as a whole.
But there is always a risk that the rights holder rises up from the grave and sues you. With proper abandoned work exceptions you would be safe as long as the rights holders are not currently distributing.
seems to me that once something is out of print for a lengthy period of time, publishers shouldn't be able to make the fair use argument that electronic copies interfere with the commercial market for the book.
Better chance of staying alive and complete if they can remain in the US but additionally we build seperate archives in the EU, Russian and as many geographically and politically distant regions as we can.
"We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers.... We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books."
Checking a listing for a specific book ... there's still the option to log in and borrow it as I write this.
A lot of people in these comments still seem confused about what has happened here.
This ruling is not about the emergency library at all. It's a ruling that controlled digital lending (one physical copy backing each digital copy lent out) is illegal.
Is this just ebook lending? Is that popular among local libraries?
I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries.
I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.
It is worth noting that Libraries in the UK have to pay authors/publishers to loan out books on a royalty basis with the Public Lending Right payment of course. Even physical books.
My library lends epubs through OverDrive, which puts Adobe's DRM on them. It works quite well with my Kobo Libra H2O. Checkouts of ebooks spiked during the pandemic, with 3 million in 2019, for a county with a total population of ~800K
Sorry, those were two different thoughts. I only have numbers for 2019. I haven't been able to find anything for pandemic years other than general reports that ebook borrowing spiked.
My ten year old uses "Libby" a lot to borrow books from the local library - at one point they started rate limiting him. He also typically has a dozen physical books checked out at any given time.
For my five year old, we have been rate limited on overdrive reading Pete the Cat and Franklin books. Partly because the selection is woeful (about 20 English books) compared to IA's thousands in that category.
If a book exists in overdrive, they allow you to request that your library add it to their collection. My first two requests were added to my library within days, several others came a few months later, and now about 4(?) years later I'm still getting an occasional notification about it, though at this point I've read them already...
Yeah, on an iPad. He reads a variety of stuff, but he tells me it's been pokemon themed manga recently. We limit screen time, so he mostly reads print books, but he'll get an hour of bonus libby time in the mornings on school holidays. His fun screen time, 30 min weekdays, 1.5 weekends is typically minecraft or pokemon games.
I also occasionally let him have a little bit of Libby or scratch time (which I deem "educational") before going to school or before bed. (Everything is contingent on behavior.)
Aside from minecraft/pokemon stuff, he typically reads a mix of kids graphic novels and books. Including Tristan Strong, Artimis Fowl, Wings of Fire, Dogman. He's also read Harry Potter, some Terry Pratchett, and Tolkien. He first read the Lord of the Rings in the summer between first and second grade, which blew my mind (it was middle or high school or me). So I don't really worry about stuff like the ratio of graphic novels to textual books.
> Don't many community/government libraries do this?
Those books are licensed to the libraries by the publishers. The introduction of the opinion here explains how it works:
> This dispute concerns the way libraries lend ebooks. Public and academic libraries in the United States spend billions of
dollars each year obtaining print books and ebooks for their
patrons to borrow for free. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶ 113. Libraries usually buy their print books from publishers or wholesalers. Id. ¶ 114. Copies of ebooks, however, are typically not bought but licensed to libraries from publishers through distributors called “aggregators.” Id. ¶ 117. The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126.
Libraries' ebook lending programs are not legal because they require membership and use DRM. They're legal because they're authorized by the copyright owners, and those are the terms the copyright owners choose to impose (along with licensing fees).
But if I purchase the paper book, there is - thankfully - no shrink-wrap licensing anywhere that tells me that I can or cannot lend it to anyone, yet I sure hope I can. Why IA can't?
Which might be legally sound (so says this court, we will presumably hear from others), but it’s logically balderdash. The copyright applies to the “intellectual property” content of the book, not its paper and binding. (I’m sure there are some esoteric exceptions to this because artists gonna art, but I feel confident that I’m representing the vast general case correctly.)
If I rightly own a copy of a book, I don’t think any court within the bounds of absurdity would say I can’t make a digital copy for myself because that’s how I prefer to consume it. Being allowed to lend one finite form but not another equivalent one is definitely something law or license might specify, but that doesn’t mean it makes any kind of sense.
you can make 100 copies for yourself. what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).
the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession, which replication would circumvent.
> what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).
I’m pretty sure I can do that.
> the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession
I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
Any individual in IA’s position could do this without fear of legal scrutiny. An organization doing it is under scrutiny not because there’s actual, meaningful copyright violation happening but because they systemized a thing no reasonable person would object to individuals doing.
> I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
This is the part that is not true. For example, you are free to transcribe a book onto a parchement and read it that way, and store the parchment separately from the book for archival purposes, and keep the parchement even if the original book gets destroyed.
However, this is a limited exception to copyright. You are not in fact allowed, at any point before or after the original copy is destroyed, to lend or re-sell the parchment you created. That parchment will forever be an unauthorized copy, but one that you are allowed to use in certain limited ways.
The only wrinkle is that, at least in the EU, when you acquire an authorized digital copy of a work, you are allowed to lend or sell that copy as long as you don't retain access to it during the lending/after the sale. This is allowed even though technically you are technically creating a new copy of the digital work and destroying your own afterwards, but this is an exception specific to digital realms, it can't be extended to digital copies you make of a phyisical work.
Obviously there are lots of jurisdictions and you have to hit a broad brush with answers, but generally, no. Your reproduction is only considered to be reasonable by law while you retain the original.
Now I'm wondering how this would apply in situations where the person doesn't know if they have the original or not.
Inspired by the fact that my emulation of Link's Awakening to play on a screen I could see is technically legal since we had a cartridge stuffed away in a drawer. But for 10-15 years that cartridge lived in a limbo land of 'we used to have that, it might still be around somewhere...'
I believe this court ruling suggests that, while you are free to make a copy for yourself of a work you legally acquired, and you are free to lend or re-sell the original work you acquired, you are not free to lend or re-sell the copy you made, even if the original doesn't exist anymore.
Basically, the only thing you are legally allowed to sell is the exact copy you bought of a physical representation of a work, assuming it was created by an authorized entity. You do not legally own an abstract copy of the idealized work, you own a physical object which happens to represent a copy of that work.
Note that this is in fact very much how most people would think of copyright. If I buy a book and someone steals it from me, or it is there in my house and it burns down, I don't have some right to now obtain another physical representation of that novel free of charge, or to obtain a copy made by a friend with a xerox. My sole right was to that one physical copy I bought, and that no longer exists.
It's worth emphasizing that part of the reason why publishers are happy to work with providing libraries with ebooks is that libraries are extremely good customers. There's something like 100,000 libraries in the US alone. A single organization like the Internet Archive just simply doesn't have the purchasing power to make publishers willing to give up any ground.
>Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
>So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect libraries to do.
>To counter this, publishers (and their supporters, which unfortunately include some authors) argue that (1) this interferes with the market for licensed ebooks, and (2) that there is a real difference in lending out the digital scans: that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do.
Whether a copy of a work is fair use turns on, amongst other things, the effect of the copy on the potential market for the original. The article acknowledges this.
Controlled Digital Lending competes directly with the licensing scheme publishers have for library ebooks. The fair use argument was always doomed to fail.
The article then completely ignores the copyright argument and tries to equate CDL with libraries loaning out their physical copies. This is completely absurd, since libraries do not distribute duplicates of their physical books and so do not even enter the realm of copyright.
If libraries were systematically distributing duplicates of their existing books they would be sued for copyright infringement.
The parent post makes the unwise choice of using the word "copy" to mean "duplicate".
They intend to say "libraries do not distribute duplicates of purchased books; they distribute the originals".
Unfortunately the word "copy" could also mean "the books purchased by the library". Of course the library distributes purchased books. They just don't scan the books, print fascimiles of those books on new paper, and then distribute those prints they made themselves.
I think what GP is saying is that when lending (or for that matter giving away) print books, libraries don't copy anything, they just distribute purchased works, which they have a fundamental right to do (in the US). That's different from the IA first making a digital copy and then distributing that copy, which there is no fundamental right to do.
The market considerations for fair use concern the market for the work of authorship as a whole, not a specific format of it.
I'm not convinced fair use is the strongest argument in IA's case. But the idea that lending ebook copies can't be fair use simply because it competes with publishers' ebook licensing schemes seems like a misreading of how fair use is typically applied.
Of course other fair use considerations factor in, but the market impact for a specific format isn't a death blow against reproductions of a work, generally speaking.
Laws a bit more open to interpretation and chaining rarely works, it’s humanist, and it’s at its face unreasonable that one physical copy => right to lend out digital cooy.
If the IA is creating their own digital copies of physical books, it could be argued that that the IA is creating and distributing derivative works. I'm not certain, but my impression is that derivative works have little in the way of legal protection.
The court order discusses this, and says while the first sale doctrine means IA could resell or lend their physical books, that right does not extend to unauthorized reproductions (such as making an ebook by scanning in a print book).
Changing formats without changing content is not a derivative work; it’s just a copyright violation. A derivative work must “add new original copyrightable authorship to that work.” https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
In the industry the title page is often considered to be proof of ownership. E.g. when a book doesn't sell, and book stores want it off the shelves, they may be asked to destroy the books except return the title pages to the publisher, as proof.
Regular (obnoxious) ebook lending is done under license of the publisher, presumably with the approval of the rightsholders. It may or may not be distribution, but it's approved, so it's ok.
One of the reasons the IA has lost (at least so far) here is that the judge noted they do not really do that, and have no mechanisms in place for doing that.
I thought the IA was in a bad place before, but they got very shown up in court.
Do you believe that libraries should be barred from archiving material to microfiche? How is that significantly different from format-shifting a book to electronic form, as long as they use DRM to limiy concurrent viewing?
IANAL but I think I recall seeing that the US libraries’ initiative to reprint some older books on non-acid-based paper was supported by an explicit carve-out in US copyright law.
It's more pernicious than that because it's a lie.
Broadly speaking, physical books last much longer than ebooks have been proven to. With preservation measures, you can get 100s of years out of a single book copy, but even without most books will last for decades unless something catastrophic happens or someone destroys them on purpose. I have several books from the 1800s that weren't cared for at all (picked up at an estate sale) and they're perfectly serviceable and would be fine if I rebound them.
So I have books from the 1860s that are still usable. Given how the digital world has developed, the odds of someone's Kindle or ePub file being viable in 2180 is exceptionally low. In the same way that playing old video games can be a hassle, I'd be shocked if we're still using the same files and formats in 160 years. (Outside of us weirdo archivists of course).
That’s a terrible ruling. The first sale doctrine says the copy of the book you bought is yours. Lending the book is clearly not copying it.
So, I guess you just don’t own anything you buy anymore? Like what if I want to lend a tool to someone, and the tool manufacturer wants to rent their tools out? Is that also illegal?
What if the tool contains software?
What if reasonable use of the tool requires accessing a print manual? A pdf manual?
Edit: Reading the ruling, IA should have argued they are simply format shifting a single copy that they own. I wonder if they did make this argument, and then the judge conveniently ignored it (then lied in the summary ruling, when they say IA made no other arguments in their defense), or if IA’s lawyers screwed up.
I don’t disagree with the ruling. IA is not lending their copy that they purchased. They are lending a copy of their copy. While that copy is lent out, they are still free to, I.e. read the copy in their possession.
Do you think it would have made a difference if they bought three copies of the book and then shredded two of them? That way they would have the original they scanned, their digital version they copy to lend, and the loaned digital copy.
No, that’s not why they lost. The reason is because they effectively lend it to many people simultaneously, and implement no controls on getting it “returned” (deleted) by the people they lent it to, while even being aware that some of them don’t “return” it.
The technicality that they keep a copy of the book while it’s being lent isn’t really at issue here at all. It’s not because there are two copies, it’s because there are three or more copies, given to two or more parties at the same time. It has become “distribution” in the eyes of copyright law, beyond the lending analogy.
Even if they did what you described they would still lose. There would be no way to implement a control to prevent an additional simultaneous copy. It's not a technical issue, it's simple impossible inherently.
I don't know why companies keep trying this. MP3.com, Aereo, etc. The precedent is clear.
The question isn’t whether it’s technically possible, the question is whether they even tried, and one of the reasons they lost is not just because they didn’t try at all, they instead looked the other way when they knew the borrowers didn’t “return” the book.
my point is that even if they did try, the outcome would've been the same and CDL was doomed from the beginning. their inane emergency CDL plan simply accelerated this outcome
Maybe, but that’s speculation, and others have won fair use claims. The decision in this case explicitly cited the defendant’s lack of effort to control their loaned copies while being aware of infringement.
I didn’t claim similar, and it seems like we’re losing the point here. Mine is that your claim at the top, that the problem had to do with having two copies, actually has nothing to do with why they lost. The problem, as the judge described, is that they didn’t put the “C” in CDL, and looked the other way when then knew it was missing, and then tried to claim fair use for something that clearly isn’t fair use. They didn’t lose because the judge is being pedantic about how many copies there are, they lost because they’re actually squarely violating existing copyright law.
Again, speaking about the wider CDL initiative (one digital copy lent for each physical copy) and not their National Emergency Library, the Internet Archive do implement a DRM on that digital copy, so for the reader to make additional copies of it is not trivial. Regardless, from where do you get a requirement to prevent (with 100% certainty) the reader from making additional copies? When a person borrows a physical book from a library, they could photocopy the entire thing, then return the book they borrowed to the library and still have an additional copy that they made. Does that make library lending illegal? How is that something that can be blamed on the library in the first place?
In the case of a physical object needing to temporarily go digital, it needs to be sent digitally and the records kept, and of course the physical copy has to be kept.
In the case of the GPL there's no physical copy and thus there's no need to consider how to move from one form to the other.
To require that a physical object never be used digitally is bad for society.
The entire article is about fair use and how what IA is doing is not fair use. I would like the IA to exist, but I agree with the ruling that their fair use argument is nonsense. It's not a derivative work.
That’s technically true. But frankly it seems like such people have a giant stick up their ass. The digital version would be infinitely more accessible, while still maintaining effectively 1-1 access restrictions. I’m not even sure if they’re _is_ a physical IA library one could go to. For all I know they’re in a vault somewhere. Even the USD isn’t backed 1-1 with physical tokens. It seems patently ridiculous that books be held to this standard in this day and age.
And also it's a lot easier to copy a digitally borrowed book than it is to copy a physically borrowed book.
There are practical differences between the two, which mean that the law probably should treat them differently. I expect a lot of HN have difficulty dealing with that because they think "but they both contain the same information".
It reminds me of people trying to encode books into prime numbers or the digits or pi or whatnot to "get around" copyright. Fundamentally missing the point.
You cannot even read an ebook without copying it from storage to RAM, to CPU cache, to video RAM, and so on; by your thinking, all owners of ebooks commit multiple instances of copyright infringement every time they read an ebook.
Replying to your edit: The format shifting argument and first sale doctrine are discussed in the ruling. Notably in the section headed ‘3’ starting on page 28 - but also in other places.
Nor does IA’s promise not to lend simultaneously its
lawfully acquired print copies and its unauthorized reproductions
help its case. As an initial matter, IA has not kept its promise.
Although the Open Library’s print copies of the Works in Suit are
non-circulating, IA concedes that it has no way of verifying
whether Partner Libraries remove their physical copies from
circulation after partnering with IA. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶¶ 495-496. To
the contrary, IA knows that some Partner Libraries do not remove
the physical books from their shelves, and even if a Partner
Library puts a physical book into a non-circulating reference
collection, it could be read in the library while the ebook
equivalent is checked out. Id. ¶¶ 494, 497. IA also does not
inform Partner Libraries when an ebook in its collection is
checked out, and Partner Libraries do not tell IA when their
physical copies are circulating. Id. ¶ 498. IA admits it has
never taken action against a Partner Library that did not
suppress circulation properly. Id. ¶ 499.
I do want IA to win, but this certainly doesn’t help their case, to say the least…
This is such an “ackchully” argument from the ruling. It’s not the spirit of the law and the principles behind the idea of free access to information. Instead it’s narrowing in on the specifics of physical lending of books, grasping for analogies to the 20th century, in a world which has transformed and moved on decades ago.
But even if all those things weren’t true, or important, it’s profound that there’s enough collective incentive to go after IA, instead of say corporations violating GPL, or the hedgies who created “temporary” artificial supply of stocks (which shares a similar “overprovisioning” aspect, except they’re fraudulent at massive scale).
Make no mistake, the law is specific made to limit free access to information. Originally this was a reasonable concession to encourage creative work, but as the length extended and copyright starts to be controlled by massive corporations, they gradually became a way to protect profits.
Right. IMO copyright in general seriously conflicts with the very concepts of free expression and ownership. As corporations eat the world and are able to push to maximize copyright to protect their profits, our rights of expression and ownership are diminished. Fair use and the first sale doctrine will ultimately be meaninglessly minimized curiosities if we don't fight, tooth and nail, corporate IP holders and the bought state entities that protect them.
When IP laws existed to make sure authors could be compensated people broadly supported them. The perception has changed (for many reasons), to where people broadly see IP laws as an enabler for corporate greed more than being about fair compensation for authors. (See Disney not paying owed royalties, for example.)
We can either have "good copyright" that the public sees as reasonable, or we can have rampant piracy and the consequences thereof. The villains of the piece are those who deliberately perpetuate an unsustainable system out of greed (and I am not talking about authors and publishers trying to get paid for the work they've done).
It was always from the very beginning a way to protect profits, that was the primary intent of copyright law, to give the creator of a work the exclusive right to make the money from the work before others are allowed to take the content and sell it for their own profit. Yes the length has become crazy long, and yes the law limits free (as in beer) access to information, but that hasn’t changed the reason for it’s being at all. It’s not really a “concession” either, more like it was intentionally balanced to provide enough time for people to make profits (which is what economically encourages creative work), while being short enough to allow works to reach the public over time.
1. IA actually buying a physical copy (or as many copies as they plan on simultaneously making available to borrowers) of the book.
2. After scanning the physical copy, destroying it, and documenting same.
Then as long as they guarantee that they only loan out as many copies as they physically had (before destroying them) there's no question of simultaneous usage.
IA doesn't want to destroy its own books, because it warehouses them in climate-controlled spaces so that it can re-scan them with improved technology in the future. That should hardly preclude (controlled) lending of scans of its own physical books that nobody is using, even under current draconian copyright law.
Now that I think about it, not being able to own anything is a good reason to start stealing. Think about it, why is stealing bad? Usually, this is an application of the Golden Rule. If you don't want people to steal the stuff you own, you shouldn't steal their stuff either. However, if you are no longer allowed to own anything (just like under communism), then the argument falls apart. Realistically, information wants to be free, and spreading it is much easier than controlling its spread. I expect the current copyright wars will come into an end in a decade or two, ending in the loss of the copyright mafia as society reconsiders the concession that is the copyright system.
Come on, this was explained like milion times: you cannot own private property (factory, land, buildings, means of production), but you can own your personal property just fine. Why do leftist use such confusing terminology? I don't know. We should ask Free Software Foundation.
Most importantly here, information falls under "means of production", so under communism it should be free.
Freedom of information under capitalism is (as everything) a discussion about money.
I admire your optimism, regarding the copyrights future. Fingers crossed.
"Alpaca III, can you write an accurate page-by-page summary of every page of Book-I-Want-To-Read, where each summary's one page long and as faithful to the original pages content and length as possible, fully quoting each page permitted?"
My point being: as technology marches on the ageing concept of "owning" entirely fungible digital material becomes less and less valid. It is already at a stage meaninglessness is flirting with it in a new way daily and that will continue.
Whether or not someone is allowed to distribute creative works without the permission of the author, the point of copyright, is and will contribute to be independent of the technology used to do the distribution.
This sets back archival and human knowledge back 100 years. If you embargo a physical copy, an electronic copy should be lendable.
I would start a webtorrent+ipfs+i2p site in Iceland just to get around this insane perpetual monopoly on difficult-to-find, old shit that doesn't have a market but publishers keep locked away.
It means you are not legally allowed to lend them or sell them, even if you lose the original DVD and even though you did have the right to lend or sell the original DVD.
IANAL, but even if we assume the act of backing up a DVD to hard drive is legal, it's not clear to me how one could legally use the resulting copy without somehow circumventing CSS.
And with only narrow exceptions that probably don't apply here, this act of circumvention violates 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1)(A)[1] unless the copyright owner has authorized the process (as they do with licensed playback devices and software).
> It’s a ruling that controlled digital lending is illegal.
That’s not really true. One issue described explicitly in the decision is that the lending is mostly uncontrolled, and worse there’s evidence of it the defendant was aware of. The second issue is that the defendant isn’t using the first sale doctrine, their defense is fair use. Presumably the whole reason they decided to argue fair use is because they knew they weren’t adhering to the lending analogy, because they were aware they were effectively distributing copies, not just lending them.
> This ruling is not about the emergency library at all. It's a ruling that [...] one physical copy backing each digital copy lent out) is illegal.
That's not what I read in the linked article, specifically:
Regarding "IA’s promise not to lend simultaneously": "IA has not kept its promise. Although the Open Library’s print copies of the Works in Suit are non-circulating, IA concedes that it has no way of verifying whether Partner Libraries remove their physical copies from circulation after partnering with IA…. To the contrary, IA knows that some Partner Libraries do not remove the physical books from their shelves"
As I understand it, this case exists because the IA was not keeping its promise anymore and made an error of judgement by breaking the 1:1 ratio without any legal argumentation or even a logical reason for it. It was said at the time already, but the obviousness, whether something as important as the wayback machine's owner should compete with the pirate bay for market share on illegal ebooks, and the use of (my/our) donated money on the ensuing legal nonsense, is a different discussion...
If these underlying facts and circumstances were different, such as if someone tries this concept again but keeps their promise and implements it correctly, the same ruling cannot be passed because it's not the same situation. It would have to be tried again and it might (or might not) swing the other way, at least that is my general understanding of legal systems around the world.
Perhaps it would also be different in another country whence ExampleBooks Ltd could operate legally, that will depend in part on whether the copyright alliance pact (I forgot the name) has provisions letting signatories (afaik that's every nation you might want to live in) make exceptions for things like this.
I'm bummed IA chose to pick this fight by declaring this magical COVID emergency and lending more digital copies than they owned. The outcome seemed inevitable and IMO IA has been dishonest about what the lawsuit with its own statements.
It makes me wonder if there are any adults at the helm at IA and I worry about its future.
IA is an amazing resource... I don't understand why they chose this hill to fight on.
I don't think that controlled digital lending in its entirety being ruled illegal was at all inevitable. Sure, take them to task for the 'emergency library', but the scope of this ruling seems unjust.
It's about probabilities. If they had even a 10% chance of bankrupting themselves they probably shouldn't have done it. Even if they eventually win, every dollar spent on lawyers wasn't spent on archiving.
The first doc on this case was filed June 1, 2020.
NEL closed down almost immediately on June 16, 2020.
IA was definitely and stupidly playing with fire here. As others have said, publishers weren't happy with IA's one hardcopy, one digital loan rule, but lived with it because of the potential bad press. However, I'm willing to bet the NEL pushed them over the edge to go to war. Incredibly reckless and now we've taken a step backwards against IP abuse, IMO.
What's magical is the thinking involved in copyright, particularly as it involves the digital space.
I 100% guarantee that if a dead tree library xeroxed their books during a national emergency, nobody would be making comments like this. Somehow, because computers are involved, magical thinking gets a pass.
Try giving some thought to the consequences of your line of thought if applied before 1865 in the US and I hope you'll understand exactly how specious it is.
If this results in the collapse of the Internet Archive as a whole, it will be the digital equivalent of the Notre-Dame fire; a treasure being destroyed before our very eyes.
Digital copies of books are available to anyone willing to look for them, free of charge and easily downloadable. I suspect all this ruling has done, if I've understood it correctly, is make it more difficult for people wanting to download or view copies legitimately.
I love the IA. I use it weekly if not daily. My bet is that they'll push back on this and other rulings and will ultimately lobby for saner laws.
837 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] threadIA can and should lobby for copyright law to change. But breaking it before it has changed is risky and foolish, and does more harm than good.
There's an app for that.
https://www.google.com/googlebooks/perspectives/facts.html
Yes. And they can lend those books to people due to the first-sale doctrine, which allows the legal owners of a work to lease, lend or sell it without the copyright owner's permission.
the judge said the conversion to digital was not transformative, so I don't see why it should constitute another work versus the original one
The first sale doctrine (which libraries depend on) says you're allowed to to sell, rent out or give away your own physical property, even if that property happens to be an embodiment of a copyrighted work. It doesn't say anything about it being legal to make another copy of a work, and then distribute it while you keep the original one for yourself.
Copyrighted works only show snippets, and publisher-enabled limited previews.
It does when there is disagreement over what constitutes the greater good.
Is this facetious? What constitutes the greater good is the entire point of government. Many things you think are obvious are lines another would die to prevent--this is the basis of civics.
1) an elected legislature that's supposed to consider the greater good?
2) a generally non-elected judiciary that is supposed to consider the greater good to override the legislature?
3) a hopefully-benevolent dictator to consider the greater good?
Obviously any of these methods can fail; the first of them is the easiest to "edit," as it were. Things like term limits would likely improve it, though.
Instead, few elections are competitive and the representation happens through the lobbying process.
In short, the accountability story we're taught isn't true and money talks more than votes. It's this bait and switch that has the unintended consequence of fueling populism and the disbelief that representatives represent us, and that institutions work.
Here's a dumb idea. Create and advocate for a congressional proportional representation interstate compact in the same vein as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[1]. Then advocate for pooled campaign financing as a function of proportional representation[2].
The nice thing about interstate compacts is that they can eventually capture a majority given election variability over time. They divide and conquer the problem into actionable tasks that effectively aggregate.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
2. purposefully being vague. what would softmax(T>>1) look like, for instance?
I implore you to do your homework, but I will tell you the compact would only serve to reduce the voice of the people (that is to say, reduce democracy) rather than increase them.
The United States of America is exactly what it says on the tin: A Union of States. Each State is equal to all the others, united somewhat loosely as a Federal Republic.
With regards to the consequences of the Compact, it would destroy the democratic right of the people of each State to decide, for themselves, who will represent their State in the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The President of the United States represents the States in the Union and is elected by the States, the States in turn determine who they elect as President by respectively asking for their people to vote who their State should vote for.
You might ask who in the Executive Branch of government represents the peoples of each State directly, that role falls upon the Governor of each respective State.
The Compact would reduce the voice of the people and the sovereignties of States by removing their right to decide, for themselves, who to elect for President of the United States. People from one State would be able to overrule the people of another State, and vice versa. You're in California and voted for Bob? Tough shit, someone in North Dakota voted for Alex and your vote quite literally does not matter.
Citing and supporting the Compact indicates you have no understanding of who, and more accurately what, the President of the United States represents. It indicates you have no understanding what powers and rights each State and their respective peoples hold. If you are in a larger State, it indicates you have no care for what your fellow Americans and Statesmen think; if you are in a smaller State, it indicates you are fine with forfeiting your right to vote in deference to the nationwide majority.
If you sincerely think the Compact would improve democracy in the United States of America, at best you are misguided and were misled, and at worst you are disingenuous with ulterior motives.
> The United States of America is exactly what it says on the tin: A Union of States. Each State is equal to all the others, united somewhat loosely as a Federal Republic.
This is simply counter-exampled with the proportional representation of the US House. If states were equal then population would play no part in representation.
> With regards to the consequences of the Compact, it would destroy the democratic right of the people of each State to decide, for themselves, who will represent their State in the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The President of the United States represents the States in the Union and is elected by the States, the States in turn determine who they elect as President by respectively asking for their people to vote who their State should vote for.
Again untrue. This doesn't reflect reality. People don't behave like that or believe that. Most people are in fact in favor of abolishing the electoral college[1].
> You might ask who in the Executive Branch of government represents the peoples of each State directly, that role falls upon the Governor of each respective State.
I'm not asking that. We're discussing Federal elections and representation.
> The Compact would reduce the voice of the people and the sovereignties[sic] of States by removing their right to decide, for themselves, who to elect for President of the United States. People from one State would be able to overrule the people of another State, and vice versa. You're in California and voted for Bob? Tough shit, someone in North Dakota voted for Alex and your vote quite literally does not matter.
This literally describes how Electoral College operates. It's a well known point of discussion when critiquing the electoral college. Surely, you must be familiar with that line of reasoning.
> Citing and supporting the Compact indicates you have no understanding of who, and more accurately what, the President of the United States represents. It indicates you have no understanding what powers and rights each State and their respective peoples hold. If you are in a larger State, it indicates you have no care for what your fellow Americans and Statesmen think; if you are in a smaller State, it indicates you are fine with forfeiting your right to vote in deference to the nationwide majority.
This confuses a personal subjective experience with the objective truth of reality. You've extrapolated a genuine question and comment into a malevolent and sinister plot. I truly urge you to find the best in people.
> If you sincerely think the Compact would improve democracy in the United States of America, at best you are misguided and were misled, and at worst you are disingenuous with ulterior motives.
Questioning people's character and motives distracts from productive discussion.
Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine meeting someone who had this take. Can you point me in the direction of Constitutional scholars who share the same opinions you do?
I urge you to familiarize yourself with The Federalist Papers : No. 68[2]. It covers the motivations for the construction of the electoral college all which are not reflected in your assessment of it. If you wish to continue belaboring this point, please just quote from No68 where it agrees with you.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/08/05/majority-of...
2. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-61-70#s-lg-box...
This is a compromise because not all States have the same population (obviously). The Senate, where all States have equal representation, decides matters which are considered de facto of higher importance such as government appointments and diplomatic matters, among many others. All bills must also pass both the House and the Senate, meaning a bill must pass the test of equal representation voting; larger States cannot simply force their way through, especially if smaller States come together.
>Again untrue. This doesn't reflect reality. People don't behave like that or believe that. Most people are in fact in favor of abolishing the electoral college[1].
Abolishing the Electoral College (which in my humble opinion is rooted in ignorance and party politics more than anything) has nothing to do with the fact that the President of the United States represents the States and is elected by the States. The Governors are who represent the peoples of the respective States in the Executive branch of government.
Congress will act as a failsafe in the event the Electoral College deadlocks, and in such an event the House will vote for President-elect along State lines with the Representatives of each State voting in unison with fellow State Congressmen as a bloc, just like the Electoral College, with each State bloc getting 1 vote. The Senate will likewise vote per-Senator on who will become Vice President-elect.
It is very clear that the intent is the Presidency (and Vice Presidency) will be decided by the States, with or without the Electoral College by an equal representation vote. The Presidency is voted in at the pleasure of the States, derived from the pleasure of the people of each State respectively.
>I'm not asking that. We're discussing Federal elections and representation.
The President of the United States does not represent the people, at least not directly. In that context, you are in fact asking that because you, by citing and supporting the Compact, are arguing the President of the United States should represent the people directly rather than the United States.
>This literally describes how Electoral College operates. It's a well known point of discussion when critiquing the electoral college. Surely, you must be familiar with that line of reasoning.
The Electoral College (or Congress in the event of failsafe) votes, either officially or de facto, according to the will of the people of the respective States that the Electors (or Congressmen) hail from. The Electoral College (or Congress) quite literally represents the direct will of the people in each State.
The Compact instead proposes to not represent the direct will of the people in each State, instead deferring to whatever is the majority vote of the nation as a whole.
The very nature of the Compact means that if the nationwide majority votes for Bob, then any States that voted for Alex or Charlie or Dave effectively have their votes uncounted; this is because the Electors of States whose people voted for Alex or Charlie or Dave will instead vote for Bob in absolute defiance of that State's peoples' votes for the others.
The Compact effectively legalizes unfaithful Electors answering to the will of States they do not represent.
This is an attack on the sovereignties and democracies of the States and their peoples thereof and should never be accepted, let alone tolerated.
>This confuses a personal subjective experience with the objective truth of reality. You've extrapolated a genuine question and comment into a malevolent and sinister plot. I truly urge you to find the best in people.
>Questioning people's character and motives distracts from productive discussion.
Explain yourself how the Compact would improve democracy, then. What the Compact...
Stop focusing in on exactly how individual electors would supposedly defy things, because the point of the compact is to make electors irrelevant, and the overall outcome follows people's will perfectly fine.
Consider this: If states traded pairs of electors with each other your logic would call that defying the will of the people, even though it would change nothing about the outcome. Because now they're not voting directly based on what their state said. Your logic is wrong.
Consider another example of Federal matters being decided by votes by the States: Constitutional amendments. Amendments require ratification from 2/3rds of all the States to become part of the Constitution, not 2/3rds of the nationwide popular vote.
The Compact argues for the people of one State dictating the decision of the people of another State, in this case the question of who shall become President of the United States of America. Destroying State rights like that is not how you improve democracy.
First and foremost, the Electoral College (and Congress, whose numbers are the basis for the College's numbers) are determined by a popular vote within the respective States. The ballots in a presidential election are asking the voters "Which candidate should your State vote for?".
This means California determines by popular vote who to vote for President, likewise Wyoming. The State tallies their votes, and the State then decides according to the results who to vote for President. If the voters in California voted for Bob, California will vote for Bob in the Electoral College; if the voters in Wyoming voted for Dave, Wyoming will vote for Dave in the Electoral College.
We should also note that Nebraska and Maine both allot their Electors proportionally according to vote results, unlike all other States where the winner of the State gets all Electors.
I reiterate for emphasis: The basis for the Electoral College (and Congress) is a popular vote within the respective States.
As regards the "disproportionate voter power" itself, the Electoral College's roster of 538 Electors is derived from the following numbers in Congress:
* 435 House Representatives.
* 100 Senators.
* Equivalents of 2 "Senators" and 1 "House Representative" for the District of Columbia.
All States are guaranteed a minimum of 1 House Representative, with more allotted according to population as determined by the Census. All States are guaranteed 2 Senators. The District of Columbia has no representation in Congress (D.C. is not a State!) but is represented in the Electoral College with representation equivalent to the smallest State in the Union.
The "disproportion" comes from all States being guaranteed at least 1 House Representative and 2 Senators (this is where "all States have at least 3 Electors" comes from), and this is necessary in order to make sure that all States are represented no matter how small they are.
The ability of smaller States banding together to override a larger State is the system working as intended, it is a safeguard against a tyranny of the masses. The United State is a Union of States, not a Union of Peoples.
This indicates most of it is all politically motivated, enabled by a lack of understanding for the political system among most Americans. It's a gross violation of Chesterton's Fence, crying for the Electoral College (the "fence") to be abolished ("torn down") because who needs such a seemingly convoluted and meaningless system, amirite?
As for you specifically, you obviously still aren't understanding how American democracy is structured, no. We are a representative democracy and a federal republic. The people vote along State lines to determine delegations whom we respectively send to the Federal political table. The United States operates on Statewide Popular Votes, not nationwide popular votes, because we are a Union of individual, otherwise independent States.
That's the original reason, but it doesn't have any real benefit. Everyone knows why this fence was built. You're not specially enlightened among a bunch of fools.
But it causes people's votes for president to have different strengths, which is bad. And nudging the presidential vote up or down by 5% doesn't do jack shit against the tyranny of the masses.
It's a complication with no upsides and mild downsides.
So would my theoretical where states trade electors. So that's not enough to show that democracy has been damaged.
The process as a whole would still be democratic. The result as a whole would be based on everyone's vote with even more equality than usual.
Looking at individual electors to make an objection is not going to give you the right answer.
You are absolutely right that the States, particularly the smaller and weaker States, would have zero incentive to agree to surrender their sovereignties in deference to the other States.
The United States of America is a Union of States, and the first step to further democracy in this country is respecting the sacred fact that each State and the people within them each have the right to decide their own path. Violating their sovereignties is destructive for democracy.
Except that they already have. Each of Vermont(3), Delaware(3), Hawaii(4), Rhode Island(4), New Mexico(5), Connecticut(7), and Oregon(8) has already ratified legislation agreeing to the compact. That's seven counter examples.
I'll point out that there are in fact enough states pending ratification that will obsolete the EC should they be confirmed. In a twist of irony, a sacred duty to represent states could be foiled by state legislatures themselves.
As I recall, this is precisely how British Columbia got Sunday shopping. Stores and shopping malls broke the law repeatedly. There were fines, but Sunday shopping was popular. Eventually, public pressure led governments to legalize Sunday opening.
I didn't agree with it then and I don't fully agree with it now, but it can work.
Probably not the best example, because it's not like a sandwich is the only lunch option (the lazy one for sure), but I take your point. Migraine and no painkillers, period and no pads, sex and no condom, alcoholic and no alcohol (with risk of lethal DTs)? Too bad...
Why even do this to someone if you understood their meaning and more or less agree?
> “Didn’t realize you were low on bread and forgot to get it Saturday oh well kids are not getting a sandwich in their lunches for Monday morning school.”
It is possible to make bread. And to eat other things. And to buy school lunches. And to borrow or trade food with neighbours.
Is the low wages of retail workers less bad on the other days of the week?
It's a stupid idea and a dumb law that it only makes sense if your worker protection laws are too weak.
Provide your own answer here: why did the system which exists to exploit humans for profit do away with a free day instead of "just" passing worker protection laws? (Why did you frame it as "prevent people from overworking" instead of "prevent people from being overworked"?)
> "It's a stupid idea and a dumb law that it only makes sense if your worker protection laws are too weak."
Humans exist for more than just buying things. You may not like "A Sabbath for God" but "A day for something in life other than shopping" is an important idea. When September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks happened - great big terrorist attacks on American soil for pretty much the first time - President George Bush told Americans to "go shopping" in response. When many American teenagers grew up, they hung out at a shopping mall.
Are you not lamenting the increasing feeling that you can't go out in public without being charged to be somewhere these days? Or the gradual turning of all walks of life into advertising and subscription services? Is any pushback on it "stupid and dumb" to you?
I'm sorry I used the wrong words.
> Humans exist for more than just buying things
Yea, duh
> "A day for something in life other than shopping" is an important idea
That's fine. Why does it have to be the _same_ day for everyone? That's the stupid idea. Pass a law that says everyone must be given a full day off every week, I'm with you. Pass a law saying that day _must_ be Sunday, and I'm walking away.
Hell, pass a law that says everyone must be given three full days off every week, I'm with you. Pass a law that says you have to pay someone 3x for every hour they work beyond 30 hours, I'm with you. Pass a law that says everyone must work 9am-3pm and I'm walking away.
> Are you not lamenting the increasing feeling that you can't go out in public without being charged to be somewhere these days?
Irrelevant to the conversation, but generally, no.
> Or the gradual turning of all walks of life into advertising and subscription services?
Irrelevant to the conversation, but yea, it's a hellscape.
> Is any pushback on it "stupid and dumb" to you?
Nope.
i am actually curious how they do that in israel where the jewish law not to work on sabbath is taken much more seriously.
As those people should have same exact rights to spend leisure time with their families and friends.
And… just protection for retail workers? Is there a reason it wouldn’t apply to all workers below a certain pay range (or maybe it did, and the “no shopping” rule is just a shorthand?)
and actually, in germany for example, the rule is not that shops must be closed. you can open your shop if you can run it yourself, without any employees help.
depending on the country, saturdays can be school days, but generally nowadays, the rule extended to saturday as well, actually, with the exception of retail. it used to be that saturdays were half work days. and of national holidays are equal to sundays.
Remember when Arkansas rolled back some child labour laws? Hopefully you do, it was last week[1]. The reason why not "just do something good for workers instead" is because companies want cheaper employees with fewer options to leave, not better protections for workers.
> "Why is it Sunday? Why not Saturday?"
Great, well done, you've bikeshedded it from "mandatory day off" to "no mandatory day off" because you can't see a difference between them. Religion bad, Atheism good, therefore roll back labour protections?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/08/politics/sarah-huckabee-s...
In the United States, blue laws have historically been used to oppress religious minorities like Jews and Sabbatarian Christians.
I didn't say religion bad. I said that Sunday was chosen because of it's alignment with many Christian religions, and this is true: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law
There are many other religions that do _not_ have Sunday as a day of rest; other abrahamic religions choose Friday (Islam) or Saturday (Judaism, 7th day Adventist). Non-abrahamic religions and atheists feature further diversity.
Consider:
> California twice passed Sunday closing laws, in 1858 and in 1861. The first was found unconstitutional just five months after it was enacted. It was used to convict and imprison a Jewish clothing merchant who closed his business on Saturday, and opened it on Sunday.
( https://historycollection.com/the-random-history-of-blue-law... )
One could simply mandate that businesses offer employees one or more consistent day of rest instead of having the state pick religious winners and losers.
Gas stations were also allowed to be open although they rarely had convenience stores attached to them back then.
Is it the responsibility of the government to protect the profit opportunities of some specific people who choose to be a certain religion?
If it’s not the sabbath, then I’m intrigued and want to learn more.
Does cohesion of those families matter less?
You didn't split out essential services, and it seems dead-obvious to me that shutting those down would cause more harm than good even when you value all families exactly the same. There's no way they're saying the families of essential service providers are less important.
And it seems pretty clear they're grouping those other things in with essential services, which you could disagree with, but is a very different thing from saying those families are less important.
I am genuinely curious how a person reconciles two seemingly opposing views:
"It gives everyone a guaranteed weekly timeslot to spend time together."
where everyone is everyone except:
"except restaurants, attractions, hospitality and essential services".
I could easily give in on essential services, because a lot will ride on how broadly they are defined, but if the goal is 'family cohesion' building for everyone then as few groups should be excluded as possible ( which also means that businesses that people, who usually have even less leisure time than most of us -- restaurants, attractions, hospitality -- can recharge ).
I will be honest. For me it the line drawing always tends to be the most interesting piece, because it tends to indicate what the individual really values. In this case, and this is not a shot, because it is very human thing to do, they value 'their family cohesion' and 'their ability to participate in various leisure activities' over those who have to serve them, while they bond with their loved ones.
For the record, the line listed by parent is not unreasonable, but can you give me an argument as to why it is not amazingly selfish way of looking at society ( Sunday for me, but not for thee ).
Sure, that's easy enough. Even if some people can't participate, it's a big benefit to have most people share a day, and everyone that's taking those sunday work slots should be getting paid significantly extra and also probably on rotation. And the other poster might be in one of those businesses.
If someone in a restaurant/attraction/hospitality business has less leisure time, you could improve that by valuing Sunday higher. Let them trade two Sundays in a month for 3-4 non-Sundays.
And I btw, do not count public transport as essential service. People have plenty of time to walk, and emergency can include ambulances for medical problems.
Scotland - Largely Presbyterian ie rather more Catholic than us southern softies wot do Church of Eng. Your Catholic is rather more concerned about Sabbath behaviour than your Protestant except when they don't. Mind you we have some laughable nonsense available regardless of denomination - for example otters were once classed as fish hereabouts for Fish Friday. lol! It is quite hard to get more than 50 miles away from the sea in Britain. We also have quite a lot of rivers/streams/brooks/burns/cultured waterways - canals. Those ribbons of water contain quite a lot of fish. Yes, the UK might be quite as mad as you imagine it - we seem to require mammals to be classified as fish to ensure we make a God happy (one day in seven).
I recall shopping on Sunday becoming a thing here around the late 80s/early 90s but hours were not too conservative here in the UK compared to the rest of europe. We never had formal lunchtime closing for example, which is bloody annoying. I lived in W Germany for a few years back in 70s-90s and it was tricky buying stuff around 1200-1400 depending on where you were and the time. Nowadays I note that Italy, Spain, Portugal int al still have some pretty patchy midday work practices. That's fine but caveat emptor!
Back then, nothing was open on a Sunday.
In some parts of Scotland (the Western Isles for example) doing any work, hanging your washing out, cutting your grass etc. on a Sunday, to be violating the Sabbath. No laws. Just peer pressure from your neighbours. As you'd expect this is stronger in smaller villages than larger towns.
Your final para describes rather more of little Britain than just bits of Scotland.
I actually do agree with it. Same reason as jury nullification. If enough people (jury members in this case) believe that the law / particular application is unjust then fuck it. In nullification the government must give in. I do not see why it should be any different in general. The key here should be what constitutes "enough"
Mob rule.
Slavish obedience.
The jury is not supposed to be robots. They're there because there's supposed to be someone with judgment.
IA is learning the difference, unfortunately.
If I told someone smoking is bad forr their health, would you follow with "I know a person that smoked till 98" as reasonable advice? This is the same argument.
And in this case, the actions of IA may well end them for all of us. That's not such a good outcome for breaking the law, is it?
And we're seeing the IA possibly going to end because they wanted to break the law, and not completely for some moral cause, but because breaking it helps them. There was plenty of reasonable calling out Brewster's ignorant and self-serving choices on this issue for some time. He didn't need to do this, and he put the entire operation at unnecessary risk, as his critics claimed would happen.
This is what lawbreaking generally does.
That's how most laws get abolished.
Which Supreme Courts have been friendly to fair use and opposed copyright expansionist arguments?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_v._VidAngel#:~:text=J...
I'm sure someone will reply to tell us how it's not really that similar but I thought there were some parallels
- The infringer paying the monetary damages and profits.
- The law offering a range from $200 to $150,000 for each infringed work.
- The infringer paying for all lawyers' fees and court costs.
Is it more likely for the case to be resolved outside the court? I am worried about their future.
I value Internet Archive as much as Wikipedia. And with LLMs set to replace Wikipedia, I think IA will have longer societal and historical value.
They host a lot of material that is not copyrighted and expired copyrights. Also this ruling does not apply to software.
Statutory damages are the most significant risk to IA's finances, both in this case but also wrt other potential plaintiffs who might be waiting in the wings. Exemption almost certainly figured into IA's risk assessment when designing and deploying their loan program. The argument for exemption is, naturally, stronger than for Fair Use.
Are you just choosing to ignore those comments?
It's a question of proportion, and I'd go further say that it's quite disingenuous to pretend that this contradiction, in this website, isn't heavily tilted in favour of predatory corporations and against public good services (i.e. libertarian).
This of course makes sense. Innumerably more people here used Uber than IA, and what's more, many were literal employees of Uber, AirBnB, etc. and its competitors. It would be silly to expect anything else. But it's still amusing.
This advice is reasonable in most cases, but applying it as a rule is devastating for society.
It certainly worked out well for Uber
Exactly, that's only for companies like uber and airbnb who add real value to society, not some losers trying to make books accessible.
I really don’t see the angle that Uber was doing something fundamentally new, except to the extent that they dramatically lowered the price and a lot more people used the service.
>Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
>So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect libraries to do.
>To counter this, publishers (and their supporters, which unfortunately include some authors) argue that (1) this interferes with the market for licensed ebooks, and (2) that there is a real difference in lending out the digital scans: that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do.
;-)
Same for broadcast radio vs. record companies.
And DVRs vs. streaming video companies. Oh wait...
The entire US civil rights struggle would disagree with you.
IIRC this all came about because the IA decided to increase their lending beyond the limits of the licenses they had during covid, when more people were trying to use their services due to being stuck inside.
Also of note is that the is only the district court. We'll have to see if the EFF appeals to the circuit next.
That's the excuse the publishers are pushing, but ultimately they disagree with, and have successfully argued in court it seems, against the entire principle.
Ultimately, controlled digital lending should be as lawful as format shifting an album: this is format shifting from a physical book to an ebook.
> Also of note is that the is only the district court
Phew?
I don't really care about the publishers, but I still wouldn't expect to seriously get away with arguing that I wasn't distributing copyrighted material if I started offering movies online for free in unlimited numbers... because it was just controlled lending since the movie files were set up to probably become unreadable in 3 weeks.
I'm sure they have competent lawyers that would've predicted an outcome like this, which makes the decision to do it even more baffling. Especially for an organization that ought to be conservative by design, considering they want to be a very long-term archive.
Which is why it's really dumb that the IA pushed it blatantly violating copyright laws.
It's sad because it has muddied the image of IA and it made them look like rebels when in reality they were doing just fine flying (somewhat) under the radar.
I've also read some comments here from people saying they would possibly stop donating to the IA because of this. Because of donations, the scrutiny is 1000x more for non-profits vs regular companies.
Considering their software archive is one of the easiest source of warez today, I'd say they have a thing for painting targets on themselves.
Why? It’s not like this really makes a difference to the other 100 different things they’re doing.
They got sued, and the settlement didn’t allow them to offer the full books except for-purchase with a particular revenue sharing arrangement.
But the court noted that Google was right on the edge of fair use. Google notably prevented the previews from being usable as a replacement for an original purchase by only displaying 1/8 of a page snippets, blacklisting 1 snippet per page, blacklisting every tenth page completely, and blacklisting works where a single snippet could be all you wanted such as dictionaries and recipe books.
Say I downloaded z-library and wrote a search system that only showed me snippets (for searching). How likely do you think courts would find in my favour?
> The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit previewed as much in HathiTrust and Google Books, cases that “test[ed] the boundaries of fair use.” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 206. The defendant in HathiTrust scanned whole copies of millions of books, including those protected by valid copyrights, to create a database on which the general public could search for particular terms across the scanned works. 755 F.3d at 91. The creation of this “full-text searchable database [was] a quintessentially transformative use,” the court held, because “the result of a word search is different in purpose, character, expression, meaning, and message from the page (and the book) from which it is drawn.” Id. at 97. Importantly, the database did not “allow users to view any portion of the books they [were] searching” and therefore, unlike IA’s Website, “d[id] not add into circulation any new, human-readable copies of any books” or “merely repackage or republish the originals.” Id.
> Google Books similarly found transformative use in Google’s scanning of copyrighted books to create a database that included a “snippet view” search function that allowed readers to view a few lines of text containing searched-for terms. 804 F.3d at 208. The snippet view showed the searcher “just enough context surrounding the searched term” to help the searcher evaluate whether the book fell within the scope of the searcher’s interest “without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright interests.” Id. at 208, 216. But the Court of Appeals cautioned that “[i]f Plaintiffs’ claim were based on Google’s converting their books into a digitized form and making that digitized version accessible to the public,” precisely what the Publishers allege in this case, the “claim [for copyright infringement] would be strong.” Id. at 225. If HathiTrust and Google Books demarcated the boundaries of fair use, this case shows what conduct remains squarely beyond fair use.
Edit: reading other sources, it seems like the crux of the idea is they would only lend out books where they had the same number of physical copies. I can see the reasoning for that, but it seems hard for fair use to get you there.
My assumption is that publishers probably weren't happy about the original model but it was legally murky enough that they didn't pursue it for risk of losing and setting the wrong (from their perspective) precedent, but the emergency library made for an extremely easy case against IA.
> IA also argues that it made fair use of the Publishers’ copyrights during the National Emergency Library. The analysis above applies even more forcefully to the NEL, during which IA amplified its unauthorized lending of ebook versions of the Works in Suit by lifting the one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio. IA’s defense of fair use with respect to the NEL therefore also fails.
The scanned books are not so much fun to read, it is definitely less ergonomic than a Kindle. I would expect those using the program likely needed it.
The most checked out book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, had ~850 check outs. I think it's safe to assume they didn't come close to the amount of physical books locked in libraries.
Not that it's very important, the pandemic policy is barely mentioned in this ruling.
I think what IA was doing, making sure they only lend out as many copies as they physically own, was clearly within the spirit of that doctrine. But in the digital era, lending anything over the web necessarily means making a copy of it somewhere along the way, which laws haven't adequately adapted to yet.
The argument that this is no different from lending temporarily to a friend seems to be much more reasonable. Especially since no money is changing hands.
In practice this means publishers can revoke access licenses for all sorts of arbitrary reasons, alter the content of ebooks already purchased, or plenty of other shady practices, with little recourse available to the reader.
Plus it means they can force libraries to keep paying repeated, marked-up licensing fees for the privilege of lending out ebooks. Much better deal for the publishers than the physical library lending model!
I don't blame IA for trying to find a way to liberate library lending from that racket.
That right there is the true root of the problem.
I own the physical book. Why does the publisher have any further rights to tell me what I do with it?
You could sell or lend virtual copy if the platforms supported that. You are allowed to make a copy for backup purposes, and no one will ever know if you use that or even lend it. But if you make business of it, then they will notice and sue you.
It makes me so sad -- it reminds me of Aereo, when the Supreme Court ruled against it in 2014 that it wasn't allowed to stream public broadcast TV over the internet, despite having a separate radio receiver for each viewer.
I can understand why Congress hasn't changed law to allow digital 1-for-1 reuse of previous physical/analog sources -- because there will be too much lobbying against it from corporations.
But it really seems like the Supreme Court had a chance to set new precedent in an area that hadn't been foreseen in law so really was undefined. And they chose corporations over consumers back in 2014, just like a federal judge did again now.
I can only imagine how much better if the Supreme Court had sided with consumers here. Congress could have overturned it through law, of course, but only in the face of massive voter dissatisfaction, and so I'm not sure they would have.
Part of this points out that they weren’t even doing that; there was no process to ensure that the “partnered” library wasn’t simultaneously lending out their copy.
Famously it only went against segregation because "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." (Attorney General James P. McGranery)
https://redsails.org/concessions/
Fortunately this means more of an impetus for piracy in the meantime, and alternative systems in the near future.
Thankfully that's the best outcome. Unless you mean you support eminent domain.
I'd pay hell to the country that even plans on using it against me, and I'll follow and protect others who this happens to as well. Anyone who decides they can steal my resources will have to fight for it.
You do not own me.
You are free to demand that publishers provide you unlimited access to their servers so you can download your books perpetually. Publishers need not give in to alternative access methods to their material.
If you want to own books, have it actually in your possession, which is not the internet.
Or is most or all of what it has already available in the pirate libraries?
So this is sad news.
[0] https://www.hathitrust.org/
I never thought about it that way. I avoided getty and other stock media publishers out of principle. In their deranged quest to subjugate google, they made image search worse for me. I think it's about time I started applying this logic to other publishers as well. Copyright is completely out of control. There has to be accountability, even if it's insignificant and only on a personal level.
For any authors reading this: I intend to continue paying for books and will gladly do so but only if it's to you directly. Either self-publish or put a donation link on your site. If I'm interested in your book, I will search for your personal website prior to taking any action.
It's sad that it has to come down to this.
Any idea if this means IA has to shut down lending by when? Tomorrow? Next month?
Any chances for appeal here? Or any chance they relocate the books division to another country or something?
It's just so sad if something so valuable is forced to go "poof". A real loss.
Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA.
The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
> The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords
The opinion (p46) defers this matter,
> At this point, IA’s statutory remittance argument is premature. IA may renew the argument in connection with the formation of an appropriate judgment.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
Try Library Genesis: https://libgen.is/
Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.
I cannot picture why blockchain seems like a value ad here, there's way easier ways to synchronize collections of data, no global consensus necessary
It's not the books and PDFs that are being updated, it's the collection that needs to be updated.
A blockchain is far easier to manage and far more censorship resistant.
It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...
And if you're not accepting payments there's especially little reason for you to need to care.
Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned.
What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic.
But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
> It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Do keep in mind that pruned nodes are a thing.
I guess I'm going to have A LOT more interlibrary loans in my future.
https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/16394247772647219...
The Internet Archive very well may be the only way to know a lot of important things from the past -- things that libraries used to keep track of but can't in the internet age.
I understand not allowing certain things to be archived, but the tweets of a public person, especially one who works as a news-maker, should certainly be in the allowed list.
E: And just to be clear, this was before said writer set their tweets to private.
---
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://twitter....
Your opponent doesn’t play by these rules.
What's most tragic about it to me is that that vast majority of works affected are "zombie" copyright works that have no actual commercial value. Someone, somewhere holds the copyright, but no one has sold a copy in years or decades. For the sake of protecting the tiny sliver of commercially valuable works, access to all of this other knowledge will be lost.
Has there been any kind of movement towards a law that would automatically put zombie works into the public domain?
It really doesn't seem unreasonable that if a book, film, recording, or video game hasn't been generally available for sale over the past 5 or 10 years it becomes public domain. Use it or lose it, in other words.
Although it might really only apply to past works. Because while physical books go out of print, e-books will probably be available forever, no?
Most of Europe was going to do this at some point but the photographer's unions pushed back in very strong terms so they were often watered down.
Most of Europe was going to do this at some point but the photographer's unions pushed back in very strong terms so they were often watered down.
I would argue the artist still deserves to retain value, regardless of the size of it unless they give it up. If it expires, sure it's public domain.
Given the very large proportion of orphaned works, a very large proportion of living authors don't think their existing corpus has any residual value to them.
A writer/artist/whatever can make some money off a work for two decades and then their work goes to the society that enabled its creation.
-- Signed, Not an Artist.
(Most artists are paid an absolute pittance for their work. Most work at least one other job. Almost none make even a basic income. I feel artists should have the benefit of the income from their work for their natural life, unless they waive their rights. That said, companies have sorely abused and influenced copyright law to the point that the advantage is highly asymmetric in their favour and that certainly needs to be addressed).
Also, fuck you for assuming I've never made any art. I'd be fine if anything I've drawn, painted, or written became public domain after twenty years. If I wanted to sell it that's plenty of time. Works entering public domain doesn't preclude me from selling the physical artifact even after its public domain. It doesn't preclude me from making new art to sell. A musician's work becoming public domain doesn't preclude them performing it for pay.
It would be ridiculous if twenty years from now some poor bastard got sued into destitution because they downloaded some dumb thing I wrote twenty years ago.
Pretty sure the plumber is getting (very) decently paid for their work. Pretty sure the people who planned and installed the sewage system were well remunerated.
Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
> Also, fuck you for assuming I've never made any art.
And thank you for speaking up on behalf of all artists and kindly telling us all that we should expect 20 years worth of almost nothing out of efforts, instead of a lifetime.
> It would be ridiculous if twenty years from now some poor bastard got sued into destitution because they downloaded some dumb thing I wrote twenty years ago.
So licence it CC-0. Or release it to the Public Domain. Knock yourself out.
These are generally not considered desirable jobs so why are you so sure they are paid their due? After all you are using the result of their labour every day, so why are you unwilling to pay more.
> Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
Medical costs don't affect artists more than others and in some countries we have come up with other ways to pay for them collectively.
> And thank you for speaking up on behalf of all artists and kindly telling us all that we should expect 20 years worth of almost nothing out of efforts, instead of a lifetime.
And you can speak for all artsts then? Of course the idea that only copyright holders should have a say about copyright policy is ridiculous in the first place - it has always been a deal between creators and everyone else. If one "side" (and really, these aren't separate sides but mostly overlapping groups) feels that they are getting less out of the deal then the other side can't just say "but I want to be paid forever".
> So licence it CC-0. Or release it to the Public Domain. Knock yourself out.
Or argue for copyright reform. We don't owe it to you to support your choice to make a living off of art - you could always work as a plumber if you thing they are very decently paid.
So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous. Copyrights lasting as long as patents gives an artist plenty of time to monetize their work. It then becomes public domain to serve the public that gave them that monopoly in the first place.
Billions of dollars changed hands every year due to patent licensing. If two decades wasn't enough time to monetize something that wouldn't happen.
The length of copyright protections in the US are ludicrous. It's especially egregious as the company that's done the most to extend copyrights, Disney, made their fortune absolutely pillaging public domain fairy tales. Thousands of pop songs have been riffing Johann Pachelbel for nearly a century.
There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
1. Why should the plumber be paid-per-flush? A toilet is infrastructure, a permenant part of a house. You may as well argue that we should pay a carpenter, a landlord, or a bank to use our front doors.
2. I actually don't have a flushing toilet. The compost toilet I have was not installed by a plumber.
> As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous.
When a plumber installs a toilet, they get paid. When a musician releases a song they might hope to get enough money for a beer, if they're lucky. Nobody requires art. Try and get a house plan through planning without a toilet. So plumbers and other trades have a certain expectation of being able to make a living. Artists do not, and the very, very, very that are lucky enough to just make a minnimum wage are doing better that 99% of their peers.
I do art too. Yeah, I'm never going to get money for it, and I do it for my own entertainment and my friends. If society values my art, and wants me to release it out to people, you better believe you'll be paying for it. Plumbers don't install toilets as recreation. They do so to get paid.
Artists have the option, at any time, of releasing their works to the public domain. If they felt strongly that they should profit from their works for only 20 years, they have the absolute power to make that happen.
> There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
Here, at least we agree.
As an author myself, I think the proper copyright term is ~15 years from the copyright inception. (Disclosure: I give my stuff away for free online--people buy paper copies if the want them, so I'm not a publisher's idea of a model author.)
A relative handful of publishers/authors will lose out (e.g. Dune, Van Gogh), but the public domain will be well-served. 15 years seems like a good balance point.
Hard disagree. We have chosen to allow the artist to retain a monopoly for a limited time because we though it would encoruage the cration of more art. The only valid argument for copyright is one that shows it benefits society as a whole.
<https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/>
Specifically:
"We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers.... We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books."
Checking a listing for a specific book ... there's still the option to log in and borrow it as I write this.
This ruling is not about the emergency library at all. It's a ruling that controlled digital lending (one physical copy backing each digital copy lent out) is illegal.
I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries.
I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.
Did you mean 2020? Or did they spike before the pandemic really started?
I also occasionally let him have a little bit of Libby or scratch time (which I deem "educational") before going to school or before bed. (Everything is contingent on behavior.)
Aside from minecraft/pokemon stuff, he typically reads a mix of kids graphic novels and books. Including Tristan Strong, Artimis Fowl, Wings of Fire, Dogman. He's also read Harry Potter, some Terry Pratchett, and Tolkien. He first read the Lord of the Rings in the summer between first and second grade, which blew my mind (it was middle or high school or me). So I don't really worry about stuff like the ratio of graphic novels to textual books.
Those books are licensed to the libraries by the publishers. The introduction of the opinion here explains how it works:
> This dispute concerns the way libraries lend ebooks. Public and academic libraries in the United States spend billions of dollars each year obtaining print books and ebooks for their patrons to borrow for free. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶ 113. Libraries usually buy their print books from publishers or wholesalers. Id. ¶ 114. Copies of ebooks, however, are typically not bought but licensed to libraries from publishers through distributors called “aggregators.” Id. ¶ 117. The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53..., page 3 (emphasis added).
If I rightly own a copy of a book, I don’t think any court within the bounds of absurdity would say I can’t make a digital copy for myself because that’s how I prefer to consume it. Being allowed to lend one finite form but not another equivalent one is definitely something law or license might specify, but that doesn’t mean it makes any kind of sense.
"myself" being the operative word here.
you can make 100 copies for yourself. what you can't do is make a copy that you give to someone else while simultaneously retaining access to the original (or another copy).
the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession, which replication would circumvent.
I’m pretty sure I can do that.
> the way libraries work is by relinquishing posession
I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
Any individual in IA’s position could do this without fear of legal scrutiny. An organization doing it is under scrutiny not because there’s actual, meaningful copyright violation happening but because they systemized a thing no reasonable person would object to individuals doing.
Not legally.
> I almost included that I could shred my copy, keeping only the digital equivalent, and still retain the same rights to the work and lending it.
This is the part that is not true. For example, you are free to transcribe a book onto a parchement and read it that way, and store the parchment separately from the book for archival purposes, and keep the parchement even if the original book gets destroyed.
However, this is a limited exception to copyright. You are not in fact allowed, at any point before or after the original copy is destroyed, to lend or re-sell the parchment you created. That parchment will forever be an unauthorized copy, but one that you are allowed to use in certain limited ways.
The only wrinkle is that, at least in the EU, when you acquire an authorized digital copy of a work, you are allowed to lend or sell that copy as long as you don't retain access to it during the lending/after the sale. This is allowed even though technically you are technically creating a new copy of the digital work and destroying your own afterwards, but this is an exception specific to digital realms, it can't be extended to digital copies you make of a phyisical work.
Inspired by the fact that my emulation of Link's Awakening to play on a screen I could see is technically legal since we had a cartridge stuffed away in a drawer. But for 10-15 years that cartridge lived in a limbo land of 'we used to have that, it might still be around somewhere...'
Basically, the only thing you are legally allowed to sell is the exact copy you bought of a physical representation of a work, assuming it was created by an authorized entity. You do not legally own an abstract copy of the idealized work, you own a physical object which happens to represent a copy of that work.
Note that this is in fact very much how most people would think of copyright. If I buy a book and someone steals it from me, or it is there in my house and it burns down, I don't have some right to now obtain another physical representation of that novel free of charge, or to obtain a copy made by a friend with a xerox. My sole right was to that one physical copy I bought, and that no longer exists.
>Every part of that has been deemed legal. Copyright law already has first sale rights, written directly into the law and allow for the lending or reselling of copyright-covered works without a license or permission. Similarly libraries are given explicit rights to make copies, so long as those collections are made available to the public. On top of that, courts have determined, multiple times, that book scanning itself is fair use for libraries.
>So, literally each separate component of what is happening with Controlled Digital Lending has already been deemed to be legal and exactly what we expect libraries to do.
>To counter this, publishers (and their supporters, which unfortunately include some authors) argue that (1) this interferes with the market for licensed ebooks, and (2) that there is a real difference in lending out the digital scans: that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do.
Whether a copy of a work is fair use turns on, amongst other things, the effect of the copy on the potential market for the original. The article acknowledges this.
Controlled Digital Lending competes directly with the licensing scheme publishers have for library ebooks. The fair use argument was always doomed to fail.
The article then completely ignores the copyright argument and tries to equate CDL with libraries loaning out their physical copies. This is completely absurd, since libraries do not distribute duplicates of their physical books and so do not even enter the realm of copyright.
If libraries were systematically distributing duplicates of their existing books they would be sued for copyright infringement.
There may be a question of definition here. Do you mean that they have to lend it, but they cannot give it away?
They intend to say "libraries do not distribute duplicates of purchased books; they distribute the originals".
Unfortunately the word "copy" could also mean "the books purchased by the library". Of course the library distributes purchased books. They just don't scan the books, print fascimiles of those books on new paper, and then distribute those prints they made themselves.
I'm not convinced fair use is the strongest argument in IA's case. But the idea that lending ebook copies can't be fair use simply because it competes with publishers' ebook licensing schemes seems like a misreading of how fair use is typically applied.
Of course other fair use considerations factor in, but the market impact for a specific format isn't a death blow against reproductions of a work, generally speaking.
It's not impossible for a case to win when competing against a licensing scheme, but it is very, very, very hard.
I don't see the argument that this is "distribution" any more than regular (obnoxious) ebook lending is.
The courts have gone back and forth on this issue, and I would expect this ruling to be appealed by either side if they had lost.
Nothing. Which is why losing was inevitable.
Then truly they would be lending only a copy, which was never legal to begin with.
I thought the IA was in a bad place before, but they got very shown up in court.
Wow, so they're arguing that the destruction of the sold good is implicit in the sale, and that preventing that is therefore illegal.
Broadly speaking, physical books last much longer than ebooks have been proven to. With preservation measures, you can get 100s of years out of a single book copy, but even without most books will last for decades unless something catastrophic happens or someone destroys them on purpose. I have several books from the 1800s that weren't cared for at all (picked up at an estate sale) and they're perfectly serviceable and would be fine if I rebound them.
So I have books from the 1860s that are still usable. Given how the digital world has developed, the odds of someone's Kindle or ePub file being viable in 2180 is exceptionally low. In the same way that playing old video games can be a hassle, I'd be shocked if we're still using the same files and formats in 160 years. (Outside of us weirdo archivists of course).
So, I guess you just don’t own anything you buy anymore? Like what if I want to lend a tool to someone, and the tool manufacturer wants to rent their tools out? Is that also illegal?
What if the tool contains software?
What if reasonable use of the tool requires accessing a print manual? A pdf manual?
Edit: Reading the ruling, IA should have argued they are simply format shifting a single copy that they own. I wonder if they did make this argument, and then the judge conveniently ignored it (then lied in the summary ruling, when they say IA made no other arguments in their defense), or if IA’s lawyers screwed up.
That's how you digitally send a copy of a book.
You're saying something similar to "you wouldn't download a car".
It's applying without considering it.
The digital book isn't being kept at the old location because there is no digital book in the physical book.
It's the only way to transfer a single copy of a book without destroying the physical copy.
Judges should consider stuff like this and it's a disappointing ruling.
But go on...
The technicality that they keep a copy of the book while it’s being lent isn’t really at issue here at all. It’s not because there are two copies, it’s because there are three or more copies, given to two or more parties at the same time. It has become “distribution” in the eyes of copyright law, beyond the lending analogy.
I don't know why companies keep trying this. MP3.com, Aereo, etc. The precedent is clear.
In the case of a physical object needing to temporarily go digital, it needs to be sent digitally and the records kept, and of course the physical copy has to be kept.
In the case of the GPL there's no physical copy and thus there's no need to consider how to move from one form to the other.
To require that a physical object never be used digitally is bad for society.
Isn't "fair use" restricted to (a) short portions of a work, (b) used for specific purposes, such as education or criticism?
There are practical differences between the two, which mean that the law probably should treat them differently. I expect a lot of HN have difficulty dealing with that because they think "but they both contain the same information".
It reminds me of people trying to encode books into prime numbers or the digits or pi or whatnot to "get around" copyright. Fundamentally missing the point.
But even if all those things weren’t true, or important, it’s profound that there’s enough collective incentive to go after IA, instead of say corporations violating GPL, or the hedgies who created “temporary” artificial supply of stocks (which shares a similar “overprovisioning” aspect, except they’re fraudulent at massive scale).
When IP laws existed to make sure authors could be compensated people broadly supported them. The perception has changed (for many reasons), to where people broadly see IP laws as an enabler for corporate greed more than being about fair compensation for authors. (See Disney not paying owed royalties, for example.)
We can either have "good copyright" that the public sees as reasonable, or we can have rampant piracy and the consequences thereof. The villains of the piece are those who deliberately perpetuate an unsustainable system out of greed (and I am not talking about authors and publishers trying to get paid for the work they've done).
It was always from the very beginning a way to protect profits, that was the primary intent of copyright law, to give the creator of a work the exclusive right to make the money from the work before others are allowed to take the content and sell it for their own profit. Yes the length has become crazy long, and yes the law limits free (as in beer) access to information, but that hasn’t changed the reason for it’s being at all. It’s not really a “concession” either, more like it was intentionally balanced to provide enough time for people to make profits (which is what economically encourages creative work), while being short enough to allow works to reach the public over time.
1. IA actually buying a physical copy (or as many copies as they plan on simultaneously making available to borrowers) of the book. 2. After scanning the physical copy, destroying it, and documenting same.
Then as long as they guarantee that they only loan out as many copies as they physically had (before destroying them) there's no question of simultaneous usage.
I like the IA, but I’m happy this was the screw up. It should greatly weaken the precedent this ruling creates.
Most importantly here, information falls under "means of production", so under communism it should be free.
Freedom of information under capitalism is (as everything) a discussion about money.
I admire your optimism, regarding the copyrights future. Fingers crossed.
My point being: as technology marches on the ageing concept of "owning" entirely fungible digital material becomes less and less valid. It is already at a stage meaninglessness is flirting with it in a new way daily and that will continue.
Really, we need to let it go.
I would start a webtorrent+ipfs+i2p site in Iceland just to get around this insane perpetual monopoly on difficult-to-find, old shit that doesn't have a market but publishers keep locked away.
And you don’t need to do anything at all; all of these books have been freely available on IRC for years.
I found this chart interesting, and unexpectedly complicated: https://www.belmont.edu/legal/pdf/Public-Domain-Chart.pdf
Based on that I think a heuristic of 100 years is broadly correct.
Human knowledge remains entirely unaffected by this ruling.
Libgen?
And with only narrow exceptions that probably don't apply here, this act of circumvention violates 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1)(A)[1] unless the copyright owner has authorized the process (as they do with licensed playback devices and software).
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
Redbox tried this theory several years ago when they were trying to launch their film streaming service, and failed for the same reasons.
That’s not really true. One issue described explicitly in the decision is that the lending is mostly uncontrolled, and worse there’s evidence of it the defendant was aware of. The second issue is that the defendant isn’t using the first sale doctrine, their defense is fair use. Presumably the whole reason they decided to argue fair use is because they knew they weren’t adhering to the lending analogy, because they were aware they were effectively distributing copies, not just lending them.
That's not what I read in the linked article, specifically:
Regarding "IA’s promise not to lend simultaneously": "IA has not kept its promise. Although the Open Library’s print copies of the Works in Suit are non-circulating, IA concedes that it has no way of verifying whether Partner Libraries remove their physical copies from circulation after partnering with IA…. To the contrary, IA knows that some Partner Libraries do not remove the physical books from their shelves"
As I understand it, this case exists because the IA was not keeping its promise anymore and made an error of judgement by breaking the 1:1 ratio without any legal argumentation or even a logical reason for it. It was said at the time already, but the obviousness, whether something as important as the wayback machine's owner should compete with the pirate bay for market share on illegal ebooks, and the use of (my/our) donated money on the ensuing legal nonsense, is a different discussion...
If these underlying facts and circumstances were different, such as if someone tries this concept again but keeps their promise and implements it correctly, the same ruling cannot be passed because it's not the same situation. It would have to be tried again and it might (or might not) swing the other way, at least that is my general understanding of legal systems around the world.
Perhaps it would also be different in another country whence ExampleBooks Ltd could operate legally, that will depend in part on whether the copyright alliance pact (I forgot the name) has provisions letting signatories (afaik that's every nation you might want to live in) make exceptions for things like this.
Changing format was illegal of course under current law but publishers looked the other way.
By allowimg multiple this was the only outcome.
Without risk taking we wouldn't have any IA so this is all part of what they are. It's hard to know when to hold em.
It makes me wonder if there are any adults at the helm at IA and I worry about its future.
IA is an amazing resource... I don't understand why they chose this hill to fight on.
The first doc on this case was filed June 1, 2020.
NEL closed down almost immediately on June 16, 2020.
IA was definitely and stupidly playing with fire here. As others have said, publishers weren't happy with IA's one hardcopy, one digital loan rule, but lived with it because of the potential bad press. However, I'm willing to bet the NEL pushed them over the edge to go to war. Incredibly reckless and now we've taken a step backwards against IP abuse, IMO.
I 100% guarantee that if a dead tree library xeroxed their books during a national emergency, nobody would be making comments like this. Somehow, because computers are involved, magical thinking gets a pass.
Thoughts?
I love the IA. I use it weekly if not daily. My bet is that they'll push back on this and other rulings and will ultimately lobby for saner laws.
Capitalism 1
Expansion and the preservation of human knowledge 0