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If society invested in a system of tubes reaching from libraries to all homes, each tube containing a sequence of small mirrors and lenses capable of bouncing an image all the way down the tube, and eventually into a home that connected its viewer to that tube; and the libraries kept the physical books they owned in small, well-lighted spaces, with page-turning robots, so that the images of the book page could be bounced through the mirror-tubes, and the readers in their homes could signal to the page-turning robots what page to flip to, would it then be ok for people in their homes to read the books physically located in the library, without paying separate remote-viewing licensing fees above and beyond the purchase price of the book?
I'm a creator too and I benefit from the protection of intellectual property I create. But I also recognize that my freedom ends where others' begins and that the benefit of society overall must also be weighed, since I didn't just grow up and survive all on my own in the wilds but rather relied on all the other good people that happen to be around me...
This is the kind of insane hypothetical that I keep returning to hacker news for, bravo!
Bravo!
Thanks - now if only someone knew a judge who could be entertained and maybe a little provoked :)
The article concentrates on the briefs by RIAA, MPA, and U.S. politicians - the moneybags and perennial bad guys whom everyone loves to hate. It barely mentions the brief by authors groups and other creative organizations, from the Author's Guild to the North American Nature Photography Association. From the summary:
IA has created a vast unauthorized online database of literary works that anyone in the world can access for free, which differs from the most flagrantly illegal pirate websites only by reason of its residing in a U.S. not-for-profit. ...
IA’s infringements have caused and will continue to cause significant harm to Amici’s members. Many members’ works are part of the “long tail” of older published works that earn much of their revenue from licensed electronic uses rather than sales of new copies. Because authors and many other creators today generally earn so little from their writing,3 they rely on income from the long tail, and even a seemingly minor reduction in such income will materially impact the authors, visual artists, photographers, and other creators who depend on the income for survival.
Further, creators and their publishers will find it more challenging, if not impossible, to bring older titles back into print, whether in physical or electronic form, if they must compete with free Open Library-generated ebooks from IA. Finally, such free Open Library-generated ebooks will also create a direct market substitute for authorized lending by libraries outside the U.S., which lending – unlike Open Library – generates royalties for creators under the public lending right recognized by most other developed countries.
Source: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.609...
Like many people on HN, I regularly use the wayback machine or other parts of the Internet Archive to track the history of websites or read out-of-copyright and public domain works. Sharing this information is important and should be continued.
I also believe in the concept of "Fair Use" for sharing and discussing excerpts of more current works.
But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized. Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped these rights and the laws of the United States. Even when it was asked to repeatedly stop, he continued.
Far from this being a "crusade" against IA, it's the logical outcome of one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law and the people who work very hard to bring new books into being.
The collateral damage to the many noble aspects of the Internet Archive is bad. I truly hope it survives.
> against the law and the people who worked very hard to bring new books into being.
The problem is that U.S. copyright law is twisted to reward corporations over authors and artists. Copyright extending automatically to almost everything, and lasting life of the author+70 years, is absolutely ridiculous.
All of these copyrights floating around everywhere, lasting lifetimes and accumulating at an unimaginable rate serve primarily to interfere with the free exchange of information and the development of our culture. The vast majority of copyrighted works - easily 99.999% - will go unenforced by the original authors, turning into rights landmines. The lion’s share of those that are enforced are enforced by copyright trolls against innocent creators.
This system is horrible and often does the opposite of what was intended: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Amen. Bring back the original copyright term and cure all these problems.
Like that's ever going to happen. :(
> IA has created a vast unauthorized online database of literary works that anyone in the world can access for free
As opposed to an ordinary library, which... wait.
> Further, creators and their publishers will find it more challenging, if not impossible, to bring older titles back into print, whether in physical or electronic form, if they must compete with free Open Library-generated ebooks from IA.
But why does that matter? It's neither providing an incentive to create new works nor making older works available that wouldn't have been, since IA doing so is literally the thing they're complaining about.
> generates royalties for creators under the public lending right recognized by most other developed countries.
This is basically an argument that it can't be fair use in the US if it isn't in some other country, because otherwise people in the other country could get it from the US. That seems like a stretch.
Especially since it falls to the opposite problem: If we're considering laws in other countries then there will be at least one where there is nothing illegal about what IA is doing. At which point someone is going to do it, and what does it matter to anyone which country they're operating from when the internet is accessible everywhere?
Ordinary libraries can only lend as many copies as they have at a time, and eventually have to replace them (due to wear and tear or e-licensing conditions). In some countries the author also receives a dividend for every loan
I definitely agree with the limit of only lending what IA bought - and their brief violation of that policy was wrong in my opinion. But that shouldn't be used as an excuse to enforce a completely separate regime on "digital books".
I was not aware of the dividend on every loan in other countries. If you can provide a reference to where and how much, that'd be quite interesting.
Under EU legislation, all 27 member states are obliged to have a scheme to remunerate authors for the lending out of their works by libraries.
Ireland has it in place under the provisions of our Public Lending Remuneration Scheme, which is currently capped at €200,000 per annum, paid at a rate of 4.39 cents per title borrowed in 2020. Payments to individual authors are capped at €1,000 with a minimum sum of €2. Authors receive an average payment of just under €32 per year for having their books borrowed from public libraries in Ireland.
Under the PLR scheme in the UK authors can receive a maximum annual payment of £6,600.
Great to know, thanks.
I wonder how that compares with the fees US libraries are being for digital lending rights to publishers…
> Ordinary libraries can only lend as many copies as they have at a time
This is the same as controlled digital lending.
> and eventually have to replace them (due to wear and tear or e-licensing conditions)
Physical books frequently last longer than copyright terms and it's not obvious why authors should be entitled to double dip just because someone spilled their coffee, i.e. it should be equally reasonable for a library to print their own physical replacement copy of a damaged book that they already own, because they already own it.
The law is wrong and perverse. The current copyright system hands out a copyright length that's longer than the existence of many countries.
And the worst part is that certain governments have pushed it so far that it is pretty much ubiquitous across the globe. Nobody is allowed to not make absurd copyright laws.
Some guy being able to exclusively make money off of work that his great grandfather authored 120 years ago is not useful to society. It does not progress the useful arts or sciences.
Does making directly derivative works —in a way that wouldn't be allowed by fair use— really progress the useful arts or sciences?
I'm against these stupid-long copyrights but because I believe all human endeavours are a result of human society. Fair remuneration but not forever.
Yeah, I'm answering my own question. If society can't access work, they can't use it fairly or otherwise.
Yes, because fair use is a defense in court. This alone is enough to intimidate away most people from even contesting it. The result is that copyright conglomerates and some corporations take advantage of this by using a firehose of copyright claims.
The other factor is that people don't really behave according to copyright rules. People will habitually create copies of images all the time by uploading them to discord, imgur etc. Their intent is not to create copies, but to simply show it to somebody else, but because of some technical reason they can't easily do it without that.
Memes, specifically image macros, are likely suspect whether they fall under fair use. They can sometimes take the entirety of the work.
There are some other reasons like this as well that I can't recall right now.
Everything is a Remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA
The Author's Guild is NOT this peaceful grandma's knitting association you're portraying it as. It has a long history of frivolous lawsuits, censorship, and copyright maximalism only matched by groups like the MPAA.
It also has a history of lip service against publishers, while in reality acting entirely in their interests. That is the reason why they joined in, not any heartful concern for the little guy. They have consistently fought against higher royalty digital publishing. (https://www.techdirt.com/2015/07/30/authors-guilded-united-r... https://www.techdirt.com/company/authors-guild/)
I find it interesting that you just take at face value the claims that IA will materially impact republishing and revenue streams and harm creators. No skepticism, no reasonable demand for a shred of evidence that this has taken place or will take place, just believe what certain vested interests claim and destroy a valuable public resource for no factually established reason.
> But when it comes to outright republishing of in-copyright printed works, the rights of creators and publishers need to be recognized.
'Republishing' is a bad faith description here. What IA is doing is not 'republishing' but offering 'Controlled Digital Lending' with time limited lending for scanned versions of items they posses digital copies of.
This is happening in the context of the same publishers refusing to sell lend-able digitial versions of books to libraries at the same price as physical books.
Book lending is a concept what these publishers are actively working to eradicate and this lawsuit is an important part of that.
> 'Republishing' is a bad faith description here. What IA is doing is not 'republishing' but offering 'Controlled Digital Lending' with time limited lending for scanned versions of items they posses digital copies of.
The IA does both. It's pretty easy to upload copyrighted works that aren't kept behind borrow-walls, and people do it all the time. The IA doesn't seem super motivated to change that.
It would indeed be unfortunate if the baby were thrown out with the bathwater, but come on: I typed "site:archive.org cranberries" on DuckDuckGo and was directed to a downloadable track-by-track rip of the Irish band's greatest hits album. That's tough to defend with a straight face.
> It's pretty easy to upload copyrighted works that aren't kept behind borrow-walls, and people do it all the time. The IA doesn't seem super motivated to change that.
Neither do most sites hosting user-submitted content.
IA responds to DMCA takedowns. What are they supposed to do if you haven't issued one to them?
It is basically the same with the books. The IA's book hosting system has DRM, yes, but it is Adobe's ADE which has been well and truly cracked. If you have a bit of patience and tech knowledge you can pull a full PDF of any book on IA in about 20 second's time. They could do a better job restricting access and I figure they wouldn't be in this much trouble.
The DMCA makes no distinction between 'weak' and 'strong' DRM. Bypassing any form of digital protection violates the act, and media companies have fought to defend their use of materially insufficient DRM such as DVD-CSS.
This is not simply a legal issue. As an author of books myself I have very little problem with libraries and online lending and I feel there is mutual benefit. I do not feel the same way about the way that IA is hosting commercial titles, which hews very close to ZLibrary, which I do not think is beneficial for all of us in the long term as it disincentivizes the production of books even if it makes things available to more people in the near term. We might disagree about that but my belief is pretty set.
Regarding legality, the media company battle re: DVD-CSS is quite different in quite a number of ways such that it doesn't simply apply here. That said, I'm not making a legal argument -- I am advocating for a system that makes sense to authors (whom we rely on to write the things that we value) and the greater good.
Position statement on 'Controlled Digital Lending' (CDL) [1] is an interesting read. Within it there is the clause "Because there is no directly analogous case on point, this Statement offers a more detailed explanation of how fair use and copyright exhaustion can work together to effectuate CDL practices:"
The idea of CDL is indeed novel and possibly worth pursuing through the courts. However, it is an argument fraught with financial peril for the IA because of the statutory penalty structure of US Copyright law.
If you read the court case findings the IA was not doing CDL as they claim. They had lost control of whether or not the digital copies were backed by physical copies at all. They were also pushing people to buy used copies from a site part owned by the person who runs IA.
I think CDL can work and win legally. Unfortunately, IA's blatant disregard for copyright has poisoned the well for likely a long time to come.
> 'Republishing' is a bad faith description here
I would have agreed if not for HN. IA is basically used as a paywall workaround here; that’s transparent republishing.
Hubris in the area of copyright is not new [1] nor novel. It is unfortunate that we (me too) fail to learn from the path trodden by others. There are things about US Copyright law that are quite over the top [2] that should be repealed or fixed [3], but disagreeing with it doesn't it suddenly legal. Back in the day when I did a lot of music licensing I would have copyright discussions over a beer with people. After a while I figured that this was "cocktail party licensing." In the morning you'll wake up with a hangover in bed with your attorney.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
3. https://www.amazon.com/How-Fix-Copyright-William-Patry/dp/01...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
This is a district court case (i.e. one that doesn't set precedent) where the record companies liked the result, which also effectively bankrupted the defendant. One of the media companies then bought the defendant, causing the case to not be appealed.
It's not obvious they would have lost on appeal. The district court largely ignored the Sony Betamax case and what MP3.com was doing was effectively operating tape recorder with a longer wire on it.
MP3.com made mechanical copies without permission. Pretty black & white. Vivendi Universal acquired the company for $372 million in 2002 mostly because they were interested in moving forward with digital distribution. The MP3.com engineering team then went on to build PressPlay with Sony and Universal, which was later sold to Roxio and renamed Napster. I'd be happy to answer any questions about MP3.com.
> MP3.com made mechanical copies without permission. Pretty black & white.
So does a Betamax device though?
I also find value in parts of the Internet Archive's mission, but I refuse to donate to them because of their flagrant copyright violations. It's on the Aaron Swartz road to martyrdom.
I also do not condone copyright violation. But I don't think there is a separate "digital lending right" that automatically accrues to a publisher or the author, beyond the purchase price of the book. A library should be able to lend out its legally acquired copy of the book, whether there's an internet or a fancy system of mirrors in the middle, or not.
While I think that's a natural extension, it shows libraries don't scale in the digital world once the barriers to entry (driving to the library) are removed and you can change the utilization so books can be re-lent as soon as the app closes. Suddenly, you'd need 5% as many books as before, crushing the publishing model.
I honestly don’t believe that’s true. People who might check something out of the library are a very large superset of the people who might actually purchase the book. Society loses out if the browsers can’t browse, but the publishers rarely do. If anything, those browsers might one day actually purchase, if they could learn more about the item.
> IA has created a vast unauthorized online database of literary works that anyone in the world can access for free
Information available for free? How awful.
Honestly, I feel like the Internet Archive is playing with fire in a lot of stuff. I won't link it here, but last night I saw a repo that was hosting hundreds of emulator-compatible Switch games, even more recent stuff like Super Mario Wonder, that was easy to download. Also, just a ton of full TV shows are directly available to download, often direct blu-ray rips.
This really has started to make the Internet Archive one of the best places to pirate media. It's starting to have a comparable selection to ThePirateBay, but without any ads for "Hot Milfs In Your Area".
I love IA, but I think they really need to start cracking down on this stuff, because if they don't I think it's going to prompt even more lawsuits.
It seems like a wonderful opportunity to talk about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence and DRM's effect on society's cultural memory. Even the most long-lived individual or most successful of corporations has a finite lifespan, and we have no societal escrow for the digital media which becomes a part of our lexicons. IA seems to be taking that roll, regardless. It would be nice if we could work out a framework within which to make it official and sanctioned. Copyright is a social construct, not a law of nature, and at least in theory we could band together and change the terms. Unfortunately, artificial scarcity is behind a lot of business plans.
The Switches games are all available on the Switch's store. There is no good reason to pirate them. As usual, pirates make excuses for ripping off creators.
Oh, you mean like the online stores for the 3DS and WiiU?
I think the audience on HN is somewhat amenable to the idea that some amount of piracy/copyright-infringement is necessary for preservation. Pretty much everyone here hates DRM, and hates that you don’t own your media anymore.
That said, when the Internet Archive is directly competing with both the Switch Store and ThePirateBay, then lawsuits from Nintendo are basically inevitable.
I agree with your broad point, because archival is important, despite what these big corporations think, but I think that the way that IA is doing stuff right now carries a very real risk of getting sued into oblivion.
Specifically of issue in this case -- there is a wide-open hole in the IA's book hosting system that allows anyone to easily download an Adobe Digital Edition of any book in the archive -- ADE's DRM has been broken for a long time. It takes 2 minutes to go from IA to a full OCR'd PDF. The result is that there are a LOT of decrypted PDFs in the wild that carry the Internet Archive logo on the very first page.
I am for DRM because it could enable something like the IA to host and lend books without violating author's privledge. The IA's implementation is foolish and, I think, carries the intent to allow exploitation.
In this case, the IA has applied DRM, just as media companies do, and anyone breaking that DRM is the person liable for infringement, not the Internet Archive. Even breaking weak sauce DRM violates the terms of the DMCA, and media companies have fought to protect their use of such insufficient schemes. I see no reason that legal wrangling shouldn't also apply to the Internet Archive as well as it does members of the MPAA.
At least the Adobe Digital Edition is a nominal attempt at controlled lending. It's not a great attempt, but it's something.
The thing that really concerns me is the fact that people are treating IA a general file sharing site. You can find complete sets of ROMs for basically any game system you can think of, TV shows and movies that can be downloaded completely uninhibited, completely DRM-free versions of books.
To some extent data harboring laws will protect them, but that's not a silver bullet; if they're not making an active effort to deal with copyright stuff I really think it's going to bite them, and that's a shame. The IA is an extremely valuable resource when used right.
IA is worth more to humanity than these assholes will ever be.
In that case IA can write their own books
The publishers aren't writing the books either. A more apt comeback would be "then they can publish and distribute their own books", except they already do.