Item — HN Reader

After publishers successfully sued the Internet Archive over its digital lending program, calling it unauthorized copying

No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Internet Archive, and supported the suit.

Each new restriction limits the archive’s ability to act as a comprehensive backstop.

This self-inflicted damage to the wayback machine is the real tragedy of this entire affair. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - founder Brewster Kahle continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored:

The Internet Archive says it would rather talk with writers individually than talk to the NWU or other writers’ organizations. But requests by NWU members to talk to or meet with the Internet Archive have been ignored or rebuffed.

https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/

When the requests to abandon CDL turned into demands, Kahle dug in his heels. When the inevitable lawsuits followed, and IA lost, he insisted that he was still in the right and plowed ahead with appeals. And here we are today.

5 comments

> No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying.

You're not wrong, but you're treating “guilty of unauthorized copying” as a statement of physical fact when in reality it just means it falls under an arbitrary rule invented by humans (namely, the law that defines unauthorized copying). This rule is ambiguous at its edges because it's not written as an algorithm or equation. It was perfectly reasonable for Kahle to believe that the rule can be interpreted in a way that it wouldn't apply and, by dragging it through the courts, have that interpretation be made the established one.

Even though the court has now established a competing interpretation, it is still not unreasonable to ask whether the law is fair and just under this interpretation. I feel that it isn't and should be changed.

Seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Expecting otherwise would have been hoping that notorious atheist Richard Dawkins somehow spared one specific god. Making websites accessible with history ignoring copyright is sort of what it does. That he would do it with books seems entirely in keeping with the philosophy.

I was initially confused what Dawkins was doing with books, until I realized that the "he" in your last sentence was Kahle, not Dawkins. Might want to edit your comment to put his name in, because otherwise you have a pronoun referring to a person named in a different comment (rather than the person named in your comment), which could get quite confusing if more people comment on the parent and their comments push yours down the page.

Fair comment but sadly I noticed yours past the typo fix window. Fortunately it has your clarification. Thanks for being able to repair.

I agree that IA should have never done CDL but for the opposite reason: They should have never embraced DRM. Either make things available unrestricted and be prepared to defend or don't release it at all. People being unable to loan works during the pandemic may have just been the push we needed to get more people to see the ridiculous onesidedness of todays copyright laws.

And secretly upload all the files to Anna's Archive.

> The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying.

That's what the "successfully" in "successfully sued" means.

> The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty

This doesn't seem to be a contradiction. Sometimes the courts are wrong or even the law is wrong. It is just a label.