Internet Archive's digital library has been found in breach of copyright. The decision has some important implications
Internet Archive's digital library has been found in breach of copyright. The decision has some important implications
The legal ruling against the Internet Archive has come down in favour of the rights of authors.
Copyright only exists so rich people can own yet another thing they didnt make.
The original intent was good. You make something, you can legally ensure people can't just copy your work and slap their name on it for profit. People could make creative works without fear of someone else ripping it away from them.
Then Disney just kept bribing politicians to extend it to a ridiculous degree so they wouldn't lose Mickey to public domain until they moved his likeness into their trademark, which lives as long as it's being used actively.
And then you have DMCA, where everyone is guilty until innocent and that whole can of worms, and DRM which is technically illegal to circumvent no matter how much time or what reason. Corporatization and the Internet turned that relatively simple and good ideas into an utter mess.
that original intent never mattered. no one's gonna make mickey mouse shorts and people be like "oh that must be their character, not Disney's". Mickey became famous and profitable from Disney's amazing animation and enjoyable writing. Without copyright, that's still the case. Queen and David Bowie didnt fall from financial or celebrity grace because Vanilla Ice copied them, because being copied doesnt detract from you. Again, all it did was enable the rich to profit from more things they didnt make. Get rid of all of it.
If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity.
Ah yes, because it's the fault of (internet) libraries and not greedy publishers who try to keep the royalties for their authors as low as possible. /s
How about looking where this problem starts instead of where it ends?
Piracy dies (mostly) with easy and reasonably priced ways to pay for content. Most people don't want to do something illegal and want to support those who make content.
But when publishers like Warner Brothers are removing content from services making pirating sites the only place to find artists' work, then little are going to pirate.
Without sites like the Internet Archive, so much stuff would risk being lost forever because of greedy copyright practices.
IA helps keep democracy alive. Documentaries that are banned by dictators, like the BBC documentary on Modi that was banned in India by Modi, would be unavailable to people without IA.
If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity.
The irony being that this is exactly what copyright was originally intended to facilitate - authors creating works to become public domain within a relatively short period of time.
Especially fucking Wiley. If you're a student paying hundreds for a textbook with a "supplemental code" that makes it so you can't buy it used, then it's probably by fucking Wiley. Fucking greedy cunts.
There are authors starting to publish without a publisher. I think that is the right direction, not making all books free. Maybe once the publishers have less control there will be some copyright reforms to shorten the time it takes to bring works into the public domain. Right now it is 95 years from publishing, but I think the author's life plus 30 years or something might make a bit more sense. For example, George Orwell has been dead for over 70 years, but his works are still under copyright.
Most important paragraph in the whole article:
The Southern District of New York court issued its final order in Hachette v. Internet Archive on March 24, 2023. It found that Internet Archive was liable for copyright infringement. The consent judgement of August 11 has banned the Open Library from scanning or distributing commercially available books in digital formats.
The premise of the Internet Archive is perfectly legal, but we have dimwits who think anything and everything can be uploaded for "archival purposes". This won't be the last time we see this because people are actively abusing the site.
Don't believe me? Go to the archive and search "anime". Are the first results you see forgotten 1960s shows whose only source materials are moldy VHS tapes because the studio went under and the copyright is in limbo? No. The entirety of fucking Naruto, iconic movies like Ghost in the Shell, the whole remastered Dragon Ball Blu-ray set, and who knows how much more.
No, just because it's not available where you are does not justify uploading. If geo-blocking doesn't work for a monolith like YouTube it certainly won't work for the Archive. One visit from copyright owners lawyers in their territory and it's another black eye for the Archive.
The archive is in the right for works that are out of print AND, AND, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, have no commercial equivalent or rightful copyright owner. Those old cookbooks by authors and publishers long gone, great! Vintage DOS games, do some reseach, make sure it's not commercially available on sites like GOG before uploading. A fan subbed show, upload the subtitles only. Your favorite show that is streamable but you won't pay for, put it on a tracker and seed it elsewhere.
This is a good point. I didnt realize people were using Internet Archive for what is basically piracy for commercially available content.
I agree with you. This is the issue at hand.
Which is who’s responsibility to moderate for though.
This is the fault of Internet Archive for not moderating better. Is it is a tough problem? Yes, but everyone else faces it too.
Storage owners are responsible for the contents of their units, website owners are responsible for what’s stored on their DBs
People are abusing attack methods by uploading illegal content themselves in order to shut a competitor.
The case wasn't about the whole Archive though, as the part you quoted says. It's specifically about the defunct Library section, because the plaintiffs argued, and the court agreed, that the library offered by IA violated copyright. The rest of what IA hosts is, at this stage, irrelevant to the legal proceedings.
four major publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House – to file a lawsuit against Internet Archive in June 2020.
Well now you know which publishers to steal from 100% of the time
I pirate almost every book, the only ones I actually buy are new ones from authors I love (Brandon Sanderson is the main one) or books I pirated that I loved enough to want to support the author
Honestly if you want to support an artist, dont buy their work. Steal their work and give them a donation. Otherwise you're mostly supporting the middle-men more than the artist.
This last bit kills me
It’s beyond time that readers and consumers of all cultural output recognise the cost of creating cultural material. If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity. In the broader context of current generative AI discussions, I think our whole community is fed up with short-sighted arguments that aim to justify the ripping off of authors – whose earnings sit at an average of $18,200 per year.
For the record, the national minimum wage in Australia is $45,905 per year.
It's so disingenuous. Authors are not making so little because of library sharing or internet sharing. They're making that little because publishers take the largest cut and have a stranglehold on publishing. 🙄
There is also an incredibly huge saturation of authors, musicians, actors, artists, and other creatives that all expect to make it a career. It's far from realistic, and the stripping down of public domain through many decades of shady copyright extension laws have just been propping up this house of cards, at the expense of the public that deserves it.
For the past 20 years or so, especially with the Internet accelerating the process, people are starting to realize that these are not good career choices, and these industries will turn into mostly free hobbies, based on their passion to create.
Even now, I can throw a stick at some random artist on Bandcamp, and find great music for free who has barely any subscribers. Why spend $15 for a CD? Why spend money on royalties for using music on a video, when so many artists give it out copyright free?
Internet Archive’s distribution of copyrighted works is problematic.
Since when? That's literally what a library is supposed to do..
It was the fact that during the pandemic they forwent the rule that 1 copy they owned could only be rented out to 1 person at a time. Any library operates by that principal for exactly this reason. Even digital copies, they can only lend out so many at a time. During the pandemic archive.org ignored this rule which was noble of them considering the circumstances, but now those consequences are coming back to bite them.
Personally I think I was dumb to risk the whole Internet Archive to offer that and hopefully they use this as a lesson to consult more with their lawyers going forward.
You can literally photocopy every single page out of a book at a physical library.
It's not the paradigm, it's the convenience and ease of access.
The ramifications of this ruling are astoundingly dire.
The notion of controlled digital lending was a good counter to "ebook packages" that come with a yearly sub. At the moment, that yearly sub eats a large chunk of university budgets because academic texts are harder to get for free (we are a captive audience, though we do have scihub to help somewhat). In terms of books outside academia, I'm not looking at prices but I can tell you which direction they'll now go.
I'm sure you can guess which direction library budgets are not going to go.
In essence, it's forcing digital from a "purchase to lend" to a "subscribe to lend" model, which is going to really hurt libraries. This doesn't even begin to explore the full horror of censorship - "I'm sorry, LGBTQ+ texts are not available to bundle for your library due to local laws prohibiting them". That's a topic that deserves its own book!
Oh FFS!
Well, shit.
The outcome was completely obvious, and I blame Internet Archive for poking this bear. They had no reason to do this, and they are putting their actual core mission at risk in the process.
This is why I sail the high seas. Copyright is an affront to liberty.
Aaaw. Publishers caring about authors? That's a big fat lie. Make no mistake, no matter what type of publisher, be it literary, musical, dramatic (TV & film), the only goal is to consolidate ingellectual property, employ predatory and lobsided contracts and then pretend that they represent the creators.
Fact is that lending, and also digital lending, has a negligible result on the author's bottom line. The publishers however want libraries gone because then they make their investors happy. That's it.
Know the motivation and intention behind this, because it isn't to protect the income of authors.
“Right of the authors”, sounds like a propaganda piece. It’s quite objectively in the favor of the copyright holders.
Does the author work for a publishing company? It’s hard to understand their perspective otherwise.
https://lemmy.ca/comment/2777069
After finishing her PhD, also in archaeology, she decided to follow her passion for books, and pursue a career in publishing. She worked for over 15 years in scholarly and educational book publishing, commissioning and project-managing a wide range of non-fiction titles, producing ebooks and implementing accessible publishing practices.
This is an affront on preservation of human knowledge and keeping it accessible. This is a perfect example of what utter cancer copyright is.
Wow, the author really seems to take the publisher's side here. I'm surprised they're listed as just an academic, I was expecting it to be an industry spokesperson.
Wasn't it that there buy a book, loan 1 book digitally was perfectly fine, but then during covid, they bought 1 book and then loaned 100s because it was an emergency?
Source? Interested in reading more about this if you have it
I think we need to start caring about how laws affect the preservation of data, this is ridiculous.
They only issue here is that they stopped following the "one book one rental" rule. You're allowed to "rent" out a digital copy but only if you have a physical version of the book not lent out. They stopped doing that during covid
Well then we should donate books to the Archive. Then in the interests of efficiency and cutting down on storage and transportation costs. I volunteer my home to store my newly donated books. If I ever need them back, I will request them.
I believe even "one book one rental" was kind of a gray area. Publishers probably didn't sue at the time as the potential ruling was less certain, and they didn't want a precedent not in their favour.
I wonder if you would feel that way if you were one of the artists whose copyrighted media was distributed illegally?
You realize this is about books right? This is about free and easy access to books. Like a digital library. Don't be ridiculous.
The problem is that copyright last way to fucking long and they keep extending it. It should be the same as patents... 15 years I think. I'm just going to keep xdcc get whatever I want until they fix it.
I always make sure all my work are freely avaliable on the internet, even when I have to pay to do so.
Well for one, piracy often helps artists by getting their media in the hands of more people, hence more exposure
How about we implement UBI so we can stop pretending this is a good argument? Copyright is a blight on society.
As a writer I would be fine with this.
I would!
Also as if the artist are actually paid much of anything by the publishers. Focus on the actual problem next time
I would be for it.
Let me guess if you have read the thing you are making comments about.
What would you say are my odds?
100000:1?