The legal ruling against the Internet Archive has come down in favour of the rights of authors.
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.
Libraries have been doing it for ages, this isn’t hugely different
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.
And what do you do for a living? I would like to access that free as well…
I’m a dev, and on occasion I like to contribute to FOSS apps. That backfired on you didn’t it?
Yeah, you have completely changed my mind here. I am uploading all my work to github and all my pics as we speak for everyone to use as they please. Give me a break. Are you really that childish in person, or is it just the screen and keyboard giving you this false machismo?
I’m not being childish, you’re being ridiculous. This is a library, this is a concept that already exists. You’re thinking too profit oriented, not everything has to be for profit. This is so that people have access to these things now and for generations to come. Copyright laws compromising the internet archive will mean loss of data over the next few generations. There is already so much lost media from the internet era, and so little is being done about it, aside from the awesome efforts of the internet archive.
This isn’t about profits this is about preserving data from our era.
There’s more to this argument but it’s already been said in this thread and I don’t feel like typing it out, and I doubt you’d change your mind anyway.
you are taking this to the extreme without considering what you are saying. it is true that authors should be rewarded for their efforts to produce a piece of writting or art. however, sometimes some authors and publishers choose to hide this content, which may be useful when accessible by the larger community. imagine if certain inventions were not made public by their inventors. the entire race would still be living in the stone age.
This is actually happening with certain things that are patented or prohibitively expensive. I.E. insulin. A LOT of more efficient eco-friendly tech has just not been adopted because it’s patented and it wouldn’t be cost effective for companies to switch in our profit driven capitalist hellscape.
I’m also a dev. I do upload my work other than my day job work since it’s my employers copyright not mine. You can check out my GitHub which is the same as my username here.
Regardless though, libraries have existed for decades in the real world - but suddenly in a digital form it’s some unimaginable and unforgivable thing? Give me a break.
You might not familiar with how the internet archive does the book lending. The book is actually drm-protected and can only be opened with adobe software, which will expire in just a few days, rendering the file useless. What the internet archive did was simply allowing more people to borrow the same book during pandemic instead of only allowing one person at a time. The lent books still expire after a few days. It’s not like the internet archive was suddenly turn into LibGen and distributing unlocked pdf to anyone. Anyone who familiar with LibGen would not bother borrowing from the internet archive digital library. The issue is simply blown up out of proportion by publishers.
I write software. I am legally bound to not release source code for the things I do for work.
However all of the software that I write that is not required to be closed source, is not.
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 agree, but the internet archive doesn’t have the authority to roll the duration back right? So it was illegal. We all agree the law needs to change, but it is still the law currently.
Sometimes laws need to b broken to bring changes.
Well the average career is 30 years. So you think that if I was to start a photography business that at the end of my 30 year run, half of my career should be publicly available? That means that people could use half of my life’s work without owing me any compensation? Copyright protects a lot of small creators, not just Disney and the likes.
Good thing you’re covered for 70 years after you’re dead then
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Exactly.
So if you release a movie that took you 5 years to make, you only get paid on the day it is released. Not the next day, because you should not get paid for doing nothing due to work you did in the past. Keep working. Gotcha.
Yes, absolutely. If it takes me a year to make a high-quality table, then I shouldn’t keep getting paid for the table for the rest of my life + 70 years + whatever new extension Disney comes up with.
but if your work is good enough and better than your competitors it shouldn’t be a problem. that’s how the free market works right?
the problem here is capitalists want it both ways. they want to be able litigate any competition into oblivion… but hey, it s just business.
Way to sweepingly generalize something. I had to use copyright laws when I was a pro track photographer. I found out that one of the drivers owned a printing shop. He was telling people to purchase one photo from me at my price and then turning around, scanning it in, and re-printing them for the customers at a lower price. Same exact work, so you can’t argue about the quality. This fuck was also taking my images and using them in advertising which was also a copyright violation. This isn’t about who took the better picture as I was the person behind the camera. It’s about protecting work, that in my case involved time and actual sweat each and every weekend I was out in the sun. But it seems the majority of people in this thread think that he was justified in stealing MY work.
Do people buy your photos decades after you take them? No?
So reasonable copyright terms like 10 or 15 years should be totally fine with you. Unless you are just emotional about it and ranting online.
When working at a print shop, we checked for copyright coverage all the time, and even refused orders over it. Watermarking the corner of your images is a good start. You can also make sure your web images are low resolution to prevent reprinting. 300ppi (pixels per inch) at scale is required for printing. Though the real kicker is, YOU are responsible for protecting your copyright, and you probably should have hired a lawyer.
I think you gotta keep it mind that, like reddit, a majority of the people here should be assumed to be teens or so.
Hey, just here to let you know that I 100% agree with you. You’re being attacked for no reason.
Thats how it works for patents, medicines, etc…
When someone build a home… There is not even any time at all… You get paid once and then you can forget your past work.
What percentage of your money would come from 15 year old content you produced? Please reply with the median.
I always make sure all my work are freely avaliable on the internet, even when I have to pay to do so.
Props
Same here. Every project I have ever worked on is available on github. Even my job open sources its tools.
I just checked out your github. Your python “age guesser” repo and “name guesser” repo are top notch. Your unfinished “street address guesser” looks promising. The internet is thrilled for these three contributions
Fucking hero
How about we implement UBI so we can stop pretending this is a good argument? Copyright is a blight on society.
Well for one, piracy often helps artists by getting their media in the hands of more people, hence more exposure
Okay on some level I agree with you, but “paying with exposure” is bullshit. If I like something I’ll pay for it after the fact
As a writer I would be fine with this.
I would be for it.
Also as if the artist are actually paid much of anything by the publishers. Focus on the actual problem next time
The root problem is greed, full stop. Where to begin on that one?
I would!
Let me guess if you have read the thing you are making comments about.
What would you say are my odds?
100000:1?
Fail
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.
I think a short copyright period is fair enough to stop corporations putting out word for word copies of your book a week after you publish it. But it doesn’t need to be more than 5-10 years, the current death+70 that the USA has pushed on the world is obscene.
Any author popular enough to be copied by a corporation is already well supported by fans. People prefer to support artists they like.
It’s not the popular authors that would be getting ripped off, it’d be the small ones. Corps would have people scouting books en masse, find one worth taking without a reputation to back themselves up, then present their own version and crush any momentum you might gain against their millions of dollars in marketing.
The small ones already dont make money from their work. If theyre undiscovered, they dont have any fans to buy their book. If they are discovered, they have fan support.
I think you severely underestimate the greed of corporations. If there was no copyright whatsoever there would nothing to stop, for example, amazon not publishing the new novel by a middling author and instead selling their own version where they take all the profit.
I didnt disagree with that part. Youre missing the part where theres nothing stopping fans from giving the author money instead.
How are they finding fans?
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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?
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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.
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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.
Yeah internet archive is fucking stupid for this.
And they sold access to the books they stole via a subscription? I mean… yeah. That’s gonna get you sued
Where was it mentioned that they sold a subscription to access to copyrighted materials? They sold a subscription to their web archiving service.
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.
This is why I sail the high seas. Copyright is an affront to liberty.
“Right of the authors”, sounds like a propaganda piece. It’s quite objectively in the favor of the copyright holders.
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.
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.
Person working in publishing for 15 years sides with publishers, shocker
Ahh, there it is!
