I'm surprised and disappointed that the IA ever thought this would go over well, though I do respect the reasons for which they took these actions.<p>Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages.<p>You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this.<p>On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong.<p>Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation.<p>I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.
I have three favorite properties on the web: Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and the Internet Archive.<p>Whoever thought this was a good idea should own up to it and step down, this was a dumb move if there ever was one and risking one of the prime - and very fragile - properties on the web like this was highly irresponsible. Keep in mind that IA already has plenty of enemies who are continuously monitoring it and hoping to find a way to shut them down, then hand them this sort of thing on a golden platter. Beyond stupid, really.
The more interesting thing here is the "controlled digital lending" test case that will almost certainly come of all of this.<p>If they somehow prevail on that aspect and set a legal precedent there, that would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of companies.<p>For example, Netflix could stream every movie ever, as long as they bought enough DVDs for peak demand. Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream the signal.<p>I just hope the IA doesn't get CDL shot down because of this and ruin it for everyone.
I stand behind Internet Archive on this. It was the right opportunity to try and push our freedoms forward. Internet Archive is political by design, it's very existence is merely tolerated by the Intellectual Property Feudalists. It was the good fight to fight.
I had not realized that the Internet Archive had 'expanded' into archiving & re-publishing books<p>While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability.<p>Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.
> The Internet Archive removed waitlists for books in its "National Emergency Library" so that multiple readers could simultaneously download the same digital copy.<p>>Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit.<p>>The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.
> In doing so, it essentially allowed for a single copy of a book to be downloaded an infinite number of times.<p>The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
I've got a synology NAS with at least 10TB spare capacity I could donate... If only there were a way to use it, and thousands more, to back up important projects like this in a decentralized way.
> Controlled digital lending is a legal framework, developed by copyright experts, where one reader at a time can read a digitized copy of a legally owned library book.<p>And digital downloading is a communication framework, developed by technology experts, where an unlimited number of readers can read the same digital library book at the same time.
As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs.<p>Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.
> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license.<p>Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?
This wasn't the smartest move on behalf of the Internet Archive. One could argue they were pushing boundaries to get courts to rule in their favor but in the process they are putting the whole project in jeopardy. Taking current copyrighted works and just giving them away en-mass is obviously not going to be seen favorably by many.
Good. the internet archive does important work, and i'd hate to see a stupid idea like this put their larger mission at risk. i'm not sure how they ever thought they could get away with giving away other people's property, just because pandemic.
I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide?
I wish that the Internet Archive had tried to work around this by reaching out to public libraries, and having those public libraries agree to "loan" their still-on-the-shelf books to the Internet Archive. That might not cover all the copies that were simultaneously checked out by people (I don't know the numbers involved), but it would have helped.
See announcement: <a href="https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close-2-weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emerg...</a>
Remember (the few that are over ~~600 years old might??:) )
Gutenberg invented movable type and a publication explosion followed. Heretofore books were hand copied, with errors etc. A medieval ~Xerox room was full of scribes - hard at work. A Xerox salesman who promised to double the speed of your copying - he walked in a hulking slave with a whip - all the monks visibly and hurriedly sped up.
Back to Gutenberg, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.htm...</a> the Authors fought printing presses, they fought even lending libraries. Books were often chained to the shelves to limit access as well as theft.
<a href="https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-chained-libraries.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-cha...</a><p>So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up.
MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!
"<i>Many open-Internet activists have been discussing how to back up the archive and make it more resilient for years. The temptation would be to employ a distributed system, such as a blockchain, that would be censorship-resistant and couldn’t be legally shut down.</i>"<p>A blockchain? Oy, vey.
The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not put it at risk of destruction.
I’m a big supporter of IA, but they really goofed on this one. I donated after this incident but mostly because I don’t want this lawsuit to shut them down.
I wonder if there’s a turnkey(ish) way to crowdsource a back-up the archive on IPFS.<p>IPFS seems ideally suited for two reasons:<p>- it has decent censorship-resistant properties<p>- content addressing is ideal for partial backups because individuals can mirror as little (or as much) as they want.<p>I’m guessing the simplest approach would be to somehow get access to the archive’s database? Is this something they’d be willing to consider?
I really don't know much about the intersection of IP and legal entities, but in the worst case scenario would IA be able to move its web captured assets to a separate company instead of tanking the whole thing? In other words, just leave the "library" division to tank and take the heat while everything else remains safe elsewhere?
The Internet Archive should do the lawful thing and remove all the content that the publishers want removed, to prevent the collateral damage to the important resource for those who just want to see old versions of pages that have changed or disappeared.<p>Leave the books and whatever to pirate torrent sites and just do the Wayback Machine thing.
I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence.<p>I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640</a>
Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?
Yeah, its only 10 PB, why don't we p2p a copy? 1000 people with 10 TB to spare wouldn't work but 50 000 storing 100-400 GB each would be managable. 50 k pp is ofc nothing and probably not even enough to get it done before everyone gets bored. (you know who you are) Tubing it into the boxes would be the hard part. Most wouldn't need to do much more than contribute bandwidth and temp storage.<p>Why isn't file coin done?
Sorry for my ignorance on this matter, but why do safe harbor provisions not apply to the Internet Archive? Shouldn't they have been served a DMCA takedown request bu the publishers, and then been in violation of those rules and paid the applicable penalties had they not complied and removed the offending content?
Not sure why IA thought it was smart to do unlimited lending and risk the organization.<p>Did they just get caught up wanting to do something during virus stuff?
Losing the Wayback Machine alone as a free resource would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It must be saved!
At least the internet archive usually follows the law. When IA is gone everyone will just go to libgen which actively opposes copyright. Not only that but a bunch of history will be lost and source links on Wikipedia will break.<p>IMO: most publishers are worthless anyway. I feel bad for authors but it’s hard to sympathize with publishers.
See also: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491229" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491229</a>
To appease publishers? How about so they can do right by the many authors out there who are still able to sell books through Powell's, Amazon or other local book sellers?