I am not a lawyer, but I wouldn't have thought that was relevant. This isn't like libel, where you have to show damages.<p>As I understand it, if I wrote a manuscript that I didn't want published at all, my rights would still be violated if you published it. I didn't lose any money; I just wanted to assert my right to control it.<p>I could imagine this being an issue in the penalty phase, but they're not there yet. Can a lawyer explain why this is relevant here?
I know it's well-enshrined in law, but I don't know that I'll ever wrap my head around the bedrock principle that supposedly keeps "intellectual property" from being an oxymoron.<p>Someone else gets to tell me that I can't arrange bits on <i>my</i> computer in the same pattern as the bits on someone else's computer, just because they arranged their bits in that order first? It just doesn't compute for me.<p>Property laws exist because if I take your shoe, you don't have your shoe anymore. If I arrange bits on my computer in the same order as the bits on yours, you still have yours, and you can still do all the same things with them that you could before. I don't see why you should have a right to tell me how I can or can't use <i>my</i> property just because you came up with a specific way to use yours.<p>This is especially true if we're talking about <i>ideas</i> and not digital copies, like with NDAs. Telling me I can't tell anybody else about the thoughts in my brain because someone else prompted me to think them just boggles my mind.<p>I think "intellectual property" is a contradiction in terms.
This reminds me of the vidangel case[1]. The company would buy physical copies of movies and then rent a digital stream of it. Every digital stream was backed by a physical copy of the media, which is not true in the IA case. They lost the case and were found in violation of copyright. If they couldn’t win, I don’t see how IA can.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_v._VidAngel" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_v._VidAngel</a>
IANAL but the issues seem depressingly similar to this (maybe an <i>actual</i> lawyer can enlighten me):<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...</a><p>Once in Google Legal, I found a snippet of a book that looked promising for patent-busting. I really had to read the book to know if it was worth buying a legal copy of it. Out of 100 possibilities you run across in searching, <i>maybe</i> one is actually worth it. You can't tell until you read it. The same is true of scholarly articles, btw.<p>Of course, the old Books project had it on disk, like they have almost every book ever published. They told me I could come over to the actual cubicle of one of the engineers and read it there; they could not even send me an URL. That's how tightly access was controlled.<p>I don't remember why I didn't. Maybe the case changed, or I didn't need it after all.
I don’t see anyone can defend the internet archive. They decided to loan out digital assets without any regard to the backed licenses available.<p>The Union of people’s thoughts on the matter is very amusing, though. People don’t want ads, or drm, or to pay. It should be totally free, effort be damned.<p>Personally my main criticism is that in schools certain editions of text are required. Ideally all problem sets and answers would be provided without having to buy a given text, and you can consult any resource that teachers the relevant material as a supplement, rather than an issued textbook.<p>Assuming the IA wins, though. It would be curious to setup a website where people can donate physical copies of a book and you download the ebook and can loan it out in accordance to the amount you have physically. Yes, this is a library, however unlike a regular library it’d be interesting to push this to the limit. Even per page checkout on demand.
Book publishers are notorious for being very whiny. One need only look into the history of paperback books to see how interesting their arguments can be. That they would want to squash lending comes as no real surprise. I swear, if they could remove second hand sales, they would.<p>I'll also note I amusingly mixed up IA with AI, such that I was very confused on how the story was relevant to the headline here. :D
It's hard to imagine the Internet Archive winning... just CDL on its own is on pretty shaky ground, and the Archive's brief "uncontrolled" version even more so.<p>Pushing the boundaries is kind of their thing but I think they went too far here.
> Gratz said that IA avoids the conflict by only lending out e-books to one user at a time, causing no harm because it honors traditional lending in brick-and-mortar libraries that has been practiced for years without impacting publishers’ bottom lines.<p>This is a bad argument. It's very likely that brick-and-mortar libaries <i>do</i> impact publishers' bottom lines, and they're allowed anyway. The concept of libraries fundamentally conflicts with publishers' concept of "reasonable" profit from their copyrighted material. Capitalism conflicts with socialism.