Related URLs (from threads we merged hither) in case of interest:<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-...</a><p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-books-case-appeal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-...</a><p><a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/major-book-publishers-defeat-internet-181817991.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/major-book-publishers-defeat-...</a><p><a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/internet-archive-digital-lending-isnt-fair-use-2nd-cir-says" rel="nofollow">https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/internet-archive-digita...</a>
This has been playing out for many years. And it's all because Brewster Kahle decided that an overly broad interpretation of the Internet Archive's mission trumped the rights of authors and publishers, and the laws of the United States.<p>When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - he continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored:<p><i>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.</i><p><a href="https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/" rel="nofollow">https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/</a><p>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.<p>He also opened a new front in the court of public opinion. In his blog posts and interviews with U.S. media, Kahle portrays the court cases and legal judgements as a crusade against the Internet Archive and all librarians (see <a href="https://blog.archive.org/2023/12/15/brewster-kahle-appeal-statement/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2023/12/15/brewster-kahle-appeal-st...</a>). It's not. It's the logical outcome of one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law and the people who work very hard to bring new books into being.<p>In addition, there has been real collateral damage to the many noble aspects of the Internet Archive. Legal fees and judgements have diverted resources away from the Wayback Machine, the library of public domain works, and other IA programs that provide real value to society. I truly hope the organization can survive.
Very much not a surprise. I think the Internet Archive is providing an invaluable service to humanity in preserving works that would otherwise be lost to time. it is one of the crown jewels of the Internet, doing a job that nobody else is willing to do. But at the same time I know the courts side with publishers pretty much every time and copyright law being such as it is they're totally screwed. The only real question is how many trillions dollars will the judgment be. Preserving history is at odds with the profit motive, and lawmakers care a lot more about the latter than the former.
This struck me as significant (buried in the opinion's last footnote):<p>"IA makes a final argument that, even if its Open Libraries project did not qualify as a fair use, we should restrict the injunction to the Open Libraries project and allow IA to continue CDL for books that IA itself owns. In support of that argument, IA argues that the fourth factor analysis would be more favorable if CDL were limited to IA’s own books. In our view, the fair use analysis would not be substantially different if limited to IA’s CDL of the books it owns, and the fourth factor still would count against fair use. So we decline IA’s invitation to narrow the scope of our holding or of the district court’s injunction."<p>In other words, even if one purchases a print copy of the book, fair use would not allow them to lend a digital copy of the book to one person at a time. Why the court concludes that that "would not be substantially different" is unclear from just this footnote.
I still cannot imagine how IA thought that giving unrestricted access to copyrighted books was a good idea. It seemed inevitable that <i>someone</i> would sue them over it.<p>Honestly, I think that IA's ambivalence towards the use of their website for outright piracy might lead to their collapse, and that's a shame. The Archive <i>can</i> be a really wonderful tool, though I'm not sure that its current management really knows what they're doing.
Am I to understand that it’s legal and okay for LLM providers to profit massively from training commercial models on copyrighted works, without the rights holders’ permission - but illegal, and unacceptable, for private individuals to access a digital library?
Things will get worse before they're get better, but ultimately the publishers will pay dearly for this.<p>First, the IA should move to a more favorable copyright jurisdiction to preserve the collection.<p>Second, there's no point fighting the copyright lobby, especially so in the US. We need to build an alternative access to knowledge that bypasses the copyright/ownership of knowledge paradigm.
If I can relate this to movies [1], it might be illuminating:<p>Watching a movie, you normally get a "home viewing" license. That does <i>not</i> give you the right to show it at your business (even if you don't charge money and only 10 people come).<p>There's also a Public Performance Rights (PPR) license, and I always had to get PPR's because Google lawyers would shut us down otherwise. PPR costs considerably more than a home viewing license.<p>When I negotiated PPR's, they always asked three questions:<p>1. How many in the audience?<p>2. Are you charging money?<p>3. Are you advertising this outside Google?<p>If I were a movie theater taking $15 a head from anyone who showed up, my PPR would cost a lot more.<p>It seems that what IA wants is to use home viewing rights as though they had PPR's.<p>"No, they don't!" you retort? You might be right, but asking AG to design a license for them would be a lot more friendly than saying, "Hey, this is fair to you, take it!"<p>Edit: one thing I forgot to add: lawyers always prefer to start with their own draft. We can hypothesize a conversation between IA and AG (which never actually happened):<p>[IA] Hey, can we use your books? Write us a new agreement.<p>[AG] OK, that'll take a few months for a first draft. Then we'll negotiate.<p>[IA] OMG, we don't have all that time.<p>[AG] Okey-dokey, we'll see you in court.<p>[1] <a href="https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-one-the-movies" rel="nofollow">https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o...</a>
<a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.306.1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.609...</a><p>On one hand: the court opinion. On the other, a breaking news tweet from Publisher's Weekly with hundreds of tedious low effort takes ready to melt precious brain cells. Please read the opinion.
Internet Archive response blog post: <a href="https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/04/internet-archive-responds-to-appellate-opinion/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/04/internet-archive-respond...</a>
> This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a
nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their
entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to
a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital
copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from
the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant
provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and
Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no.<p>When the conclusion is so obviously incorrect, we should examine the underlying precedent that leads us to such an erroneous conclusion. This precedent should give us pause. They're restricting a NONPROFITs to distribute legally purchased print media in a way that the publishers don't want.<p>And this seems to be the justification:<p>> In addition to selling traditional print books, Publishers collectively invest
millions of dollars in developing new formats and markets suited for the digital
age, including the eBook market.<p>> Here, by contrast, IA’s Free Digital Library offers few efficiencies beyond
those already offered by Publishers’ own eBooks. IA argues that its use is more
efficient because it “replace[s] the burdens of physical transportation with the
benefits of digital technology,” but this ignores the fact that IA’s digital books
compete directly with Publishers’ eBooks―works derivative of the original print
books.<p>This is an assault on free-use, libraries, and collective sharing of knowledge. If I buy a physical book, I can give it to anyone I want because the laws of yore did not see societal benefit to prohibiting this. I'm quite certain that these companies would prohibit the practice, if they could. The law is the only thing protecting the commons.<p>The argument here is essentially, "these companies are spending millions to distribute their IP digitally, so we should shield them from Open standards that would negatively impact their profits". "Your work isn't transformative, because we've already done a similar transformation". They're wielding a proprietary implementation as a hammer to crush open knowledge. The internet should be a tool to facilitate knowledge-sharing for the betterment of our entire species, not a weapon to stifle knowledge for the sake of corporate profits.
I hope this doesn't bankrupt the Internet Archive (either the legal fees or the case - I don't recall what they're asking for). It would be bad if the Wayback Machine, the biggest internet archivist around, went under, and also all the books, software, et cetera that the Archive hosts. I wonder if there's any way to archive all of the Wayback Machine (82.3 petabytes), or, better yet, all of the Internet Archive (which is, by my count, around 120 petabytes?) Who would have the capability/interest in doing so, ideally without charge?
Key findings and implications:<p>1. The court rejected IA's fair use defense, finding that its digital lending practices merely substitute for and do not transform the original copyrighted works.<p>2. IA's activities are likely to cause significant market harm to publishers' e-book and digital licensing businesses, which outweighs any public benefits of expanded access.<p>3. Allowing widespread unauthorized digital copying and distribution, even by a nonprofit, would undermine the fundamental purpose of copyright law to incentivize creative expression.<p>4. The ruling highlights the tension between expanding public access to knowledge and preserving authors' and publishers' exclusive rights over their works, which copyright law is meant to balance.<p>5. The decision sets an important precedent limiting the ability of digital libraries and archives to widely distribute copyrighted works online without permission, even if the intent is to increase public access.<p>-Kagi Sum
How do AI startups get away with copyright violations? To train AI model they need to download copyrighted works (images, videos, music) into their AI cloud, thus creating a "copy" under US Copyright law. Isn't this outright illegal?<p>There are even datasets, collections of URLs like "common crawl". You cannot legally download them and use without breaking the law.<p>They cannot get away with "fair use" because they are harming creators income by making generative AI using their works.<p>But as there are big money I guess the government will make some exception for them.
>Four major book publishers again thwarted the online repository’s defense that its one-to-one lending practices mirrored those of traditional libraries<p>How does it not? I don't get it... why are physical libraries in the clear if it's still a 1:1 borrow?
This is why I stockpile manuals and other guide books, and pirate as much as possible. The publishers don't really care about anything other than cash, even on media they haven't published or updated in decades. I will gladly buy self published and, small run media new, but everything else is used/second-hand. The abuse only stops when you set boundaries.
This article doesn't mention controlled digital lending at all, what the entire lawsuit was about, and instead spends a significant chunk of the article on the national emergency library, a program that got like a one sentence mention in the judgment.
At this point, the Internet Archive should consider simply moving to another jurisdiction. Decisions like this are a shame, because they hinder a proper way to deal with piracy.<p>Physical libraries compete with book sales too, but of course libraries are lawful. Why should digital libraries be treated differently? Because there are ways to circumvent DRM on Internet Archive books? Well, there are ways to bypass DRM on sold ebooks, too.<p>Perhaps IA’s greatest mistake was to allow unrestricted lending during the pandemic. If it had kept its original mission, maybe things would not have ended up like this.
Clearly copyright law is wrong, and needs correction. The extensive use of the propaganda term "Intellectual Property" is the first thing that has to go. There is no such thing. There are copyrights, trade marks, and patents. Each of these involve a government enforced monopoly, which is granted to help benefit society in the long run.<p>The benefits to society stopped outweighing the costs a long time ago. There is no natural cost to making a digital copy of a work, or using an idea. Nothing in nature stops the spreading of good ideas. It is only by fiat that such things are restricted with the force of Government.<p>Clearly creators of works need to be encouraged in their efforts, they need to be paid. Far too many creators are not fairly paid, with a rent seeking entity utilizing the asymmetry of the market to abuse them. This needs to end.<p>The excess profits for those rent seekers are an unlegislated, and hidden tax upon the rest of us. This also needs to end.<p>The political use of copyright to control debate and limit free speech needs to end.<p>What's Legal isn't the same as what is Moral. It's time to re-balance the law to more fairly treat all involved.
This decision is ridiculous. It essentially codifies, once and for all, that buying a physical book conveys more rights than buying a digital book, to the buyer. Previously this was de facto the case only because of DRM on the digital book, but this now makes it de jure, regardless of the presence of DRM.<p>By my take, the only correct action any right-thinking person can do is civil disobedience and work to archive, anonymously and for the public, as much written works as possible. This is an absolute theft of the commons, and particularly heinous.
<i>sigh</i> Entirely avoidable, entirely predictable. It's time to talk about what happens next.<p>The Internet Archive must cost a fortune to run. There's no way they're going to get enough donation money if they <i>only</i> provide old website archives. Their "online library of everything" gambit was an attempt to boost their donations by attracting a wider audience.<p>They'll have to diminish the capabilities of the wayback machine in some way. I think they'll replace domain-based search with some kind of LLM-based conversational frontend, grabbing some funding from OpenAI or someone in the process.<p>It's too bad. I've been scraping the wayback machine ever since they did this stupid "pandemic library" and I noticed that they were allowing full movie and game rips with zero moderation. I'd like to have gotten a more complete archive, but what I have now is pretty good for my own uses. If you did the same, good job. If you didn't, well, I did warn you over and over ( <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=phendrenad2%20archive&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a> )
We're getting closer and closer to a situation where some jurisdiction eschews so-called "intellectual property" altogether, and then houses essentially of the data on the internet.<p>What will happen then? Will other states attempt some kind of embargo?<p>This whole thing feels so childish. The age of owning ideas is over, and all these silly political and legal battles are a waste of the best minds and energies of our time.
This appeal will further be appealed. There are logical contradictions within the decision. Further, the judges have come to a conclusion at the summary judgement phase that does not meet the basic criteria of looking at things in the light that best favors the defendant.
I’ve purchased quite a few old books from online booksellers based on my browsing of them through IA so I hope, at least, there could be some way to still expose these old treasures to people so they could somehow acquire a printed copy of them.
I wish IA had not started this fight. I love libraries, but it's totally unintuitive to me why it would have been OK to rent out unlimited digital copies of copywritten books. Just from a policy perspective, that structure doesn't create the right incentives for authors and publishers to publish books. It's a non-starter unless you make some broader societal change regarding how we fund writing.<p>IA does plenty of other awesome things - this felt like a waste of time and money.
What will this mean for other sites with similar programs? I know many libraries do similar "renting" of digital texts on their websites. I guess they will have to shut down these programs.<p>For instance, I know this is Canadian so different jurisdiction but here is an example of one: <a href="https://montreal.ca/en/services/digital-book-loans" rel="nofollow">https://montreal.ca/en/services/digital-book-loans</a>
If IA still loses after all avenues of appeals are exhauseted, will they be required to delete the archive or will they merely be required to take it offline?<p>Are private attempts to preserve human knowledge (e.g. IA keeps it offline from public access but continues to archive new works) legal in USA and other major jurisdictions?
iirc they still got the chance to appeal at supreme court, so we shall hear about this in a few quarters time.<p>personally, if you disconnect the rest of IA from the "CDL" aspect and look at the lawsuit this way, it seems to me like another instance where from legislative perspective, owning a digital copy of media remains inferior to owning the physical one. the affordances of the digital technologies has been used as a way to exploit the laws' interpretation.<p>AI is shaping up to be the next frontier of this matter, but we don't have a large player (with community focus and not big tech money) that could be tested as a scapegoat just yet.
How would you download all the English books in, .pdf format, printed from 1800 to 1900 - as those are legal to download?<p>What size of storage would you need?
CDL was incredibly stupid. DRM <i>and</i> legal trouble from pissed off publishers? That's the worst of both worlds. Pick one or the other, not both. It would have been better for Archive.org to ignore books and leave that domain to the pirates and legacy libraries; one defying the law and giving people books without DRM, and the other staying safely inside the law. With the combination of these two we have the best of both worlds, instead of the worst of both.
What a disgusting lawsuit. I struggle to beleive in the "lost profits" these publishers "suffer" from. Libraries, digital and physical alike are incredible and neccessary institutions that deserve our support.
Controlled Digital Lending was a desperate move in a desperate time. Let's not let it go to waste. <a href="https://annas-archive.org/datasets/ia" rel="nofollow">https://annas-archive.org/datasets/ia</a>
IA could turn the org into a massive opportunity by having AI companies use its data for training. They'd have enough to lobby to change the laws hah
"Is it 'fair use' for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no."
Really wish one of the billionaires would fund a publishing house that worked off a very different model than the Copyright Protection Scheme that the current majors used. Something that would allow authors to capture upsides, publishers to recoup, and information to spread freely.<p>Patronage? Large Advances + Subscriptions?<p>Something besides what we have now. Writing a 200 - 300 page book takes fair bit of effort and time that is not directly compensated, hence advances and the upside of royalties.
Honestly the dumbest possible move by Internet Archive. IA has gotten more and more ideological as well, and it's been censoring content it doesn't like. I'm not sure if they're in the Wikipedia/Mozilla boat of screwed up political spending, but if they are, this decision should at least temper that down.<p>I'm sure they'll be able to raise the money needed to pay off this lawsuit. It's true the Archive has a lot of amazing things not found elsewhere. Still, I've been hesitant to give them any money for years.<p>The replies in that thread are dumb too. I don't think people understand the legal complexities here, what a huge advantage it was for IA to even be able to lend out digital books in the way it was doing, and how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020.<p>It does show the two tiered system. Amazon, big tech and others massively got away with absorbing huge amounts of money in 2020. This non-profit tried to do equally shady things and it bit them in the ass. You clearly see where the system is tilted towards.
Url changed from <a href="https://twitter.com/PublishersWkly/status/1831357570365497379" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/PublishersWkly/status/183135757036549737...</a>, which points to this.
What's sad....<p>IA could have implemented a situation where book pages could be read with the same copy limits local libraries implement and then point to where the book is sold or point to users local library where book could be checked out....<p>Instead IA pursued a strategy that would fail...and for what to put the IA mission in harm's way
Whole thing should be obvious if you tried something else too. Like say DVD movies, rip them on free service and then only stream 1 copy at time... Surely that should be allowed as well?<p>Why not music too, go out buy cds or vinyls, rip single one and now however many bulk copies you have you can stream at one time?<p>Software gets bit more messy as it needs to be installed, but why not share saas seats, just somehow enforce single concurrent user...