What will happen then? Will other states attempt some kind of embargo?

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.

IA does plenty of other awesome things - this felt like a waste of time and money.

For instance, I know this is Canadian so different jurisdiction but here is an example of one: https://montreal.ca/en/services/digital-book-loans

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?

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.

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.

What size of storage would you need?

Patronage? Large Advances + Subscriptions?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

Instead IA pursued a strategy that would fail...and for what to put the IA mission in harm's way

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?

Software gets bit more messy as it needs to be installed, but why not share saas seats, just somehow enforce single concurrent user...

So digital library, lending books over Internet is much better than a physical library.

> [...] The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords

-- 17 U.S. Code § 504(c)(2) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

But NEL threw all that out the window. And COVID was a pretty translucent fig leaf. It's not like there is any shortage of public domain works "for the children" out there even if copyright terms should be shorter.

And yet, the IA is 100% aiming to absolutely reproduce literally every part of the work in a 100% complete manner that replaces the original use of the work.

And you cannot bring yourself to admit that the IA is wrong. When you get to that point you have to admit to yourself that you're not making an argument your pushing a dogma.

Sounds sensible. I also wouldn't want to host such content tbh, similar to CSAM or pirated movies or so, hosting this material sounds somewhere between being a dick and a shortcut to getting the whole site taken down

I could see the point of keeping it around for research and law enforcement purposes but not the general public

I'm glad to hear this is not about censoring for a political agenda, that would have been a huge blow to how I value and trust the IA with what I've come to find a very useful function on the internet

Just shows how far forward we have progressed. Maybe book burnings next to prevent resale?

>one man's seemingly fanatical conviction against the law

Reviewing the large number of amicus briefs on the Archive's side, from the get-go through appeals, refutes the idea this was a solitary crusade: https://blog.archive.org/2023/12/29/friend-of-the-court-brie...

Those supporting IA's position range from the American Library Association (the world's oldest & largest library advocacy group), to individual libraries of all kinds, to expert IP law academics, to public-interest advocates like the Center for Democracy & Technology or Public Knowledge, to fellow open-culture organizations like Wikipedia, Creative Commons, & Project Gutenberg. Also: lots of book authors, including those with commercial success & titles inside the IA's lending program.

The IA was in the leading position, sure – but taking the arrows for a very large group of like-minded organizations sharing a stance against copyright maximalism. Personalizing it as one man's radical crusade is odd.

>asked to stop… tried to open a dialogue

Saying no to the copyright maximalists, even through their claims of absolute control & threatened or actual lawsuits, has been essential in establishing the actual settled law around copyright.

What sort of 'dialogue' can be had when the sides have incompatible views of the law: one believing in a permissionless right to do an exact something (supported by reasoning & precedent) and another asserting an absolute right to prohibit that exact same thing (supported by other reasoning & precedent)? Each side needs to enact their beliefs then resolve it in the courts.

HathiTrust - a major consortium of university libraries – was the named defendent in an earlier lawsuit by some of the same copyrightholder interests with regard to Google Books scanning. (It's also an ally of the Internet Archive in this fight.) Should HathiTrust have rolled over when "asked to stop" scanning by rightsholders? Absolutely not: they won in court & on appeal.

If Sony hadn't appealed the Betamax decision to the Supreme Court, VCRs & everything since that let people record their own copies of TV programs could've been "illegal". A mere 'dialogue' with TV broadcasters or moviemaker trade associations couldn't have done anything: the issues had to be ruled on by legal authorities.

>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.

I agree that the overheated rhetoric from both the plaintiffs (about giant but never-proven sdamages) and defendants (about how central these principles are to IA) may have created that impression in some coverage – but the idea this was ever existential for IA, in legal costs or potential damages, is pure paranoid fantasy.

As a non-profit, the IA files detailed form 990s with the IRS showing income & expenses. I challenge you to find any hint of legal costs changing other operations in the years since the lawsuit was filed (2020) and appeals launched.

I suspect, but have no inside info, that much of the costs were borne by other advocacy & legal organizations/donors that wanted to pursue a ruling on these particular essential issues. That is: this battle was fought with resources targeted for this program and these legal principles, not resources diverted from other programs.

As part of private settlement with the plaintiffs in 2023 – not any court monetary judgment against it – the IA agreed to make some undisclosed payment but ALSO had permission from the plaintiffs for IA to continue to pursue appeals (like the one just ruled-upon) on the issues important to IA, at no risk of further damages.

That's hardly the "scorched earth" plaintiff behavior implied by some hyped coverage imagining an IA bankruptcy, or other threats to its ability "to survive".

This was always a dispute on some copyright principles; it will be a loss to the public if IA's vision of format-shifted digital lending is ultimately ruled illegal, but no impact to IA's other long-established programs.

Finally: this may not be the final chapter & ruling on these issues. Sony had to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court before getting the Betamax ruling in 1984. Google had to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court before getting a ruling that API reimplementation could be fair use in 2021. I don't know if IA will judge it as worthwhile to appeal. But they might! And before those other historic final appeals, the preceding judgements seemed pretty definitive and bleak for the ultimate victors.

Maybe it shouldn’t. There is value in asking if there is a better home for those projects.

Oh no, won't someone think of the rights of the poor poor publishers :(((

The fact that IA disregards copyright law and seems to have a "wait to be sued" mentality means that the donations end up feeling more like lobbying money and less like funding an actual Archive. I'd be totally fine with a CDL being codified into law, and I'd even be fine with IA's version of it, but it doesn't change the fact that Brewster is treating IA like an ideological mission now more than an Archive.

If you want to donate your money to it, that's obviously fine, but I think that it's important to be honest about it.

CDL had been going on for years in a bit of a cold war. Publishers had a lot to lose if they lost CDL and just lived with it. When NEL happened, they decided to use their nukes. They had a rock-solid case against NEL, so might as well use it and try to take out CDL at the same time.

If they lost CDL but won NEL, they would be back where we've started for years.

I look forward to all the new AA mirrors + contributions that are going to come from disgruntled archivists.

And everybody in the libraries/archives space going on downloading sprees. Most of us have personal illegal libraries. We just don't share them.

I just sent emails into the void per their request for more than a year: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...

After nothing worked I had to draft an official legal letter, which also took several months to get acted on.

I believe that, however, is irrelevant to the transformative nature of the end product - the model itself.

I would also encourage you tread Perfect 10 v Google and the appeal ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/05/google-v-perfect... https://www.eff.org/cases/perfect-10-v-google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com.... )

From Wikipedia:

> The Ninth Circuit did, however, overturn the district court's decision that Google's thumbnail images were unauthorized and infringing copies of Perfect 10's original images. Google's claimed that these images constituted fair use, and the circuit court agreed. This was because they were "highly transformative." The court did not define what size a thumbnail should be but the examples the court cited was only 3% of the size of the original images. Most other major sites use a size not longer than 150 pixels on the long side. Specifically, the court ruled that Google transformed the images from a use of entertainment and artistic expression to one of retrieving information, citing the precedent Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation. The court reached this conclusion despite the fact that Perfect 10 was attempting to market thumbnail images for cell phones, with the court quipping that the "potential harm to Perfect 10's market remains hypothetical."

> The court pointed out that Google made available to the public the new and highly beneficial function of "improving access to [pictorial] information on the Internet." This had the effect of recognizing that "search engine technology provides an astoundingly valuable public benefit, which should not be jeopardized just because it might be used in a way that could affect somebody's sales.

If resizing an image to a fraction of the size of the original is sufficiently transformative and useful for a different thing (image search rather than selling thumbnails for cellphone porn) is considered fair use, then direct parallels could be drawn from that ruling to OpenAI's use of copyrighted material being sufficiently transformative and irrespective of someone selling summaries of a copyrighted work.

---

If you believe that OpenAI and other LLMs are infringing and not covered by fair use, it would be helpful if you could write a bit on how they fail at the four tests of fair use described in https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

And if that's wrong, is me lending a book to a friend wrong?

Perhaps diligent but conservative government archives should be run by your gray ideal of "boards of archivists and librarians".

But the Internet Archive was founded to be an activist organization, in deed and legal strategy. When you start, fund, or staff an archive, you can run it as risk-averse as you'd like.

I see that many people here do not care about IA and their goal. I am not sure why that is. Maybe HN is filled with people in places were access to books is easy and think that there is an alternative. What IA did was the only sane option, I agree that it was bound to be destroyed the same way Google Books was.

I'm genuinely not sure what you're saying here.

That's not even addressing the magic of infinite copying-- lets suppose we all agree publishers deserve secondary markets be restricted to physical copies. Then the digital age gives us literal magic portals but the benefits are withheld from society because... they want their money. There were laws protecting that money before so the intent of the law is to protect the money in the new age too. For shame.

Except the whole reason this case exists is that publishers think they have found a clever way around the first sale doctrine.

Generally speaking, when you request a site, barring a compelling reason to believe otherwise, the assumption must be that accessing the content is legal.

Even if that were true, they could have still been waiting for something like NEL to start the process, if nothing else to get the narrative on their side.

I don't know, I don't work for a book company.

The CDL is where they would buy N physical copies of a book, and then allow N active rentals of the digitally scanned version of that book with a waiting list for when people "return" them. Can't do that anymore.

Breaking laws and pushing to change them has been the modus operandi for some of tech’s biggest names.

It’d be interesting to see how this might have played out if the IA had the resources that Uber, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, etc have at their disposal.

It’s a sobering look at who actually has power to shape the legal landscape, and which direction it’s likely to be shaped in.

Whether or not I'd suggest that if AI makes reverse-engineering easy (and I see no reason why it won't) then users will use it on an individual basis. Detecting the myriads of breaches would be a nightmare for any law/courts system. Ultimately, the paradigm will have to change.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus>

The first US Public Library dates to 1848 (Boston).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Public_Library>

The first public libraries ever dates to at least the 4th century BCE, with one known instance begun by Clearchus in Heraclea, on what is now the Black Sea coast of Turkey.

<https://research-bulletin.chs.harvard.edu/2017/09/11/clearch...>

More recently, and post-classical / Roman times, there is still the 1447 example of the Malatestiana Library.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malatestiana_Library>

Public libraries significantly pre-date the First Sale doctrine by several measures.

I've thought since the beginning of this saga that a change in statute would pretty much be needed for CDL or something similar. The idea being to craft something that extends the philosophy or idea of libraries in the face of an increasingly digital world where doing much of anything requires a copy, things are licensed rather than sold, and the first sale doctrine has little application, but I agree with you that such an idea has dim prospects.

IMO, properly executed CDL had/has a good chance of succeeding.

IA is most certainly holding some amount of content that is copyrighted and currently sold like they mentioned. It's just not easy to find.

How does this same thing not apply to physical libraries then? Even if the scope were limited to books IA itself owns (which they still denied anyways), why should one-to-one digital lending be any different than physical in-person library book lending?

"IA maintains that it delivers each Work “only to one already entitled to view [it]”―i.e., the one person who would be entitled to check out the physical copy of each Work. But this characterization confuses IA’s practices with traditional library lending of print books. IA does not perform the traditional functions of a library; it prepares derivatives of Publishers’ Works and delivers those derivatives to its users in full. That Section 108 allows libraries to make a small number of copies for preservation and replacement purposes does not mean that IA can prepare and distribute derivative works en masse and assert that it is simply performing the traditional functions of a library. 17 U.S.C. § 108; see also, e.g., ReDigi, 910 F.3d at 658 (“We are not free to disregard the terms of the statute merely because the entity performing an unauthorized reproduction makes efforts to nullify its consequences by the counterbalancing destruction of the preexisting phonorecords.”)."

This is really an issue that has to be fixed legislatively rather than in the courts.

Also, as far as I know that isn’t what physical libraries do. They buy licenses to share e-books. And don’t physically scan anything.

Say for instance, I buy a book. I make a scanned copy and lend out the original. The person who borrowed the book, makes a copy and sends it back. I do this for 1 million times. I wasn't distributing copies, no one was distributing copies.

This is what we did in Uni. The class would contribute some small amount to the purchase of an original book. Then the person who bought the original with the classes money, made a copy, passing the original along. Within the week, every student had borrowed that book. And everyone had a copy. Do you see the murky water?

Not really. This put a huge chilling effect on real attempts at CDL, which IA was not.

Was anyone else doing anything? Or standing ready to do anything?

Yes, absolutely. Insiting on business models that depend on scarcity when that scarcity doesn't actually exist is absurd and the costs to society are astronomical.

> Despite everything I've said here until now I'm not against creators receiving fair recompense for their efforts.

No copyright doesn't mean no copensation, it just means that compensation cannot be enforced on a per-copy basis. Creative works, including for-profit creations, have existed long before copyright.

But let's also not pretend that creators receive fair compensation today.

This is why local libraries are getting bled by their e-book subscriptions. They end up paying through the nose for people to check out e-books.

Also, copying is ok in some cases; for example, the court found that Google scanning books for Google Books did it legally; 17 US Code 108 and 109 provide some exemptions from copyright.

Especially if a comment is thoughtfully written, contains multiple aspects and might just get upvotes for reasonably looking at both sides like in this thread. Being thoughtful, mindful, respecting and trying to not see something in black and white can get upvotes just for being like that. And that's just one tiny aspect of why top comment isn't necessarily the most popular argument. Timing (resulting in more views and possibly upvotes) and other facotrs all play a role (not sure how much this is mitigated by the ranking algorithm.

I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. Hard to think I would ever donate to them again unless there's a change in leadership after this fiasco.

And I've only got a little bit of time in this life; I'd much rather read a trashy romance novel that was written this year and meant to entertain me than the trashy romance with politics that make me cringe that my mom was reading 50 years ago.

This is why, for example, the Library of Congress doesn't just keep a copy of everything. It's not just a space constraints or storage costs issue; it's a signal-to-noise ratio issue. As Mark Crislip is fond of saying, when you mix apple pie and cow pie it doesn't make the cow pie better, it just makes the apple pie worse.

Or, from another POV, cultural artifacts we dig out from earth millennia after they were buried still preserve something valuable. An entity like IA should think past one lifetime.

> The rights of reproduction and distribution under this section extend to the isolated and unrelated reproduction or distribution of a single copy or phonorecord of the same material on separate occasions, but do not extend to cases where the library or archives, or its employee—

> is aware or has substantial reason to believe that it is engaging in the related or concerted reproduction or distribution of multiple copies or phonorecords of the same material, whether made on one occasion or over a period of time, and whether intended for aggregate use by one or more individuals or for separate use by the individual members of a group; or

> engages in the systematic reproduction or distribution of single or multiple copies or phonorecords of material described in subsection (d): Provided, That nothing in this clause prevents a library or archives from participating in interlibrary arrangements that do not have, as their purpose or effect, that the library or archives receiving such copies or phonorecords for distribution does so in such aggregate quantities as to substitute for a subscription to or purchase of such work.

...

> (1) For purposes of this section, during the last 20 years of any term of copyright of a published work, a library or archives, including a nonprofit educational institution that functions as such, may reproduce, distribute, display, or perform in facsimile or digital form a copy or phonorecord of such work, or portions thereof, for purposes of preservation, scholarship, or research, if such library or archives has first determined, on the basis of a reasonable investigation, that none of the conditions set forth in subparagraphs (A), (B), and (C) of paragraph (2) apply.

> (2) No reproduction, distribution, display, or performance is authorized under this subsection if—

> (A) the work is subject to normal commercial exploitation;

> (B) a copy or phonorecord of the work can be obtained at a reasonable price; or

> (C) the copyright owner or its agent provides notice pursuant to regulations promulgated by the Register of Copyrights that either of the conditions set forth in subparagraphs (A) and (B) applies.

---

I believe that the covering of scanned / copied materials by a library are fairly well covered, and that Internet Achieve stepped clearly beyond that definition.

There are four factors of fair use. Factor three is the amount or substantiality is being copied. You're somewhat right there isn't an entirely objective standard to measure things, but there isn't exactly an objective measure to creativity.

You can't put something on a scale and get units of creativity a work has. You can't get a graduated stick and measure the creativity of a work.

I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?

I'm about 95% sure a scheme like that would still find them shut down. Remember the Aereo decision? They went through similar contortions, including building an antenna farm with thousands of tiny individual antennas, and were immediately killed off by the courts because it was seen as a legal hack. Such a scheme might threaten cable TV income if it were allowed to stand. Protecting incumbents from competition is a vital role of the courts.

Hard agree, and this is how I've felt since they started this whole boondoggle.

> Maybe the community trust in IA has been misplaced. The mission on their website clearly says they want to serve "All Knowledge" but I'm not alone in thinking it would be best for them to narrow their scope to just internet-related things, and specifically, things that aren't served by other archive or library sources.

I'm a librarian/archivist and my very first career goal back in the 90s was to work for the IA - digital preservation is why I went into the field. They've essentially torched my opinion of them by doing this, and I was one of their biggest supporters/proponents. Even my most charitable readings of their actions lead me to think that either their egos got in the way (because oh goodness did they ever get accolades within the profession and librarianship/archivism has a severe problem with not thought out armchair activism) or they're just idiots when it comes to tactics and strategy. Either of which suggest to me that they are thoroughly unsuited to run an archive of any importance.

They don't own these books, only pay-as-you-go licenses to do exactly what they do.

This was ruled illegal.

The letter of the law isn't the real law; the real law is that you must pay money to large media corporations or else. We now have two instances.

I'm teetering at the top of a very tall fence on the _should_ question.

Publishers have always been opposed to digital first sale for a very simple reason: fear that their prices will go to zero. Used physical books prices are pennies on the dollar for new book prices, on the basis of the condition/deterioration issue. The quality/condition issue doesn't exist for digital works. If Amazon could offer "used" digital copies of publisher e-books, the customer would be choosing between identical binaries at 10-1 price ratios _at best_. I really don't see any other way that this goes. Sure, capitalism isn't for the weak, yadda yadda, new models, but how's it going to work. Amazon's Kindle Unlimited is an alternate model, but Amazon already has enormous control over publisher fortunes. "Should the current publishers exist" is a really interesting question. I'm just not sure I want to find out by handing all compensated book publishing to Amazon.

So why am I on the fence? Well, I have paid for 2000+ ebooks. I wouldn't mind being able to transfer them to my children without limitation, or to friends. If there were a resale mechanism no more disruptive than used paper books, I would probably have sold some of them already. It's not that I don't appreciate the value or convenience of resale, but that I consider the side effects.

The second question is, "Does current law support digital first sale?" First off, I am not a lawyer, and I'm not giving legal advice. However, the words of the law are pretty damn clear, to be honest, that it does not. You found section 109, which is correct, but you're relying on the colloquial meaning of the word "copy." You need to look up the words "copy" and "phonorecord" in the definitions, section 101, so that you can see that in this law both words refer to _material objects_ in which a work is fixed.

A paper book is a material object. You can sell the book. The buyer owns the physical book - the stack of paper and binding - and can read it.

A CD or DVD is a material object. You can sell the flashy mirror thing. The buyer owns the flashy mirror thing and can listen to the album or play the movie.

An ebook is just not a material object. In most cases, they are not with a single physical object, but licensed as downloads according to fairly restrictive terms. If you have a physical object with a duly licensed ebook on it, you're probably allowed to sell that physical object (unless it's a Cybertruck, I guess.) However, the license on that download is still going to be what controls. Your Kindle has Kindle software tied to your Amazon account that allows you to read the books you've bought, and I'm really pretty certain you can't sell your Amazon account and all your individual access rights.

Various entrepreneurs have tried to convince courts that some variant of "one-copy-at-a-time" digital first sale tech fits under 109, and courts look for the material object and note that it is not there.

So, anyway, the law is not written so that ingenious digital technology that ensures that a digital copy is only possessed by one person at time can fall under first sale. It's written so that physical objects that contain or embody copyright-protected works can be sold.

IA isn't going to shut down over this, I don't think. I don't think they'll pay any damages at all, since there's a statute that suggests damages be remitted for nonprofits.

Again: the real damage is a 2nd Cir. precedent that 1:1 CDL fails the fair use test. That's going to hurt other people. This happens often enough that there's a saying about it: "bad facts make bad law."

My understanding is that, for the purposes of determining fair use, a derivative work is substantially the same thing but in a different format. Transformative work must involve significant additional creative contribution "Changing the medium of a work is a derivative use rather than a transformative one." They cite previous case law that holds repackaging a print book as an e-book as a "paradigmatic example of a derivative work." The law also offers some paradigmatic examples of transformative work, such as criticism, commentary and scholarship.

Based on all of that, I would guess that, for the purposes of copyright law, a JPEG of a painting is absolutely a derivative work and not a transformative one.

on edit: actually I also think that a JPEG of the Mona Lisa is derivative, but just noting that the value we ascribe to the Mona Lisa is something like the concept of Mana for art https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

Further: it seems weird to blame judges for applying what is in fact very straightforward law. Seems like your problem is with Congress!

No, a LOT of people in these very threads are arguing that the CDL IS 100% legal and that the ruling is ... well, many things.

Even if it didn't, preserving places like KF is necessary to prevent future scholars from having a really warped idea of what the Internet was like in the 2020s. I find KF extremely off putting (I lurked there long enough to form my own opinion), but I'm not sure how a person is supposed to research how to prevent unhealthy communities from forming without examples of said communities.

I also find it darkly hilarious/sus in light of the fact that one of the primary points of the social justice movement is how we've whitewashed/erased our history. (e.g. how Americans' history education has minimized the perspective of Native Americans or omitted uncomfortable facts about racial discrimination). Are they against historical revisionism or do they just think they'd pick better things to 'erase'? I feel the same way about censoring books that use the n-word: knowing that was at one point acceptable really hammers home how acceptable open racism was for most of American history. Censoring/omitting places like KF from archives (when those archives claim to be representative/neutral) is going to give the impression that there was far more consensus on the 2010s/2020s Internet than there actually was. It's misleading.

>Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites?

Now that I have looked at it, I likely will. I never was one to donate my money to anybody (especially with no income...), but now being employed I believe it's only fair to give them a little bit here and there for them to keep afloat.

>To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything

Neither am I. I just believe that an archive shouldn't be biased - and should keep all stuff up as long as it isn't strictly illegal, eg. CSAM or piracy. This is a blurry line though - I myself would like to be able to check out a hypothetical neo-Nazi group's website after they are all arrested for doing X to check what its contents looked like - but I am definitely in a minority here. So, essentially... >the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation. Significant can be discussed, but I see it as a very subjective measure.

[1] https://buymeacoffee.com/archive.today

If we want media licenses to cost thousands of dollars so they can be loaned out digitally fine. That's something that can be fairly negotiated.

What I oppose is a regular off the shelf purchase being used for unlimited, instantaneous digital rentals. That's disastrously terrible idea.

No. I'm focusing on all media - books, tv, movies, games, etc. It's one set of copyright laws.

> so are physical libraries also nonsense?

Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers. Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfer of non-degradable goods does not strike a reasonable balance.

That's exactly what it's about. Publishers lost the battle of banning libraries, but have won and keep winning everything about digital books.

The end effect is that people have fewer liberties when it comes to digital things. Authors don't gain much. All the profit goes to the publishers.

I wonder why judges are anti-library. Although I can understand why they are generally anti-technology: the law school people have a lot of beefs, and beefs with the compsci people rank highly. And before you start telling me all the reasons why “beefs” aren’t a central part of the character of judges and therefore law in this country, you should maybe read more about guys like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Yikes. I can not possibly disrespectfully disagree more with everything you said.

Baldur's Gate 3 has sold about 15 million copies. It's peak concurrent user count on Steam is 875,343. A difference of about 20x that will continue to grow as BG3 will sell meaningful copies over the next 10 years.

Limiting sales to peak CCU is categorically insane. And deeply illogical.

And yes I am talking about a video game because the copyright laws for books and games are the same. I would expect the CCU/sales ratio for most successful books to be even larger than that of games which have a much more hyped launch day.

I think everyone can agree we've seen from academic publishing what a shitshow {public need} + {extractive private IP ownership} can be.

Requesting libraries to enter into agreements with publishers in order to loan copies of their books isn't in the public interest.

Because invariably these publishers will realize they can bump rates year over year. And then private equity will realize they can buy these rights holders for a secure income stream. And then the year over year price growth will accelerate.

And contrast this with physical first sale doctrine. (1) The library bought or was donated a copy of the book. (2) As long as they could store it, no publisher could tell them a damn thing about how they could and couldn't loan it.

The publishers and the third party platforms libraries force people to use for digital lending can force ebook readers to create accounts and hand over their personal data and reading history and those platforms use that to push ads or sell that data to publishers and other third parties.

What the internet archive was doing didn't allow publishers to collect/sell that personal data, didn't give them the ability to limit/censor/remove titles at any time, and didn't allow them to charge excessive fees for the "privilege" of loaning the book electronically. From the stance of the publisher they risked losing a lot of money and power. From the stance of everyone else what the internet archive was doing was an improvement.

The creative part being protected by copyright are the words, not the physical pages. You're not transforming the words; you're transforming the paper to bitmaps. All the words and concepts within them are the same. It's not transformative in the same way ripping a CD to an MP3 isn't transformative.

If I change the font for an ebook, have I meaningfully transformed it?

Have you downloaded and checked this file to make sure that it is a playable copy of Super Mario Wonder rather than some other file labeled as such? Have you reported it, and if so how long ago?

Second link on the page. How is this warez distributor still online?

Calling the cops right now!

2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions.

3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consumers had with physical books, to be specific: a right to re-sell the book, a right to lend the book, a right to make archival copies etc.

I hope the likes of the Library of Congress are ready to shutdown their online services.

If it was over the NEL, the case would have been over ~4 years ago when they shut down the NEL.

This lawsuit came about in very large part because Internet Archive stopped linking to physical copies on hand during covid. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

In almost every other country in the world libraries do pay a royalty to lend books.

It's notable that the IA service was not geofiltered to the US only.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452031

The copying only exists on a technical level because digital stuff is weird. Only one copy is usable at a time.

So either IA is guilty of copying because of a technicality, or normal libraries are only allowed because of a technicality/exception. (Because normal libraries fail the transformation test, they fail the amount copied test, they fail the expressive nature test, and they fail the market impact test.)

I want to believe the former is correct. Either way I believe there should be a way for IA to access that same "this isn't considered copying" territory somehow.

It takes only a working mind to know that, and the court's decision was obvious to most before it was rendered. This could have been foreseen (and was).

> You apparently forget that the Wayback Machine itself breaks copyright laws and went to court over this many times.

...and they had good reason to do so then as there were fair use arguments to be made in favor of what they'd done. That was not the case here, and they were warned repeatedly and chose to ignore that advice.

> The IA exists in the first place because Brewster Kahle isn't afraid to test what's possible and go to court if necessary.

There's a difference between being unafraid and being foolish. Guess which one this was.

> You can take it or leave it. Or you can build your own archive... oh wait, you can't because it breaks the copyright law which is unacceptable for you.

Ah yes, except for that whole fair use thing and explicit carve-outs for the actually legal work they do, which I've been commending throughout this entire thread. Please take your blackwhite thinking elsewhere. It's not productive.

Seriously, I don't understand the reluctance of some to admit this. It's almost like the rule of law just doesn't exist for you as long as it's a cause you care about. Even more puzzling is the idea that you should just wantonly break the law in a way that drags down good institutions with you as if your own personal battle with bad law is more important than anything else. It really isn't, and I wish some of you would accept that fact rather than trying to one-up each other on the internet. It's not helping anybody.

They broke the law. This isn't that hard to understand. If you don't like the law then either work to change it, create substitute works, or break the law in a way that doesn't involve dragging down the archive with you.

In terms of the fair use argument that could have been made, the Internet Archive's CDL obviously failed "nature of" and "amount and substantiality of", but I think it did not inherently fail "purpose and character" or "effect of the use", despite the decision saying it did.

In terms of concrete legal changes that could and should happen: "right of first sale" should be updated for digital, and include both "right to do format-shifting" (e.g. scanning physical to digital) and "right to lend copies digitally" (just like first-sale already explicitly allows physically).

Ultimately, the law will either have to change to be fairer and recognize the buyer's investment or digital copying (piracy) will overwhelm it. It's not if but when (technology almost makes that axiomatic).

This will not happen immediately but as US influence in the world declines other fairer paradigms will emerge. As we've seen already, probably about one third of the planet's population pays little heed of copyright law, or it does so in name only—and that number will only increase with time (and as copying tech improves even further).

The US and Western countries have a choice, be fairer and less greedy or suffer the consequences.

Right, copyright law needs to respect your ownership of that physical property. That bound collection of paper. That stamped piece of vinyl. That reel of magnetic tape. That plastic disc. The copyright protects the ideas and creative stuff on that medium, but not the actual medium itself. You don't actually own any of the ideas that medium contains, but you do own the actual medium.

But what property do you actually own when you "buy" a digitally distributed work? What is the "that" in this case? A collection of bits that are indistinguishable from every other copy of the file? Isn't that what is actually copyrighted, and not the "that"?

But wait, there's more!: https://archive.org/details/pcgames-jp-part2

And more!: https://archive.org/details/pcgames-jp-part3 and https://archive.org/details/pcgames-jp-part4

2TB of warez in just four links.

But that was way too easy, I just listed 2TB of mostly Japanese eroge. What about more mainstream stuff?

Presenting the PS1 release of Castlevania - Symphony of the Night, and in fact you can only play it on Internet Archive in the browser: https://archive.org/details/psx_sotn

And there's a lot more PS1 games where that came from: https://archive.org/details/psxgames

You can also enjoy a collection of Game Boy Advance games, nevermind that Nintendo is really draconian about ROMs right?: https://archive.org/details/gba_rpg_pack

But I've only linked to games so far, how about something proper adults would use? Here's Photoshop CS8 and it even comes with a keygen!: https://archive.org/details/photoshop-cs-8.

Actually, you know what? Just going through the latest uploads also proves my point: https://archive.org/search?query=mediatype:software&sort=-pu...

The moral of this digression is this: Internet Archive engages in wanton distribution of warez.

And once again a note to dang and friends: Not condoning piracy, these links are to prove a point.

> Note again that a query MUST NOT be refused solely because it provides 0 address bits.

The shenanigans are absolutely on archive.is's side here.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7871#section-7.5

Present a better battle. I can't think of one - just that, enlarged in other fields. The battle against ignorance is the only one battle. Hail to the battle.

First sale doctrine (in the US) said the buyer owned the physical copy and could resell or do what they wanted with that single copy.^

Obviously, that isn't portable to a zero-copy-cost digital realm.

However, the "buyers never actually own anything digital" modern reality is vastly different than the historical norm, in favor of publishers and platforms.

What was missed was the conversation around what baseline we should establish around digital ownership.

We've nibbled around the edges (you have a right to decrypt something you've purchased, in some cases), but we never clarified it sufficiently.

And without clarity, buyers only get whatever rights publishers/platforms decide to grant them.

IMHO, we'd be better served by establishing a clear floor of digital ownership rights, that no publisher or platform had the legal right to remove or obstruct.

That's how we did it previously, and it worked well...

^ There were some exclusions around mass/public broadcasting, but those were pretty limited.

Your idea is to eliminate the very concept of a library where ebooks are concerned.

You may want to rethink your argument.

> What I fear most is that copying tech will become so easy that any sense a human can experience will be able to be copied.

For many people and mediums this is already the case. What bothers me most is that this normalizes outlaw behavior. That is usually an indication that the law is wrong, but in the meantime it erodes our collective morals.

It just didn’t materially hurt anyone, and it made a lot of people happy.

I think it was great, and while, sure, the battle was probably lost from the beginning, I like it when people challenge existing conventions. I’ve never stopped donating.

People were banned from exiting their homes. Libraries were forcibly closed. Emergency lending of digital books is the most noble battle they could have chosen.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Anyway.

First you need to legally define the kinds of licenses we care about. There's a bunch of very good reasons why permission can't be sold, so we want to make it clear that we're only talking about things that function like a sale. That is, one-time purchases of works that are downloaded to a device and whose license grants fall within normal use of that work. This is the sort of thing that needs to be drafted water-tight because the industry absolutely will search for excuses to not comply with the law.

Second, we need to define how a transfer can be done and who needs to honor it. This has per-work and per-service considerations, especially in games[1], which have anticheat and toxic player removal. There are times where a copyright owner has a legitimate interest in taking away the thing you bought because you are ruining the experience for everyone else. So we need carveouts for our carveouts, both of which need to be carefully drafted to not interfere with anticheat.

And this is only considering digital-to-digital first sale. That's easy to do because the systems already exist to revoke and delete your ownership over digital copies of works; you just aren't allowed to use them for first sale purposes. We're ultimately just dictating that certain kinds of DRM license files have a legal mechanism to transfer between owners.

Physical-to-digital schemes like the IA's Controlled Digital Lending pose an additional problem: there's nothing to physically enforce the destruction or disabling of the physical copy when you convert it to a digital one and lend it. The book doesn't refuse to open because someone has it open in Adobe Editions. Everything is done on the honor system and there's massive incentives to cheat CDL. The discovery on the IA lawsuit showed that they basically had never complied with their own legal theory. They had partner libraries who were counting copies of books as digitally loanable without actually taking them out of circulation, and when IA had discovered this on their own, they never did anything to take that library out of the system.

An actually legal CDL regime would need infrastructure to support itself. I'm talking legally qualified DRM banks that could lock up or burn books in exchange for DRM limited files that accurately represented the time in which the physical side of the book was inaccessible. That's... still extremely complicated. Actually, screw CDL. If we're talking about amending the law, there is a far easier way to go about fixing the problem with ebook lending: Book Communism!

Compulsory licensing is a scheme in which the government sets the price of a specific kind of copyright license. If you pay that amount of money to the copyright owner, you automatically have that permission, they can't say no. Naturally, copyright owners would liken this to theft, but they thought your dad's VCR was a home-invading rapist[2], so I don't consider their opinions on the subject to be meaningful. The idea is actually pretty straightforward: having a government-set license price makes licensing a lot more straightforward. Creative work owners can't make silly demands of users or withhold shit because their """strategy""" that quarter was to keep something off the market or sell exclusivity[3].

The specific imbalance that IA tried to fix with CDL is that libraries, being public services run by local governments, do not have negotiating leverage for favorable ebook lending terms with major publishers. "Just lend out physical books digitally" fixes the problem for libraries but the infrastructure needed to make this not unfair to authors or publishers is silly. Why can't we just have the federal government say, OK, we'll sell licenses in which any library can pay $X to the owner of a given book and then digitally lend it out Y times or for Z days? The Copyright Office or some administrative judge can determine fair values for X, Y, and Z.

[0] For one thing, if you are a small artist, you effectively do not have copyright protection because the enforcement costs for a single infringer greatly exceed your total revenues. Copyright is already a failed system.

[1] For example, if reselling whole accounts is legal, then I can buy hundreds of accounts, play the game I want to cheat in on each one, and switch accounts whenever I get banned.

If reselling individual licenses is legal, then after I get banned, I can resell the license - which continues to remain valid - and get my money back so I can repurchase the game on a new account with a fake identity.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...

[3] A related wrinkle in the CDL story is that publishers really, really hate libraries. Not because they let people read books for free - in fact, library circulation is actually really good advertising for sequels that won't hit libraries right away. The problem is that libraries are run by book fans, so they're going to recommend books they like, not what the publisher needs to sell that month.

The Internet Archive didn’t even get dragged into court for an interesting case, and their defiance was ideologically interesting but jurisprudentially uninteresting.

Let me try making my post a list of bullet points.

* Libraries are allowed because technically it's not copying, and otherwise would be very illegal. Agree or disagree?

* Controlled digital lending is only copying on a technical level, not in the traditional sense where more than one copy can be accessed simultaneously. Agree or disagree?

* If CDL could somehow remove that technicality and do pure digital transfers, it would be fine. Agree or disagree?

* A better version of copyright would ignore that technicality. Agree or disagree?

If you really, really want just pirate it. It's economically equivalent.

The ruling clearly addresses this in the section about the application of fair use to the idea of the CDL (that is, where the lending is controlled in the way we’re idealizing) and it was deemed obviously illegal. The very act of making and distributing a copy is what is infringement, and as the ruling clearly lays out none of the pillars of fair use come close to applying as a defense. Crucially, it is not transformative (it’s the same book used in the same way) and the entire work is copied.

The law is bad and it sucks and we need to change it. It’s depressing to me that so many really smart people don’t have a good understanding of this, probably because most infringement usually goes unpunished. We don’t get to deem it okay simply because it logically makes sense that controlled digital lending is obviously equivalent to physical lending. Unfortunately the act of making the copy and then distributing it changes everything.

> "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."

"Degradation" is the conception publishers want to think of applying to their goods. Because they want an income stream worthy of items that perish in a matter of years, not decades or centuries.

I've heard it was something about acidic paper (with it also being a plague of cheap printing, while being much less of an issue of expensive printing techniques).

(«several decades old» is a low bar...)