This might kill the Internet Archive as a legal entity in the US if the outcome is particularly unfavorable, but LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away.
> This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
Agree to disagree. Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. The Internet Archive could archive and maintain these works in cold storage (both physical and digital), only to make them public again 100-200 years from now, but that would not be keeping with "Universal Access to All Knowledge." Disk and bandwidth is cheap, and the planet is big.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyri...
(no affiliation, but a fan and a supporter, and believe in defending public goods)
>Agree to disagree.
>Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2].
This isn't a "disagreement" with the GP. Piracy is a legal concept, and they were speaking in legal terms. Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US.
>LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away.
Then why should internet archive, which fills a number of niches that aren't just book or document piracy, be killed off?
When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged. One should also have a plan if they fail.
Except the IA did not establish the NEL as an act of civil disobedience or call for changes to the unjust existing copyright laws when they did it. They instead told themselves and their patrons that there was a "national emergency" exception to copyright law, when no such exception existed. Should one have existed? Of course. But it did not at the time. The IA continued to assert that the NEL was legal within existing copyright law, not that it was a principled act of civil disobedience against an unjust law. They were trying to Jedi mind trick a "national emergency" exception to existing copyright law into existence.
If you want to challenge an unjust law in a democracy, you can work within the system to change it, or you can engage in civil disobedience, publicly accept the consequences, and put your freedom on the line as a way to bring popular attention to the unjust law. That is the mechanism of civil disobedience against unjust laws. The whole point is that you must risk something in order to go around the system and challenge an unjust law. Everyone in America has at least one law they consider to be unjust, including some laws that I'm sure you believe are very just and would be very upset if others started to violate them in the name of justice.
Birmingham banned Martin Luther King, Jr. from participating in public protests and a Circuit court judge signed off on it. When MLK said he would protest anyway, the whole point of the civil disobedience was that MLK would be arrested for it. He was right that the public was outraged at the enforcement of this unjust legal order and called for change. What the IA did was like if MLK put on a mask to go protest, and when the police tried to arrest him, he said that he wasn't MLK.
A global pandemic is a national emergency (I'm unsure how this cannot be argued considering the efforts both the US government and the Federal Reserve engaged in). The Internet Archive is at risk because of their actions, which can be argued to be in good faith during extraordinary times based on the events that occurred at that time [1]. You may not agree with regards to intent and the definition of good faith, but that is for the judicial process to resolve. If the Internet Archive legal entity is forced to dissolve, are legal participants on the other side of the civil suit prepared for the fallout from such an outcome (the "public outrage" you mention)?
I would argue the NEL is an example of fair use when the entire world is locked down [2] [3] [4], but I'm not the one who is defending the case. You're upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process. That isn't a Jedi mind trick, and to call it as such is silly ("The fair use right is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works. In the U.S., fair use right/exception is based on a flexible proportionality test that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work.").
Power concedes nothing without a demand. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Internet_publication
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Policy_arguments_abou...
> You're upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process.
I am not upset they are seeking a favorable interpretation of law through the judicial process. I am upset that they literally bet the entire organization on a questionable and novel legal theory, without acknowledging that they were putting the rest of their mission at such risk. You quoted some Wikipedia to me, but fair use is notoriously a minefield. You, me, the IA, and whoever edited that Wikipedia article all probably agree on how we think copyright law and fair use ought to be interpreted. But it seems like I am the only one of us who accepts that Big IP has a lot of influence over copyright law and that most judges don't think like us.
It would be one thing if the IA said, "We know we will be sued for this, and while we believe we will win this case and that the law is on our side, there is a very real possibility that we will not. If we lose, this may bankrupt our organization. However, we have a strong moral imperative to serve the people....." Or if they wanted to do a legal challenge to settle the law, they make one book from the most litigious publisher available for two people, record the entire thing, and send it to the publisher's lawyers. It goes to court
But they didn't. They responded to any criticism that this is risky in our current judicial system by saying that you can only believe it is risky because you don't share our views on what copyright ought to be.
> Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
That is maybe decent advice for dealing with parents or a boss, but not with the legal system. There is no forgiveness in copyright law. You don't escape liability just because you thought you were acting in good faith.
> If the Internet Archive legal entity is forced to dissolve, are legal participants on the other side of the civil suit prepared for the fallout from such an outcome (the "public outrage" you mention)?
As much as I love the core of the IA's mission, there will be no public fallout from this if the IA has to dissolve to pay its debts. I wish there would be, but I seriously doubt this would break through in our current political climate. This is one of the reasons I was so upset, because the IA does not have the political capital to pull off a civil disobedience project. And they didn't even try! Where is Brewster calling on Congress or the President to get a digital library exception added to any one of those bills or executive orders that were being passed around the national emergency?
> When one has the means and opportunity, unjust laws should be challenged.
Sure, but do they? They're a nonprofit, and as such depend on donations. Their donors might or might not be aligned on these two relatively orthogonal issues.
I'm even sympathetic of their desire to challenge the quite absurd status quo of controlled digital lending, with bizarre skeuomorphisms such as simulating "books wearing out" after a couple of lending cycles, while at the same time being more restricted than physical books (even though I don't necessarily agree with their means of challenging it).
But even for me, I think the risk is too big, and I'd feel much more comfortable with a different (maybe related/affiliated, but ultimately separated as legal entities) non-profit organization for each concern.
>Whether or not copyright has "worn out its welcome", it continues to be a legal reality in the US.
Unless you're a billion-dollar corporation who needs to feed your LLM.
To say nothing of the fully legal digital services (and physical checkouts with inter-library loans) that many public libraries in the US and I assume elsewhere offer.
The services they cannot afford?
https://apnews.com/article/libraries-ebooks-publishers-expen... ("Libraries struggle to afford the demand for e-books and seek new state laws in fight with publishers")
Consider the title above in the context of this post. It is libraries against publishers.
That may be but it exists today for the most part. And librarians at research libraries were grumbling at licensing costs for digital a couple decades ago. Not they were happy with physical subscriptions either.
> Piracy is a legal concept
Piracy is a PR/Marketing concept. Unless you are talking about commandeering or ransacking ships on the high seas.
Seriously, I don't understand how people can defend copyright at this point. Maybe at the beginning it was implemented properly. Maybe in theory it's a great idea. But - surprise, surprise! - it's been broken by corporations. Life + 70 years? gtfo.
Because people like the results of copyright, IE access to large amounts of resources including books, music, movies, and software that would not exist if there were not protections to ensure that the creators received compensation for their works.
I reject your hypothesis that nothing would exist if copyright didn't exist.
I wonder how humanity managed for so long without it, if that were the case. Or did we just not produce art or culture until we established copyright as we know it today?
Without copyright we would probably make mostly low-cost/small-scale art, of the type that can be achieved by a single person, and probably would not make big expensive collaborative projects like $100m+ blockbuster movies which are hard to bring into existence without a strong profit motive.
thank god. what was the last $100m+ movie you watched that you thought, wow, what a great piece of entertainment and/or art?
I could certainly do without big budget MCU slop, but Lord of the Rings? I am really glad that exists.
Copyright has (for better or worse) co-evolved with the technical ability to create effectively infinite copies of works, so I don't think we have any empirical data to prove or disprove this.
Right, we have no evidence that copyright helps promote the creation and distribution of arts, culture, or technology, and yet we restrict peoples' freedom to proliferate culture and art in the defense of it.
For recent or popular work maybe that kind of works yeah, for everything else though... I challenge you to find legally even early 2000s less popular movies or books, let alone older work.
The current copyright system is pretty terrible at keeping track of older content and the few ones that still manage to make it through have questionable rights holders.
Yeah it's pretty easy. I just went to a list of movies from 2001 by box office, number 100 was actually a cult classic now so skip that and I see the Tailor of Panama which is a less popular movie, steaming on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Tailor-Panama-Pierce-Brosnan/dp/B000X... and i can get a copy on DVD with interlibrary loan. The Shogun miniseries from the 1980s has some renewed interest since the new version and it's not streaming, but you can purchase a DVD on a bunch of places and once again, I can get it through my library.
Also worth mentioning that free licenses like Creative Commons, MIT, and FOSS licenses like GPL are also all copyright schemes, as unintuitive as that might seem.
The removal of all copyright also means the removal of licenses that mandate free sharing and access. Two-way street, in other words.
Those liscenses, the GPL in particular, use copyright to fight copyright. The alternative to copyright is not necessarily a total free-for-all, you could legislate a replacement that works like the (A)GPL or CC BY(-SA). Require attribution and share-alike without restricting usage or distribution.
GPL uses copyright to ensure that software that makes use of GPL licensed code will be free (libre).
Even in a world without copyright protections, the printer story ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt ) would still have occurred, but there would be no way to ensure that it won't happen again with GPL licensed code.
Without copyright, open source code could still be locked up behind paywalls and compiled binaries. It is copyright that ensures that the law is there to force people to release their code.
The hypothetical legislation to ensure the GPL or CC-BY-SA works is copyright.
You could replace the license with a "contract" in the terms and agreements section to achieve the same effect? Contract law would apply, so I have no idea.
One can agree that 70+ years is way too long without disagreeing with the basic principle of copyright.
That's true, but I actually disagree with the basic principle of copyright. I don't think that telling people they can't engage in certain creative acts encourages people to engage in creative acts.
I don't necessarily disagree with the basic principle of copyright. I just am unconvinced it's an attainable long-term goal. It seems to me that copyright in a capitalist society is bound to end up like this.
I don't believe in copyright at all, even in principle. The closest I can get is that it should be within the power of the state to grant temporary monopolies on things that it wants to encourage. But there is a basic conflict between freedom of expression and the fact that expressions can be copyrighted.
However, the idea that IA is going to defeat a copyright industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars is laughable. If you're going to fork between government choosing to end copyright and government choosing to end the IA, the IA is 100% dead.
Characterizing people who don't want the IA to risk all against copyright as copyright-supporters is not fair at all. It's like calling people Assadists who didn't want to invade Syria.
It may indeed kill the project and it's a tragic example of play stupid games win stupid prizes. There have been enough decades of lost lawsuits now that any thinking person ought to know better than to go sticking a fork in the outlet that is distributing copyrighted materials.
I think you've forgotten what 2020 was like. Libraries were closed. Schools were closed. Book stores were closed. Shipping was majorly slowed. Basically all public services were inaccessible to most people. Now imagine you're the kind of person who who founds and runs The Internet Archive for 25 years, not just another HN commenter bored at work. You're sitting in front of the button to help millions of people regain access to something the pandemic took away from them. Do you push the button, or do you cower away because some rich prick might sue you later?
I don't think the IA exists without the kind of person who pushes that button.
I don't actually care what 2020 was like because it isn't germane. No new legislation was passed meaningfully altering copyright law during that timeframe so this is absolutely a case of fuck around and find out, regardless of the optics.
Well, I expect that rigid respect for the law is why you didn't start the Internet Archive, and also why you weren't in a position to help millions of people during one of the biggest social upheavals in the last century :)
The law is the law. I don't have to respect it to grasp the concept of cause and effect. There wouldn't be much to talk about here if there wasn't a contingent whinging and ringing their hands as if any aspect of this situation was surprising or novel. Broadcast copyrighted material online without the benefits of significant opsec and you will get dragged in court, period. Hell it didn't take the recording industry 12 months to get a lock on Napster. Y'all need to quit playing like there's a victim here.
Yes, I think we are in agreement. If the law were respected, then the IA, the Wayback Machine, Abandonware Archive, and all of the benefits we get from them would not exist. It sounds like you think the law should be respected, so you think it's good for the IA to be destroyed by this lawsuit. Yes?
I think it's terrible that the Internet Archive is very likely destroyed, or at best, we have to donate a large sum of money to pay off Hachette.
But I think it was reckless to engage in uncontrolled ebook lending. Controlled lending (one copy lent for one copy on the shelf) is not a legal right (in the US), but it's got a much better chance of avoiding a lawsuit.
Uncontrolled lending was foolish. It was inviting a lawsuit, and it has far less chance of popular support than the intuitively more reasonable model of controlled lending.
I agree with the sentiment behind the NEL program: it's a lovely gesture. But to invite destruction of the Archive like that was a terrible mistake, in my view.
Clearly you aren't paying attention so allow me to reiterate:
Regardless of one's opinion on the IA or their mission, they objectively did a stupid when they decided to fuck around with copyright law. Publishers (and judges) have demonstrated repeatedly over the last two and a half decades that from a business perspective this is the equivalent of standing on railroad tracks giving an oncoming train the bird. 10/10 for balls, 2/10 for judgement.
If it turns out to have been a suicide button, then what the the IA needed most was the kind of person who would not have pushed that button.
What was wrong with all the works that are in the public domain?
Project Gutenberg is already a thing and it's apparently not sexy enough to warrant consideration?