I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass.
The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating.
But it's also because the plaintiffs are vindictive. They know this is about setting a precedent. They don't like the precedent, so they're out for blood. They could have been civilized and only asked for an injunction.
It’s not like the Archive doesn’t know what kind of people they are dealing with. They know publishers are out to stop second hand sales, ebook lending, right of resellers to set prices, and a million other things. It’s like expecting the RIAA or the MPAA to settle for an injunction when they have the chance to kill Napster/TPB/IsoTorrent/whatever. If it’s really in order to set a precedent then that’s damn short-sighted.
> The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating.
Are you trying to claim that Internet Archive purposely tried to set a precedent, knowing they don't have enough money to actually do it? That sounds like a pretty damning accusation of gross incompetence.
Actual Libraries buy materials and loan them. I don't think that is what archive.org was doing. I don't think the content owners are being bad guys here.
I found this initiative really irritating, as there are almost certainly better ways to accomplish the objective legally.
But I see only victims in this conflict. Most authors today don't really eat with golden spoons and to have an organisation that helps them get their fair share of the work they put into the books is certainly necessary in the internet age.
On the other hand the internet archive is an extremely valuable service. I hope some form of agreement can be reached that doesn't end in even more dysfunctional laws or judgments around copyright or the end of business for any participant.
The publishers have been out for their blood for a long time, this is essentially handing them a very easy victory. They'll be very lucky if they survive - and so will we.
Assuming it is possible to copy the data I would support an effort to make an off-line backup on the off chance that they get shut down completely and lose access to their assets.
If IA shuts down it will technically be the courts fining them, but I have trouble pinning blame on the court or the injured party asking for relief. Nor can IA claim ignorance here.
Either way, whoever gets the blame doesn't matter to the outcome. Court rulings don't have to be popular.
That's a lie, unless they are alleging that those print books were stolen, they were bought and paid for. That is how print books work, for the most part?
I hate that whole thing about requiring people to resign because they made a mistake (if it's genuine); obviously a pattern of mistakes is different. An obvious blunder would also be different, where it was self-evidently wrong and lacked mitigation.
What that tells you is that their board does not place the sustainability and long-term availability of the archive over all other metrics and I think that’s a fundamental issue that can’t be corrected. If growth, popularity, increasing in scope, etc are more important to the archive’s board than the guaranteed existence of the content they’ve curated ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now then they are not worthy protectors of it. The archive’s worth isn’t the data they have today, it’s the fact that they promised to safekeep it for the years to come. If they can’t be trusted to do that and place that over everything else, then they are failing what the whole world has been sharing data and making donations in the name of.
I really want the service provided by IA to continue. Even though I have never used it, I recognize how valuable it is to humanity as a whole. But if the people running organization providing that service are going to jeopardize it like that, then they must take responsibility.
Most non-profits, like almost all organizations, have the primary goal of continuing to exist as an organization, not do whatever charitable ideals they purport to support.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20623177
Archive team: is there a 101 on getting pages? I struggle to archive the things I want because of the JS interface and the generated data. I just want the links to the original GET 's and source files.
Torrents for the lowest level data per domain would be excellent. I would donate (again) to get priority for the ones I am interested in.
Similar experience here, the interface and, worse, the lack of built-in p2p redundancy, even on the gross level, is quite staggering considering that the Archive org has modelled itself around the protection and archival of brittle information.
Really hope the lawsuit swings in their favour but damn there's work to do for them. When they last held a fundraiser because their traffic overwhelmed their servers I had a look at their basic search front page - it came in at a staggering 7-8mb per pageload as compared to under 100kb for most regular search engines?! This frankly makes me unlikely to donate since it seems so mismanaged that one -cannot- throw enough money at that for it to work at scale.
I saw some API to manage ones' own collections but that seems to be only for owners...
Wouldn't that kill the organisation?
That's not at all self-evident, indeed quite likely false.
We had a similar discussion here a few times and content/program creators have said they made more money when their product was also available free - people tried it and bought it.
That probably only works for content creators who's stuff is good - publishers still want to sell stuff that's not good but just is packaged as if it were.
People who want free literature will find it, regardless of whether publishers consent.
As a sidenote, game publishers appear to be using a model of giving away an older game when a sequel is due out - it a similar game from the same company. Naturally one might think that this would eat in to potential profits, but I'm assuming they get more users for the new game, or at least profit more overall this way.
There's a difference between making your work free when most work is non-free and making most work free. When things are generally pay-walled, free content can get extra attention at the expense of paid content. When the expectation is that things are free, well, there isn't any more total attention to go around, so all that changes is that content creators stop being able to charge for their work.
More generally, positional goods exist, so you cannot reliably extrapolate from individual interest to group policy goals. When people want a bigger boat than their neighbors, you cannot subsidize boat-buying until everyone has the best boat on the block.
IA didn't release copyrighted books for free; at the very least this depends on your definition of "release" and personally after checking out a book I find that I no longer have access after ~2 weeks. This kind of timeline is much more like a library than a bookstore.
I think any smart author who cares about their craft, and knowledge in general, would much rather their publishing representative find a way to moderate and proactively track this new approach than turn the whole thing into a war, making a library--of all things--into the enemy.
Publishers repeatedly asked the IA to stop obviously breaking the law before filing the lawsuit, and were ignored.
Its right there in the article.
>In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists
Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
And they did it in the most blatantly illegal way possible, with a press release that removed any doubt as to whether the infringement was willful. Brilliant!
IA could have, for instance, reached out to local libraries to see if IA could "use" their physical copies for proxies of the digital ones IA was loaning. This would likely have been illegal, but far more palatable, justifiable, and importantly not willful infringement.
There's a long list of national and even worldwide problems I could solve, if only I was allowed to use other people's resources without their permission and was not required to compensate them in any way for that use.
I want to tackle all of those, but they would not get past the "ask a lawyer how much legal trouble it would be" stage, and so I do not actually do them.
>Its right there in the article.
The grandparent isn't questioning the motivation for breaking the law, they are asking why the organization would possibly think it's a good idea given the likely consequences.
Q: "Why do you rob banks?" A: "Because that's where the money is."
Do you have any data on that?
Clearly, we should shut down all the other libraries, too.
Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?
I'm not saying libraries shouldn't provide access to all types of books, but they could cut their costs considerably by waiting 6-12 months to stock the hot new book. Then they can use that money to provide other community services.
Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
Books should be in a digital format that has at least all of the the properties of a physical good. I agree that if one has a physical (or digital copy) of a work, that there is no-issue renting or temporarily transferring it for as many ownership tokens as you possess.
If the publishers want copy right protection from the government, they must use open formats, unencrypted, non-executable, bits I can copy/sell/rent/etc. If they want to use DRM, they get no copy right protection.
I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.)
Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.
And it run on DRM hardware only...
oh my, we live in the future https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
In some jurisdictions they are even taxed differently. Just to highlight to morose creeping evil that is VAT. Paper book is a necessity. eBook is a luxury. Apparently
If they somehow prevail on that aspect and set a legal precedent there, that would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of companies.
For example, Netflix could stream every movie ever, as long as they bought enough DVDs for peak demand. Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream the signal.
I just hope the IA doesn't get CDL shot down because of this and ruin it for everyone.
I believe Aereo tried just that and failed - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/25/325488386...
Aereo lost their case at the SCOTUS level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
IANAL, but I have trouble believing that the number of antennas matters. (And I assume Aereo tried every workaround they could think of. Although I believe there's another case at the moment with another organization trying a non-profit loophole.)
But, yes, at the moment it seems as if the IA has let the genie out of the bottle and may well force a ruling on something that the publishers were willing to let slide given the limited impact.
If they simply streamed the undecoded TV signals to their customers, they would have been fine. The Supreme Court decision constantly compared the Aereo service to previously litigated cases involving "antenna on top of hill really far from house as a service" (deemed to be legal).
The main reason for the original cable companies to pay is a loophole about 'distribution' because they're taking one antenna and boosting+splitting the result. Having separate antennas is a way to remove a loophole, IMO.
An interesting work around might be leasing physical shelf space, playback hardware, and then having someone physically move the disks. But I seriously doubt that would work.
Whoever thought this was a good idea should own up to it and step down, this was a dumb move if there ever was one and risking one of the prime - and very fragile - properties on the web like this was highly irresponsible. Keep in mind that IA already has plenty of enemies who are continuously monitoring it and hoping to find a way to shut them down, then hand them this sort of thing on a golden platter. Beyond stupid, really.
The only guess I can make is that there are people with power at the IA that fail to appreciate the value of the unique services the organization provides, and would rather be running a traditional library instead. Once the dust has settled, I would be interested in reading an account of how this happened.
They’re a DRM encumbered pile of JPEGs. The ebooks available at a local library via OverDrive are Kindle ebooks with all the searching and bookmarking enabled.
Torrents also seem like a perfect way to donate bandwidth and storage, and the IA already uses those.
The only problem with these approaches or generally any distributed file store is that someone will have to share a copy, so you'll mostly be donating bandwidth by storing a redundant copy of data that they likely have to store themselves as well to guarantee accessibility.
I wouldn't mind hosting a NAS in my closet and some bandwidth + storage to donate to the IA.
I also think cloud providers - all of them - have the capacity to host backups of the IA; I'd prefer if companies like Amazon, Google would donate their storage and bandwidth capacity to the IA instead of just money.
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....
and
Noted. I'll spend my money elsewhere.
Unfortunately, they own so many smaller publishers, that it's very hard to boycott all of their subsidiaries effectively and without harming the small fish.
But I do share your sentiment; I haven't loaned even one single book from IA emergency library and I still stand with them in support against opportunistic greed of these publishers in this case.
No, it would not even be close to that scale.
http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283
Mostly because the (New) Library of Alexandria hosts a copy of the Internet Archive.
Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages.
You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this.
On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong.
Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation.
I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.
IA's decision was apparently done with good intentions and under extraordinary circumstances. The "open sharing" was not meant to be permanent, and anyway has been discontinued. IA never sold the content for profit so any "harm" should be similarly limited.
Publishers would generate nothing but good karma by dropping their lawsuit. As an author it is more valuable to me to know my words and ideas are being preserved so they can be read and absorbed by future generations. Trying to extract every last dollar from such works undermines the pursuit of knowledge and human potential.
I live in San Francisco, whose library participates in a digital ebook lending program through Libby. They have a certain number of copies of each ebook available, and allow each copy to be checked out by one person at a time. As a consequence, i've had to wait 7 or 8 weeks for popular books to become available, something which works the same way as physical books at the library. The library buys or is given a copy of a book (whether physical or digital) and then can loan out that copy of the book.
Notably, this is how IA's lending program worked BEFORE the pandemic. They just decided unilaterally to change it to loan out unlimited copies of books. It is this change that the lawsuit is about.
The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
> The complaint had alleged that “Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” it said.
Note that I'm not saying Spotify did anything wrong in this case, but it does show two things.
1. Big companies can manipulate the system better than nonprofits or individuals.
2. Publishers sue to exploit the unreasonable monopoly the law gives them.
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
Because they hold a part of our digital history.
Doing a right thing doesn't grant you immunity when you do a wrong thing. And there was no question that what they did was illegal. Many thousands of people told them that the moment they announced they were planning to do it, they didn't even need legal counsel to point that out. They did it anyway.
But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.
As an extremely rough calculation, I've seen figures that it would be about 1.2 million dollars of hard drives. Built into 4U size, 36-drive servers with RAIDZ2 arrays, it could be $8 to $10 million of hardware. And then you need a place to put it and keep it powered up and running, let's say that's a million dollars a year for datacenter space.
That's a tiny amount of money compared to some of the other nonprofit initiatives various billionaires have funded.
Not sure how it works though and IPFS shows red status?
Copyright is a limited exclusive grant in exchange for the expectation of having more works written/created/painted/drawn/designed. We should not just ratchet up the duration or scope of that exclusive grant without the expectation that we'll get more value out of it (more works) in the trade.
Art takes work. It makes sense to give the artist something concrete that can be sold so the artist has a chance of earning a living. If that right is passed down to the kids, at least the artist has something to pass along, just like other laborers.
While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability.
Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.
>Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit.
>The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.
The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.
IPFS seems ideally suited for two reasons:
- it has decent censorship-resistant properties
- content addressing is ideal for partial backups because individuals can mirror as little (or as much) as they want.
I’m guessing the simplest approach would be to somehow get access to the archive’s database? Is this something they’d be willing to consider?
Why isn't file coin done?
So, more like 300,000 people storing 200GB, which is quite a tall order to fill.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
I'm small-potatoes for a datahoarder, but I could chip in a couple tens of TB to a project like this. If only I knew what button to push to make it do the thing.
And digital downloading is a communication framework, developed by technology experts, where an unlimited number of readers can read the same digital library book at the same time.
A blockchain? Oy, vey.
So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up. MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!
Leave the books and whatever to pirate torrent sites and just do the Wayback Machine thing.
Did they just get caught up wanting to do something during virus stuff?
IMO: most publishers are worthless anyway. I feel bad for authors but it’s hard to sympathize with publishers.
