I think we need to start caring about how laws affect the preservation of data, this is ridiculous.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Copyright only exists so rich people can own yet another thing they didnt make.
The original intent was good. You make something, you can legally ensure people can't just copy your work and slap their name on it for profit. People could make creative works without fear of someone else ripping it away from them.
Then Disney just kept bribing politicians to extend it to a ridiculous degree so they wouldn't lose Mickey to public domain until they moved his likeness into their trademark, which lives as long as it's being used actively.
And then you have DMCA, where everyone is guilty until innocent and that whole can of worms, and DRM which is technically illegal to circumvent no matter how much time or what reason. Corporatization and the Internet turned that relatively simple and good ideas into an utter mess.
that original intent never mattered. no one's gonna make mickey mouse shorts and people be like "oh that must be their character, not Disney's". Mickey became famous and profitable from Disney's amazing animation and enjoyable writing. Without copyright, that's still the case. Queen and David Bowie didnt fall from financial or celebrity grace because Vanilla Ice copied them, because being copied doesnt detract from you. Again, all it did was enable the rich to profit from more things they didnt make. Get rid of all of it.
I think a short copyright period is fair enough to stop corporations putting out word for word copies of your book a week after you publish it. But it doesn't need to be more than 5-10 years, the current death+70 that the USA has pushed on the world is obscene.
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If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity.
Ah yes, because it's the fault of (internet) libraries and not greedy publishers who try to keep the royalties for their authors as low as possible. /s
How about looking where this problem starts instead of where it ends?
Piracy dies (mostly) with easy and reasonably priced ways to pay for content. Most people don't want to do something illegal and want to support those who make content.
But when publishers like Warner Brothers are removing content from services making pirating sites the only place to find artists' work, then little are going to pirate.
Without sites like the Internet Archive, so much stuff would risk being lost forever because of greedy copyright practices.
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If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity.
The irony being that this is exactly what copyright was originally intended to facilitate - authors creating works to become public domain within a relatively short period of time.
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Most important paragraph in the whole article:
The Southern District of New York court issued its final order in Hachette v. Internet Archive on March 24, 2023. It found that Internet Archive was liable for copyright infringement. The consent judgement of August 11 has banned the Open Library from scanning or distributing commercially available books in digital formats.
The premise of the Internet Archive is perfectly legal, but we have dimwits who think anything and everything can be uploaded for "archival purposes". This won't be the last time we see this because people are actively abusing the site.
Don't believe me? Go to the archive and search "anime". Are the first results you see forgotten 1960s shows whose only source materials are moldy VHS tapes because the studio went under and the copyright is in limbo? No. The entirety of fucking Naruto, iconic movies like Ghost in the Shell, the whole remastered Dragon Ball Blu-ray set, and who knows how much more.
No, just because it's not available where you are does not justify uploading. If geo-blocking doesn't work for a monolith like YouTube it certainly won't work for the Archive. One visit from copyright owners lawyers in their territory and it's another black eye for the Archive.
The archive is in the right for works that are out of print AND, AND, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, have no commercial equivalent or rightful copyright owner. Those old cookbooks by authors and publishers long gone, great! Vintage DOS games, do some reseach, make sure it's not commercially available on sites like GOG before uploading. A fan subbed show, upload the subtitles only. Your favorite show that is streamable but you won't pay for, put it on a tracker and seed it elsewhere.
This is a good point. I didnt realize people were using Internet Archive for what is basically piracy for commercially available content.
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four major publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House – to file a lawsuit against Internet Archive in June 2020.
Well now you know which publishers to steal from 100% of the time
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This last bit kills me
It’s beyond time that readers and consumers of all cultural output recognise the cost of creating cultural material. If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity. In the broader context of current generative AI discussions, I think our whole community is fed up with short-sighted arguments that aim to justify the ripping off of authors – whose earnings sit at an average of $18,200 per year.
For the record, the national minimum wage in Australia is $45,905 per year.
It's so disingenuous. Authors are not making so little because of library sharing or internet sharing. They're making that little because publishers take the largest cut and have a stranglehold on publishing. 🙄
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Internet Archive’s distribution of copyrighted works is problematic.
Since when? That's literally what a library is supposed to do..
It was the fact that during the pandemic they forwent the rule that 1 copy they owned could only be rented out to 1 person at a time. Any library operates by that principal for exactly this reason. Even digital copies, they can only lend out so many at a time. During the pandemic archive.org ignored this rule which was noble of them considering the circumstances, but now those consequences are coming back to bite them.
Personally I think I was dumb to risk the whole Internet Archive to offer that and hopefully they use this as a lesson to consult more with their lawyers going forward.
You can literally photocopy every single page out of a book at a physical library.
It's not the paradigm, it's the convenience and ease of access.
Great a source I consistently use for bettering myself isn’t commodified enough. Can’t wait to pay Johnny no amount is enough for the privilege of learning.
The ramifications of this ruling are astoundingly dire.
The notion of controlled digital lending was a good counter to "ebook packages" that come with a yearly sub. At the moment, that yearly sub eats a large chunk of university budgets because academic texts are harder to get for free (we are a captive audience, though we do have scihub to help somewhat). In terms of books outside academia, I'm not looking at prices but I can tell you which direction they'll now go.
I'm sure you can guess which direction library budgets are not going to go.
In essence, it's forcing digital from a "purchase to lend" to a "subscribe to lend" model, which is going to really hurt libraries. This doesn't even begin to explore the full horror of censorship - "I'm sorry, LGBTQ+ texts are not available to bundle for your library due to local laws prohibiting them". That's a topic that deserves its own book!
Well, shit.
The outcome was completely obvious, and I blame Internet Archive for poking this bear. They had no reason to do this, and they are putting their actual core mission at risk in the process.
Yeah internet archive is fucking stupid for this.
And they sold access to the books they stole via a subscription? I mean… yeah. That’s gonna get you sued
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Oh FFS!
This is why I sail the high seas. Copyright is an affront to liberty.
Aaaw. Publishers caring about authors? That's a big fat lie. Make no mistake, no matter what type of publisher, be it literary, musical, dramatic (TV & film), the only goal is to consolidate ingellectual property, employ predatory and lobsided contracts and then pretend that they represent the creators.
Fact is that lending, and also digital lending, has a negligible result on the author's bottom line. The publishers however want libraries gone because then they make their investors happy. That's it.
Know the motivation and intention behind this, because it isn't to protect the income of authors.
“Right of the authors”, sounds like a propaganda piece. It’s quite objectively in the favor of the copyright holders.
Wow, the author really seems to take the publisher's side here. I'm surprised they're listed as just an academic, I was expecting it to be an industry spokesperson.
After finishing her PhD, also in archaeology, she decided to follow her passion for books, and pursue a career in publishing. She worked for over 15 years in scholarly and educational book publishing, commissioning and project-managing a wide range of non-fiction titles, producing ebooks and implementing accessible publishing practices.
Person working in publishing for 15 years sides with publishers, shocker
Ahh, there it is!
Does the author work for a publishing company? It’s hard to understand their perspective otherwise.
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This decision leaves a concerning gap: it does not apply to physical books that are not currently available digitally. As Olivia Lanchester, CEO of the Australian Society of Authors, observed to me in an email:
there is a commercial market for digital book licensing, as evidenced by the Untapped Project in Australia. By allowing Internet Archive to retain digitised versions of print books so long as no ebook edition is available, a valid future market for authors is undermined.
Cry me a river, build a bridge, get over it.
For example, authors of out-of-print works may choose to later publish their work in an ebook format and monetise that edition. The deficiency in the court’s ruling is that the Internet Archive can beat them to it – and supply their work for free.
I guess you better get your rear in gear.
This is an affront on preservation of human knowledge and keeping it accessible. This is a perfect example of what utter cancer copyright is.
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