The legal ruling against the Internet Archive has come down in favour of the rights of authors.
I think we need to start caring about how laws affect the preservation of data, this is ridiculous.
Copyright only exists so rich people can own yet another thing they didnt make.
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.
IA helps keep democracy alive. Documentaries that are banned by dictators, like the BBC documentary on Modi that was banned in India by Modi, would be unavailable to people without IA.
There are authors starting to publish without a publisher. I think that is the right direction, not making all books free. Maybe once the publishers have less control there will be some copyright reforms to shorten the time it takes to bring works into the public domain. Right now it is 95 years from publishing, but I think the author’s life plus 30 years or something might make a bit more sense. For example, George Orwell has been dead for over 70 years, but his works are still under copyright.
Especially fucking Wiley. If you’re a student paying hundreds for a textbook with a “supplemental code” that makes it so you can’t buy it used, then it’s probably by fucking Wiley. Fucking greedy cunts.
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.
I agree with you. This is the issue at hand.
Which is who’s responsibility to moderate for though.
This is the fault of Internet Archive for not moderating better. Is it is a tough problem? Yes, but everyone else faces it too.
Storage owners are responsible for the contents of their units, website owners are responsible for what’s stored on their DBs
People are abusing attack methods by uploading illegal content themselves in order to shut a competitor.
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. 🙄
There is also an incredibly huge saturation of authors, musicians, actors, artists, and other creatives that all expect to make it a career. It’s far from realistic, and the stripping down of public domain through many decades of shady copyright extension laws have just been propping up this house of cards, at the expense of the public that deserves it.
For the past 20 years or so, especially with the Internet accelerating the process, people are starting to realize that these are not good career choices, and these industries will turn into mostly free hobbies, based on their passion to create.
Even now, I can throw a stick at some random artist on Bandcamp, and find great music for free who has barely any subscribers. Why spend $15 for a CD? Why spend money on royalties for using music on a video, when so many artists give it out copyright free?
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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.
Oh FFS!
Does the author work for a publishing company? It’s hard to understand their perspective otherwise.
“Right of the authors”, sounds like a propaganda piece. It’s quite objectively in the favor of the copyright holders.
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.
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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