Internet Archive sued by big publishers

[Arrghus]

I couldn't see a thread about this. Please merge if I've missed one.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...nding-program/

"Despite the Open Library moniker, IA's actions grossly exceed legitimate library services, do violence to the Copyright Act, and constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale," write publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House in their complaint. The lawsuit was filed in New York federal court on Monday.

[tubemonkey]

About time! They should've stuck with public domain. Now they risk losing it all and they only have themselves to blame.

I liked their PD stuff, especially the Old-Time Radio shows. It'll be a shame if this content goes away.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Now they risk losing it all and they only have themselves to blame.

There is an argument that they intentionally provoked a lawsuit with the goal of forcing changes to copyright law.

Analysis on The Digital Reader Blog: Four Publishers File Suit Over Internet Archive’s Pirate Site

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by jhowell

There is an argument that they intentionally provoked a lawsuit with the goal of forcing changes to copyright law.

Analysis on The Digital Reader Blog: Four Publishers File Suit Over Internet Archive’s Pirate Site

If they wish to become a legal library, then they need to follow the same rules public libraries follow.

I'll take a look at the article shortly.

[Paperbackstash]

If they are posting copyright material, not surprised.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by jhowell

There is an argument that they intentionally provoked a lawsuit with the goal of forcing changes to copyright law.

Analysis on The Digital Reader Blog: Four Publishers File Suit Over Internet Archive’s Pirate Site

Read the comments there and the replies or lack thereof.

As pointed out by Chris Matthews of TELEREAD:

Not a lawyer, but my layman’s understanding of the law leads me to doubt that any court would ever find Controlled Digital Lending to be a fair use. All four factors of the litmus test weigh against it.

Remember, the four factors are:

the purpose and character of your use
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
the effect of the use upon the potential market.

Purpose and character: This use is not transformative in any major way; it simply copies the entire work to digital. Not being transformative weighs against fair use.

Nature of the work: This includes fiction works, and fiction works have a higher bar to clear than factual works. Including fiction weighs against fair use.

Amount and substantiality: It takes the whole work, meaning it’s less likely to be fair than if it just excerpted. Taking the whole work weighs against fair use.

Effect of use on the market: This is the biggest factor for CDL, I think—if libraries are permitted to do this, it will utterly wipe out the publishers’ library ebook sale programs. Why would a library pay a small fortune for ebooks that expire after a set number of checkouts if they could just buy extra paper books and warehouse them and then check those ebooks out forever? It could also have a depressive effect on sales of regular ebooks by making digital ones so broadly available. Threatening to wipe out an entire market weighs heavily against fair use.

If Kahle thinks that he can get courts to find in favor of CDL just because Google won its own lawsuit, he’s badly fooling himself.

So is anybody thinking breaking a law that puts that much money in so many people (authors, editors, publishers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, bookstore clerks and, above all, politicians) is going to make it go away has been inhaling too often. And that's just books: do remember that the same law that covers books covers software, clothing, furniture, cars, games, music, movies, TV, theaters, and feeds everyone that makes, transports or sells any of the above. Among many other things not covered by patents or trademarks.

If the case doesn't see a summary judgment in the first session there will be more "friends of the court" filings hitting the court than books in the "library" . The mass of the filing alpne will bury the judge.

Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

or this:

https://www.purplekittyyarns.com/info/copyright.html

Or this:

https://www.popularwoodworking.com/i...ation-illegal/


The only people against IP rights are the people that never created anything worth anything.

Remember that Creative Commons and Opensource licenses are themselves exercises of copyright ownership. It is up to the creatives and their authorized representativds to decide when and how their creations can distributed. No some self appointed dude on the internet.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Paperbackstash

If they are posting copyright material, not surprised.

They are.
Proudly.
Because "information wants to be free".

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Read the comments there and the replies or lack thereof.

...

The only people against IP rights are the people that never created anything worth anything.

Remember that Creative Commons and Opensource licenses are themselves exercises of copyright ownership. It is up to the creatives and their authorized representativds to decide when and how their creations can distributed. No some self appointed dude on the internet.

That's just factually wrong and rather obviously so. google dedicated to public domain. Of course, you could be using the True Scotsman fallacy by claiming any work released by the author into the public domain must not be worth anything.

Not to say that the Internet Archive isn't rather obviously breaking the law and seems rather unlikely to find a sympathetic judge. It does seem that they were deliberately looking to be sued. No idea what they thought they were going to accomplish.

[rcentros]

It has the feel of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. I always thought Archive.org was somehow supported by government funds. Maybe because of all the public domain stuff.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

That's just factually wrong and rather obviously so. google dedicated to public domain. Of course, you could be using the True Scotsman fallacy by claiming any work released by the author into the public domain must not be worth anything.

Not to say that the Internet Archive isn't rather obviously breaking the law and seems rather unlikely to find a sympathetic judge. It does seem that they were deliberately looking to be sued. No idea what they thought they were going to accomplish.

Read again.
I'm not talking about creator's choosing Creative Commons or any of the OpenSource licenses. Those creators are exercising *their* right under the law. And I explicitly excluded them. They are part of tbe system the IA thinks they can obviate. They can charge whatever they want, including nothing. They created it, they own tbe copyright. *They* are entitled to do anything they want with it.

I'm talking about the online chatterers and "activists".
And the people who listen to them and buy that hooey.

Those aren't entitled to "public domain" somebody else's property just because "information wants to be free" or because they can make money off sleazy ads on a sire ful of torrents. Pirates are pirates however tbey style themselves.

[Pajamaman]

But the big five publishers can price fix ebooks via cartels. That's legal.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

About time! They should've stuck with public domain. Now they risk losing it all . . .

The pre-COVID one owned book, one borrower, at one time, model seems to me the same as a paper book library, except that they honor takedown notices. I doubt they’ll lose anything except the ability to operate in their COVID mode.

Then, juries are unpredictable.

[Quoth]

See also https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/...ernet_archive/
and the comments.

I've never suspected IA of being Government backed. It does have one Mirror in Egypt and it's more likely to be backed by someone like Google, who cares about copyright on their own material but encourages piracy by their policies on Google Books/PlayStore and YouTube. Google should never have won the case about scanning and the way they use the scans breaks the intent of what they claimed.

US Court case over Google Scanning EVERYTHING and their concept of Orphan works:

The problem is that Google books is supposed to show only a partial preview as it might be copyright. The Fair Use argument that Google used. They do basic OCR of the entire book so as to use it for search. Google search is now poisoned with Google Books. Google Books ALSO includes 3rd party books being sold via the PlayStore.

Unlike Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, Apple etc, Google decides to show the section from where the search hit was. In theory it's possible to download a complete book that's copyright via Google Books, because their algorithm is more designed to aid Google Search than comply with copyright fair use.

They can get commission from adverts and links selling the books and results in Search. That's why the great copyright rip-off of Google Books exists. They even had to block the bit where 3rd parties upload to Google Books to sell via the Playstore. Unlike real ebook sellers they were encouraging PDF as the default, allowing scans. Pirates cut the spine off and ADF (only sometimes with basic OCR for search).

The Court settlement shows how the USA favours big corporations over little people.

No, the Open Library has never operated the same as most Libraries outside of US. They pay royalties (paper or ebook or audio) based on number of loans. The Authors, not publishers get these.
Also real libraries buy real ebooks at library prices (which can be more or less than retail) and can licence for whatever number of simultaneous loans that they want.
The IA scans real books, been doing it over a decade. Unlike Gutenberg they don't care about copyright. They don't proof, only an automatic OCR to aid search or "fake" ebook versions. Just like Google. They don't acquire ebooks the same way as USA libraries. They are parasites.

The pre-COVID one owned book, one borrower, at one time, model seems to me the same as a paper book library, except that they honor takedown notices.

I'm not convinced that they have reliably honoured take down requests in the past.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Read again.
I'm not talking about creator's choosing Creative Commons or any of the OpenSource licenses. Those creators are exercising *their* right under the law. And I explicitly excluded them. They are part of tbe system the IA thinks they can obviate. They can charge whatever they want, including nothing. They created it, they own tbe copyright. *They* are entitled to do anything they want with it.

I'm talking about the online chatterers and "activists".
And the people who listen to them and buy that hooey.

Those aren't entitled to "public domain" somebody else's property just because "information wants to be free" or because they can make money off sleazy ads on a sire ful of torrents. Pirates are pirates however tbey style themselves.

Plenty of people who oppose IP produce works of note, which is what you said didn't occur. You seem to be confusing those who say "I should be able to take whatever I want for free" with those who oppose IP. They are perhaps a subset of people who oppose IP, though I also suspect that many don't oppose IP per se, they just want free stuff.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I'm not convinced that they have reliably honoured take down requests in the past.

There is ample annecdotal evidence they don't.

Even if they did, their default opt-out approach has beeng rejected in court on this side of the pond along with the "orphan works" money grab by the Author's Guild "settlement" with Google that the judge threw out for lack of standing: the AG had no right to appoint themselves representatives of the wider class of authors, rather than the tiny part that is their membership.

IA can't claim even that.

As for the Google lawsuit, people keep misreading/misrepresenting the legal case itself. The actual legal issue being litigated was that Google, in order to provide book excerpt snippets in their search engine, created a database of scanned and indexed books. The AG position was that any use of the books other than individuals paying for the book was illegal.

After pruning away the irrelevancies and money grabs, the ruling was that inasmuch as Google's database was not distributing the scans and merely using it for internal purposes, to generate the excerpts (which are *explicitly* permitted under Fair Use legal doctrine) Google was not *distributing* anything that wasn't permitted by Fair Use.

That. Is. It.

The IA is taking the contents of *their* database and contributing entire books from it, pretending that if a <1% snippet is legal, so is 100% of the content. Disingenuos at best.

As pointed out above Fair Use is all about *limited* use. And distribution. And it applies to each individual item at issue.
There is nothing limited about the use the IA puts each copyrighted item to use. Even one user at a time, it is illegal to distribute the *entire* contents of the book without explicit permission.

The crime, as determined by the court, is the distribution, not tbe scanning.
Mass distribution = mass violation.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors meant to obscure.