The Internet Archive survived major copyright losses. What’s next?
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Don't worry, once all the books have been ingested by AI, we can shred them and delete all the evidence scans anyway. Copyright solved.
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Instead of the publishers trying to see/play the long game, and show some constructive cooperation with fantastic endeavors like this, they take the other way and obstruct/sue. Instead of thinking along to build a bridge to a better future where their content is more discoverable & easily accessible for a reasonable amount of money, they double down on crafting unfriendly content-silos & retreat into inane conservatism. Copyright laws ofcourse are a major stumbling block, but still... Who can be so shortsighted with regards to the spreading of knowledge? So...
...may they burn in a special kind of hell.
...may they burn in a special kind of hell.
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I feel this was a self inflicted wound. If they’d kept doing what they were doing pre-covid it would never have ended up challenged, and the world would have an open free library today, operating under normal library rules of 1 book, 1 reader at a time.
The original article talked about having no reason to goad industry into a lawsuit, but that’s exactly what they did.
As an aside, this unlimited borrowing idea would also likely have run into issues today due to LLM ingestion. Imagine if a company “borrowed” every book in the library indefinitely, via bot accounts, to try and claim fair use of their contents.
The original article talked about having no reason to goad industry into a lawsuit, but that’s exactly what they did.
As an aside, this unlimited borrowing idea would also likely have run into issues today due to LLM ingestion. Imagine if a company “borrowed” every book in the library indefinitely, via bot accounts, to try and claim fair use of their contents.
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That's all that Capitalism is - short-term gains propped up on the back of destroying humanity in the long-term. Why should the oil companies care about climate change if they'd have to make 5 percent less returns on their profits? Why should companies care about the vast loss of human knowledge if they can't make a buck off of it?
It's short-sighted foolishness and we're all going to become dumber, sicker, and unhealthier for the profits of people who have more money than God.
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Are they USA based? If so, I can tell you where the next threat is going to come from. And I'm not referring to geography, but rather ideology.
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I had a weird experience buying some digital music recently. No, not this streaming malarkey but paying $11 or something for an album's worth of WAV files from the artist's Web store. There's no DRM, nothing to stop me converting those WAVs into other formats, and no fingerprinting I can find that could tie a certain file to my purchase (if that file ever got loose on the Internet). I could copy those WAVs on to as many backup and listening devices as I want.
It would be hard to do that for e-books because the digital music equivalent would be stems which aren't easily available. Then again, I wonder why the publishing industry hasn't done the same thing as the music industry - either offer rentals like with streaming or DRM-free purchases.
It would be hard to do that for e-books because the digital music equivalent would be stems which aren't easily available. Then again, I wonder why the publishing industry hasn't done the same thing as the music industry - either offer rentals like with streaming or DRM-free purchases.
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I don't know the online "sailing the high seas" library ecosystem well, but when I go to Anna's Archive they seem to have scraped a lot of books from Internet Archive before the books disappeared. (304 TB worth, they claim) (Anna's: "The largest truly open library in human history. 59,591,792 books, 95,526,539 papers")
For older books where there are no proper epubs, the IA PDF scans are often rather middling quality, over compressed, sometimes with poor photo resolution. But they are usually usable for reference. (I personally reduced the clutter in my home by replacing many of the physical books that my family had BOUGHT over the years, ones that weren't that important enough to me to display on my bookshelves, by electronic copies, from Libgen, Z-lib, and Anna's.)
Hopefully these sorts of sites manage to continue to exist. There's always good and bad in the inability for authorities to fully control the internet.
For older books where there are no proper epubs, the IA PDF scans are often rather middling quality, over compressed, sometimes with poor photo resolution. But they are usually usable for reference. (I personally reduced the clutter in my home by replacing many of the physical books that my family had BOUGHT over the years, ones that weren't that important enough to me to display on my bookshelves, by electronic copies, from Libgen, Z-lib, and Anna's.)
Hopefully these sorts of sites manage to continue to exist. There's always good and bad in the inability for authorities to fully control the internet.
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Ironically, there's no question that without something like IA, people will simply pirate e-books instead of borrowing them, unless rights holders somehow get much more adept at shutting down distribution. Instead of the "regulated digital library" model, it'll just be a piracy free-for-all.
Unfortunately, I have to agree - Brewster, like many idealists, can be a bit inflexible in his thinking.
It pained me greatly when IA announced they were lifting their restrictions on lending during COVID. The moral justification seemed tenuous, and the legal justification nonexistent, and it does seem to have motivated enormous antipathy from publishers, who previously seemed more willing to tolerate the one-book-one-borrower model.
Unfortunately, I have to agree - Brewster, like many idealists, can be a bit inflexible in his thinking.
It pained me greatly when IA announced they were lifting their restrictions on lending during COVID. The moral justification seemed tenuous, and the legal justification nonexistent, and it does seem to have motivated enormous antipathy from publishers, who previously seemed more willing to tolerate the one-book-one-borrower model.
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These IA stories always strike home for me. I remember being a kid and Brewster calling our house a few times to speak with my dad (they both worked on WAIS ages ago). A name like Brewster Kahle tends to stick in your head when you're little.
He's always genuinely been interested in making information available to everyone. To see the courts go against him and his mission time and time again is such a shame.
He's always genuinely been interested in making information available to everyone. To see the courts go against him and his mission time and time again is such a shame.
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“But IA “hit the edge” of what courts would allow.”
I almost never comment on Ars pieces but I’ve been increasingly disappointed with the coverage of this issue over the years.
The original lending program as that was designed was hitting the edge. The national emergency lending program blew far beyond the edge. It was clearly doomed from the start. This was the inevitable outcome, and I predicted precisely that at the time.
Ars is not allowing me to link to this on X due to its spam filter, but in March 2023 I wrote, “IA's actions here put its archival mission at risk. The legal theory underlying the basis of its CDL initiative was guaranteed to fail in court and will also lose on appeal. IA will likely have to come to a significant financial settlement with publishers as a result. Under existing law, it is the publishers who have the agency to decide the terms under which their intellectual property may or may not be reproduced and re-shared. Baring a change in existing law, IA cannot unilaterally make that decision. This is going to be costly for IA.“
Blaming it on corporate greed is silly. The real problem was an unchecked activist mentality that didn’t take legal reality into account. The hard reality is IA was being an irresponsible steward of information and put its mission at risk. They were playing with fire, and luckily the corporations chose to settle so that IA did not end up like the Library of Alexandria.
This may not be popular for the typical Ars reader to hear, but it’s true. I expect to be downvoted simply for pointing out the legal reality as it is, not necessarily as it should be. And I’m disappointed that Ars chooses to paper over this reality and provide weak analysis of copyright issues. It’s a disservice to its audience that I can only hazard a guess is due to audience capture.
I almost never comment on Ars pieces but I’ve been increasingly disappointed with the coverage of this issue over the years.
The original lending program as that was designed was hitting the edge. The national emergency lending program blew far beyond the edge. It was clearly doomed from the start. This was the inevitable outcome, and I predicted precisely that at the time.
Ars is not allowing me to link to this on X due to its spam filter, but in March 2023 I wrote, “IA's actions here put its archival mission at risk. The legal theory underlying the basis of its CDL initiative was guaranteed to fail in court and will also lose on appeal. IA will likely have to come to a significant financial settlement with publishers as a result. Under existing law, it is the publishers who have the agency to decide the terms under which their intellectual property may or may not be reproduced and re-shared. Baring a change in existing law, IA cannot unilaterally make that decision. This is going to be costly for IA.“
Blaming it on corporate greed is silly. The real problem was an unchecked activist mentality that didn’t take legal reality into account. The hard reality is IA was being an irresponsible steward of information and put its mission at risk. They were playing with fire, and luckily the corporations chose to settle so that IA did not end up like the Library of Alexandria.
This may not be popular for the typical Ars reader to hear, but it’s true. I expect to be downvoted simply for pointing out the legal reality as it is, not necessarily as it should be. And I’m disappointed that Ars chooses to paper over this reality and provide weak analysis of copyright issues. It’s a disservice to its audience that I can only hazard a guess is due to audience capture.
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In my opinion, IA should be designated as one of true world wonder and all governments should pitch in with donations to keep it going (along with Wikipedia, I might add!). It's both a cultural archive and it's a truly common good. Preferably, it should also be moved out of the US to some other country that is far more amenable to the public's needs and to protecting access to all the information available, but alas.
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Baen books offers DRM free purchases.
https://www.baen.com/faq
Probably some other publishers do too.
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The excessively depressing background to all this is that when IA does it it's "existential retribution"; but when Anthropic does it it's 'you have to manually grub your way into some obscure class somewhere and maybe get a peanut; and they'll whine about how you hate innovation the whole way'.
I'm not in a position to say whether or not what the IA was doing was within the scope of 'library' as legally intended; but they got hit far harder than people who are way, way, further from it; and much more awful in general.
I'm not in a position to say whether or not what the IA was doing was within the scope of 'library' as legally intended; but they got hit far harder than people who are way, way, further from it; and much more awful in general.
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Cory Doctorow talks a lot about what you're saying. He advocates strongly for DRM free formats. I think epubs are DRM free?
The industry I really think should sink or learn is the film industry. Every other industry there is a store that is available and the sellers seek out the store, the film industry is the only one where the stores seek out the media.
Companies don't seem to be able to tell Steam to take games away from their customers, they can stop selling on Steam but the past purchasers still keep their copies. Ironically a screen recording of a film is much easier to do for someone with no knowledge than a game crack. The fact that film ownership seems practically non-existent while other industries found ways to let stores honour purchases makes me think that there is no reason to pay for films in any capacity.
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Can't say much on the rest of your post, but this statement is just wrong. Blaming it on corporate greed is not silly, even if boundaries were pushed.
Publishers could have worked out, (gasp) negotiated a settlement that would be fair for all sides, but greed intervenes and we get what we get. As another post pointed out, corporations do not give a shit about long term planning or their impacts on humanity and this has been, sadly, the norm for too long.
I'm just curious how much of that settlement went to the actual content creators, the source of all that work. I am all for artists being paid, but in this current reality, artists get the worst of the deal, not the best. Copyright is needed to protect creators, but it has ultimately been abused by greed, by corporations and specifically selfish executives, so that they feed off the backs of creators while giving back scraps.
Corporate greed is not silly and stating it as a reason for destruction is valid. Maybe IA went to far during COVID, but at least they were trying to do something for Good, but by all means, make corporations the victims.
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Given the relative pittance that storage costs, the idea that something of the value of the IA would be in a jurisdiction seems like an architectural failure. You'd want a fair bit more redundancy than that. It would also help(though probably not help warm local legislators to the idea) with the problem that various jurisdictions have some pet topic or two(whether because of interpretations of copyright or one sort of moralism or another) that they are a really bad choice for storing.
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Maybe they could try moving?
The last time a publication stole some of my photos elsewhere, "all" I got in damages as a © holder was 3x the market rate, as it should be.
No, seriously – what's keeping them in the US, apart from donors and legacy of being founded there in the days of yore when optimism about the internet being "for good of humankind" still persisted?
Obviously the servers would have to be outside the US as well, which is admittedly quite hard these days...
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Possibly true, but and it's hard to say, as we're arguing contingent histories, but it's also possible that without capitalism, we wouldn't have all the knowledge we currently have.
I don't have an answer here, but it's possible we as a civilization/species had a choice: we could be where we are today, with some (growing) portion of humanity having living standards our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, or a much smaller absolute number of humans who are able to sustain themselves at some (much lower) standard of living (feudalism? the Roman Empire? Hunter Gatherer? I don't know). It's possible the Great Filter is real, and it's still a question which side we'll end up on.
Again, I don't have an answer, but people always assume that we could have all the benefits of capitalism without any of the drawbacks. I don't know if that's the case. I do know that there have been predictions of doom due to capitalism before, and they've been proven wrong. This time may be different; I do worry about what my children's lives will be like. Is that better or worse than at least one if not both of them being dead, along with their mother, before they turned 5 without modern medicine? The US medical system is ethically obscene, but it also produces medical breakthroughs and new drugs far faster than any of the less obscene systems.
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Fair - I'd like to say that capital C capitalism and regular capitalism is a good definition of it. Same concept, different goals. If capital were pushed into the betterment of society, that'd be great. The inherent selfishness of big C capitalists is directly against that goal. Making infinite profit inherently means one cannot feed that money back into making life better for 'the little guy'
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Gnafu the Great
Ars Centurion
We need to abolish copyright, or at the very least drastically reduce the timeframe and tie it to the creators and not corporations. Ideally, people would be paid for the work and not the product. End rent-seeking!
And donate to the Internet Archive!
And donate to the Internet Archive!
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A-1 for the win!
Department of Education, World Wrestling Entertainment Pres. Linda McMahon
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[...]
I donate to the Internet Archive. I'm very supportive of the Internet Archive. And I knew that once they announced the National Emergency Library they were going to be sued, and they were going to lose. What they were doing before, backing each loaned digital copy of a book with a physical book, was on the boundary of legal, but totally morally defensible. The NEL wasn't the first, and was probably not the second, either.
That the Internet Archive still exists means that the corporations involved did settle for a lot less than they were legally entitled to. I suspect what most of them wanted was a promise from the IA to not do what they'd done with the NEL again, because the NEL was an existential threat to them.
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I wonder if patrons are aware of this. I wonder if libraries ever say, "Hey everybody, we can rent X number of ebook licences for Y years or we can purchase z number of books." I was unawares.Ashley Belanger said:
I've seen some libraries discard DVDs of material available on their video partner platform but the problem is again, access. DVDs players are often available (or lendable) and not every item makes every format jump.
I also wonder how much cooperation there is within consortiums. Do members query other members before unloading "unpopular items?" Surely not every library needs their own copy of the hit film Titanic? If libraries are connected to other local libraries, I would hope they'd consult with each other to see that at least one copy of rare items remain in their shared system.
Sigh, however, preservationists are fighting a war of ignorance. Digital rentalists tout the convenience factor over all else when the reality is control is what they're after. We've seen this played out in video experiences and computer experiences.
The most unsettling idea is that in a digital-only world, master changes can be widely, easily propagated. Remember when you could purchase professionally-created encyclopaedia on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM? Sometimes they'd have minor updates throughout the year and these took the forms of easily-visible additions to the text. They didn't sneak the changes in. Now, text can be subtly altered en masse without readers noticing until it's too late.
We've seen time and again that censorship of purely digital material is trivial. How many television programmes have you noticed that omit episodes on streaming services because said episode contains a disgraced/newly unpopular person? Who decides what's cut?
If we don't purchase more books, publishers will pretend that justifies printing fewer books. (We can do without the narky "dead tree edition" insults.) Losing tangible physical versions of books is exactly the same as losing Internet Archive snapshots.
Iowa besting Aluminium?!
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Albino_Boo
Ars Praefectus
Its very simple dont infringe copyright. Reddit lawyers legal theories lose to real lawyers. They never had a leg stand on and losing was always going to be the outcome. Take a pogo stick into a minefield don't be surprised when you get blown up
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The idea of the National Emergency Library was that, once the IA had a digital copy of some information, they could make as many copies of that thing available simultaneously as they wanted to. It was the first sale doctrine made incoherent. How exactly do you go from that, the joke where only one person needs to subscribe to Netflix and then give the password to everybody else, to a place where "their content is more discoverable & easily accessible for a reasonable amount of money?"
If they'd done some vetting ahead of time, and only made books that were out of print, and/or with at least author approval, available as part of the NEL, I could have supported what they were doing. That wasn't what they did.
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I know you're being snarky, but if AI actually worked the way its critics imply it does ("plagiarism", "copy-paste", "mashup", "parrot", "store"), there would be some kernel of truth to it.
But it doesn't, and the loss of the library is a genuine tragedy. We'll probably never have something like it again.
Pulping and shredding books sits very bad with me on principle, but there's nothing sinister there. The "buy-scan-pulp" method is the legally proper one, while cracking legal ebooks or torrenting them are both against the law. (In fact, the pulping route only offers legal protection if you can prove that you owned an original copy at some point.)
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XSportSeeker
Ars Scholae Palatinae
A public, transparent, justified and actually useful for tons of people archive for the Internet is battered down and almost killed, while private, opaque, illegal and unjustified private data collection on individuals, flagrant infringement of privacy rights, is happening everyday, for the profit of corporations, and police;state power overreach.
It's an encapsulation of many things that are wrong currently on the Internet, and the world by consequence.
It's an encapsulation of many things that are wrong currently on the Internet, and the world by consequence.
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Honestly the publishers were downright gentle - there is no evidence to suggest that they required more than a token financial settlement, and they didn't even require the IA drop their appeal in order to settle, which I believe is pretty typical in American civil litigation.
How did they get hit hard exactly? By being required to stop lending copies of books they don't own? How on earth is that hard?
Same story with the Great 78 project. While the major labels threatened the IA with hundreds of millions in statutory damages there is no evidence to suggest they took more than a token sum . As far as I can see the only major impact of the lawsuit is that the IA is now following the terms of Music Modernization Act for pre 1972 recordings to the letter.
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Question: It seems to me that the Internet Archive may archive copyrighted works, and simply keep them hidden/offline, until they enter the public domain, and then make them available as public domain works - yes, that will be a long time in the future. Am I wrong? Isn't the problem that the archive was made accessible even for works currently protected by copyright?
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The IA is a treasure.
The Internet Archive's first project was (and is) crawling the web and providing access to both old and current copies of pages via their Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a project that the U.S. Library of Congress probably would never have done. But, some of the IA's other projects are stuff that would have easily been seen as in-scope for Library of Congress, but which they never worked on. A treasure. The IA has a donation page. Other than that, I don't know their support looks like, but most nations ought to be giving them grants. It would need to grants without excessive interfence, so maybe though something like the UN's UNESCO...
The Internet Archive's first project was (and is) crawling the web and providing access to both old and current copies of pages via their Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a project that the U.S. Library of Congress probably would never have done. But, some of the IA's other projects are stuff that would have easily been seen as in-scope for Library of Congress, but which they never worked on. A treasure. The IA has a donation page. Other than that, I don't know their support looks like, but most nations ought to be giving them grants. It would need to grants without excessive interfence, so maybe though something like the UN's UNESCO...
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IANAL but it might be possible to restrict the loaning of US copyrighted books from US IP addresses. ISPs seem to be winning the war on being held liable for pirating.
When I think of the number of authors I've seen offer loans or gifts of their works to people without access, it makes me mad. They aren't the ones being protected here, just the large publishers.
When I think of the number of authors I've seen offer loans or gifts of their works to people without access, it makes me mad. They aren't the ones being protected here, just the large publishers.
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They could and indeed they can even still lend books - something they are very clearly still doing, even with books that are still very much in copyright:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL571548M/The_Green_Mile_Part_One
As I understand it the Open Library are still free to digitally lend copies that they actually own. What they can't do is to lend OCR copies of physical books they don't physically control to ensure multiple simultaneous loans of a single copy.
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Gnafu the Great
Ars Centurion
We need to put a stop to the production of mines and minefields. What the IA did may have been illegal but it shouldn't be.
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