In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”
During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that “those voices weren’t being heard.” Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA’s digital lending potentially hurts publishers’ profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers’ costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers.
I like the library analogy.
Did you know that librarians usually have a penis or a vagina? And the most horrible thing of all is that they bring it with them into the library! They jiggle it all around every time they go around putting books back in their order and such. It’s horrible. What kind of message are they trying to send?
I mean regardless of what sexually deviant thing they carry around between their legs, for sure, almost with a failure, with just a few exceptions, all of those deviants bring an anus with them where ever they go. And tits! They are gotta bring their tits like anyone is interested in those things. My God! We need to burn those places down!
But there’s a very clear distinction in the law. Libraries are covered under first sale doctrine. You can do effectively what you want with a physical object that contains copyrighted material placed there by the owner.
Digital anything is not covered by the first sale doctrine. Every individual loan is a copy. Every time a “copy” moves between devices is a copy. There is no legal framework for ownership of anything digital. It’s always a license, no matter what permissions that license grants you.
You have to pass new laws to match the digital world. Under the current laws, it’s extremely clear that lending unauthorized digital copies of a physical book is copyright infringement. Wholesale copies of a work aren’t even in the neighborhood of fair use, especially when you’re distributing a bunch of them. DRMing those copies is completely irrelevant legally.
You have to pass new laws to match the digital world.
They did—it’s called the DMCA, and it’s working exactly as they intended it to.
I really don’t think anyone envisioned the way digital distribution would change when the DMCA was written.
But my point isn’t that there’s political will to make a change, but that the judiciary really doesn’t have the capacity to rule any other way than the obvious “you can’t do this”. It would be a completely wild precedent for this case to somehow result in a ruling that it’s fair use based on the actual law and the history of previous rulings.
Digital anything is not covered by the first sale doctrine. Every individual loan is a copy
So this is basically why ebooks are problematic at libraries then? That issue alone really seems like it needs a legal update.
Yep. Libraries can’t just buy an ebook like they can buy a book. They have to negotiate a contract with the copyright holder to be able to lend them out.
I understand your point. But the archive isn’t giving you a copy. It will display 2 pages on your screen, using encryption, for up to 2 hours. You can turn pages and see a different 2 pages displayed, but that’s it.
Is this a significant distinction from a copy, I don’t know. But it does seem different as I cannot take that copy, I can only observe content and even then in a limited way.
The Internet Archive had a system in place specifically to ensure that they had a legal license for each copy of the book loaded out digitally at any given time. This essentially made it a library.
During the lockdown, they intentionally stopped using this system and loaned out unlimited copies. They didn’t just violate copyright in accident, they willfully and intentionally disabled their own systems designed to preserve copyright.
I think the publishers suck too, but the Internet Archive humped the bunk on this one.
The encryption is literally entirely irrelevant.
The argument that a copy in your browser is legally defensible is the equivalent of claiming that sites can legally stream movies to you. It is a copy, both legally and in reality.
With governance across the US destroying libraries left and right, what IA is doing is basically a necessary future.
The IA needs to lay low a bit before we loose them. There’s plenty of stuff out there they can archive that we need that won’t piss off copyright.
We need an ipfs or torrent library that’s out of easy reach of the courts.
It really doesn’t seem to be the political climate to do something good for the people right now, at least in the US. I feel dirty even typing the last part. It’s so sad.
It’s the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for those curious.
But goddammit they will try
For a second I thought that little thumbnail image was bookshelf loss but the order is wrong.
