Does this eBook downloading thing affect the rest of the Archive? Like, will the entire archive be affected or just the OpenLibrary part of the Archive?
The problem is an obsolet copyright law, made by big companies and elderly politicians confusing a remote control with a smartphone. Money is killing the culture and the knowledge.
I’ll give the parent poster the benefit of the doubt and say that it’s a satirical user account. It’s called spez_, named after the reddit CEO, I’m guessing.
Whilst I’ve heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I’ll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.
I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are “outdated”, the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn’t coming any time soon (If ever).
For me it’s not boot licking but recognizing that IA made a huge unforced error that may cost us all not just that digital lending program but stuff like the Wayback Machine and all the other good projects the IA runs.
Exactly. Less bootlickering and more “Leopards Ate My Face” material. This was heavily forseable. If they did this as a protest against copyright and announced it from the start, it would be one thing. But this was just incompetence and ignorance at a level that will likely ruin them.
How is licking the boots of the copyright office helping the people? I don’t give the first fuck about individuals trying to hoard up IP anymore; IP hoarding-- and the very concept of IP in the first place-- is fuckin bullshit, fuck 'em if they got a problem with that take. We already have to pay through the nose for too much else in society, so why are you licking copyright-uplifting boots?
Authors have the right to be compensated for their work. There are many things that are wrong with current copyright, but denying artists compensation for their work is not the way.
Wouldn’t you also be mad if your salary was denied?
I live every day of my life under a regime that steals my wages, calls it ‘profit’, and then in my face, gets away with pocketing it, with STEALING IT; that shit is ALREADY happening. At this point, it’d just even the playing field. If you want me to have solidarity with my fellow worker, you cannot have it both ways where you expect me to uplift the tools of capitalist theft too. Fuck out of my face if all you have is platitudes to capital.
And your attempted redress is bootlicking the mechanics by which capitalists steal from all of us. Sinclair was right; it really is impossible to get you people to understand shit when your material conditions are dependent on your not. And then you just smug around like you said some prosaic shit I am so sick of y’all.
They really fucked up and it’s so heartwrenching watching it all happen. I was following the story since it started and I just can’t believe they allowed anyone to download copyrighted books without a limit in 2020, without asking anyone for permission or whether it’s legally viable. Everyone knew they were losing this, and they gave publishers a convincing reason to sue them. by crossing the “legally grey” area to literal piracy.
FWIW, OpenLibrary is a good source of book metadata at least, even if it fails its goal of letting people read books on it.
Unlimited free distribution of copyrighted media is something I’m all for, but that’s a really tall order in terms of political capital for getting the law changed, a few protests aren’t going to do it, basically every elected official would strongly oppose it, you’d have to replace them all first.
Full access to currently published copyrighted books was way too much. Even Google just showed snippets or showed abandonware books. They really should have settled.
Reading the article and I wonder what Internet Archive thought when they turned themselves into a Pirate Bay but for ebooks. They had this lawsuit coming and they have obviously no idea how to defend themselves in this case.
They should stick to archiving the web instead of shooting themselves in the foot.
I've been saying this for years, this was an incredibly boneheaded move by the Internet Archive and they just keep on doubling down on it. They shouldn't have done it in the first place. When they got sued, they should have immediately admitted they screwed up and settled - the publishers would probably have been fine with a token punishment and a promise to shut down their ebook library, it's not like IA cost them anything significant. But they just keep on fighting, and it's only making things worse.
This isn't even IA's purpose in the first place! They archive the Internet. They're like a guy who's caring for a precious baby who decides he should go poke a bear with a stick, and when the bear didn't respond at first he whacked it over the nose with the stick instead. Now the bear's got his leg and he's screaming "oh no, protect my baby!" And it's entirely his fault the baby's in danger.
145+ Petabytes for a single copy of the archive and they currently have two copies of everything for a total of around 290 Petaybtes.
The largest hard drive I’m aware of is 32TB so you’d “only” need over 9,000 (lol) of the largest drives ever made. I can’t even tell you what that would cost since Seagate doesn’t have a publicly available price for the damn things!
And it had to be replicated, so 3 copies somewhere (granted proper backups are compressed).
Let’s say they have a proper backup compressed at (a random) 60%. That one backup is 87 petabytes. With daily incrementals, so another what, 14 PB to get through 2 weeks of incrementals? Something in the range of 600 PB total with replicas?
(I’m completely pulling numbers out of my ass, I’m not familiar with how such large datasets are managed from a DR perspective).
And, you’d want/need redundancy. One on-site back up for quick restoration and one off-site for surviving physical disaster. So, you’d need at least 3 times that. In HDD prices, that is roughly 2.5 million per set-up, or 7.5 million total for all three. And in SSD prices, well it’s about 3x that. 7.5 million per set up and 22.5million for all three.
An alternate option is a distributed back-up. They could have people volunteer to store and host like 10 gigs each, and just hand out each 10 gig chunk to 10 different people. That would take alot of work to set up, but it would be alot safer. And there are already programs/systems like that to model after. 10 gigs is just an example, might be more successful or even more possible in chunks of 1-2 terabytes. Basically one full hard drive per volunteer.
Lol, had to add that after doing the math for 10 gigs to ten people and realising that was 1000 people per terabyte, so would take 150 million volunteers. Even at 2 petabytes each, assuming we still wanted 10x redundancy in that model, it would be like 750 thousand volunteers or something like that. Maybe there is no sustainable volunteer driven model, lol.
You’d need more than 9,000 of the largest hard drives made (32TB) to store the nearly 300 Petabytes of data they have. Still within the reach of an obscenely rich tech bro but not exactly cheap.
Copyright is no longer functioning properly, if the Internet Archive cannot survive under it.
IP holders are pushing their luck, lately.
Edit: Lately it feels like everyone is underestimating the power of librarians. Anyone working against librarians is on the wrong side of whatever they’re on about.
“Fuck you, I’m doing library stuff.” should be a valid legal defense.
You should probably read the article. The case is only about how the Archive did more than just library stuff—they made a ton of copies and gave them out for free, then argued that the cost of maintenance somehow made that act legal.
Expanding piracy, a pretty brutal form of robbery, to include ignoring digital media copyrights only really makes sense if you’re trying to vilify nonviolent criminals. I haven’t heard good arguments for more than 5-10 year copyrights.
Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There’s really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find a compelling legal reason why it isn’t.
Loads of people don’t consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I’m very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing. Just another branch of the habitually pocket-ran and stolen-from finally adopting that stance, from where I sit.
Internet archive turned themselves into an ebook piracy site rather than a digital library. They distributed unlimited copies of books for free. And then Internet Archive defended it with something in the lines of:
It costs a lot of money to make, and distribute, digital copies of books without the permission of the copyright holder... therefore it should be legal for The Internet Archive to do it.
Internet Archive’s other projects like the Wayback Machine may be good but how they handled their digital lending of books during the pandemic was not. They removed the limit on the number of people that can borrow a book at a time, thus taking away any resemblance to traditional physical lending. You can argue that copyright laws are bad and should be changed (and I’d agree) but that doesn’t change the facts of what happened under the current law.
I’ve never seen someone self-report a failure of Amerikan History like this before. You must’ve missed THE ENTIRE Civil Rights Movement segment, or just tuned it out because it made you or someone close to you uncomfy to think about-- like I’ve asked another person in this thread, what the fuck do you think CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE means???
That’s a really terrible misrepresentation of what happened.You should probably investigate this matter more. This article is supremely biased and basically outright wrong.
The quote you gave, for example, is an almost cartoonist level of distortion of the facts.
[IA] professes to perform the traditional function of a library by lending only limited numbers of these works at a time through “Controlled Digital Lending,” … CDL’s central tenet, according to a September 2018 Statement and White Paper by a group of librarians, is that an entity that owns a physical book can scan that book and “circulate [the] digitized title in place of [the] physical one in a controlled manner.” … CDL’s most critical component is a one-to-one “owned to loaned ratio.” Id. Thus, a library or organization that practices CDL will seek to “only loan simultaneously the number of copies that it has legitimately acquired.”
…
Judging itself “uniquely positioned to be able to address this problem quickly and efficiently,” on March 24, 2020, IA launched what it called the National Emergency Library (“NEL”), intending it to “run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.” … During the NEL, IA lifted the technical controls enforcing its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio and allowed up to ten thousand patrons at a time to borrow each ebook on the Website.
[…]
The Publishers have established a prima facie case of copyright infringement.
First, the Publishers hold exclusive publishing rights in the Works in Suit …
Second, IA copied the entire Works in Suit without the Publishers’ permission. Specifically, IA does not dispute that it violated the Publishers’ reproduction rights, by creating copies of the Works in Suit … ; the Publishers’ rights to prepare derivative works, by “recasting” the Publishers’ print books into ebooks …; the Publishers’ public performance rights, through the “read aloud” function on IA’s Website …; and the publishers’ display rights, by showing the Works in Suit to users through IA’s in-browser viewer
Bold added.
It’s pretty much not in dispute that Internet Archive distributed the copyrighted works of the publishers without permission, outside of what even a traditional library lending system would allow.
Laws can very well be wrong, in a moral sense, and quite a few of them still in existence today are, but trying to argue that in court is usually a bad idea.
They should. But you can’t exactly be surprised if you get in trouble because you broke the law, no matter how stupid you think that law is.
I think it’s stupid that you can’t always turn right on a red light. Plenty of people would agree. I’ll get a ticket if I do it anyway, and it’ll be my own fault.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
If the law doesn’t maintain a carve-out for librarians to do their work; then the law is a shit law, and it needs to be broken.
No carve out is needed, because DRM allows libraries to stay within the bounds of their license agreements. The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
There’s an older legal principle in play here: anyone trying to shut down libraries needs to fuck right off.
While I agree with the idea, the internet archive isn’t a library. It was masquerading as a library to try and avoid lawsuits, but did a piss-poor job of it because they flew in the face of the licensing agreements and copyright laws that legal libraries are bound by.
I love the Internet Archive as a resource. I use it once or twice a week. But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea. They painted a giant legal target on their backs, and now they’re pitching a fit because the book publishers called them on it.
The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
It’s worse than that. They did use “Controlled Digital Lending” to limit the number of people who can access a book at one time to something resembling the number of physical books that they had. And then they turned that restriction off because of the pandemic. There is no pandemic exception to copyright laws, even if that would make sense from a public health perspective to prevent people from having unnecessary contact at libraries. They screwed themselves and I can only hope that the Wayback Machine archives get a home somewhere else if they do go under.
But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea.
That’s a false consensus in my opinion. Assuming ‘everyone’ agrees, will rarely ever be correct.
You are correct in saying that IA is not a library. In my opinion it should be treated as one, if not better. it provides free knowledge, much like a library, but unlike a library you do not have to give back because of the ability to produce a nearly infinite amount digitally.
the point of lending has become useless for anything that can be digitized. i think copyrighting needs to end. creating and not sharing “intellectual property” is an attack on humanity. the arguments in support of copywriting are all rooted in the same concept that copywriting itself is mostly based on: greed. before it was a resources issue as well. it still is but with diminishing requirements that should and could be trivial in this digital world we have now.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
This is just wrong.
If a library has purchased two copies of a piece of digital media - an ebook, for example - which patrons can check out online, only two people can have it checked out at once, and when the checkout period expires, the content is no longer available to the patron. Now a copy is freed up for the next person to check out.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
I wrote that then deleted it cause I wasn’t sure how you address it internationally. Where PBS is broadcast in the USA, the internet is open to the world.
But, you’re right! It should be publicly funded. I’d have no problem with my tax dollars going towards that.
True, I don’t know how this would work for international stuff, but this is human knowledge and history, it’s something we should be archiving and not tossing to the wind.
To do that they need to make sure they have adequate funding and make sure they don’t incur some huge financial liabilities somehow. The Internet Archive failed at that last part when they decided to lend out ebooks that are under copyright without many limits (and potentially with their Great 78 Project regarding music as well).
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