They should have known better…
Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
Nougat@fedia.io 1 week agoWhich IA failed to do, which is why they got sued, and why they can’t lend those publishers’ books at all anymore.
I have no sympathy.
db2@lemmy.world 1 week ago
stembolts@programming.dev 1 week ago
“Because what is legal is always right.
And what is right is always legal.”No?
In a fascist state, your mindset is welcome, “Well they broke the rule, they must pay,” but do you never abstract one more level? Is the rule itself breaking something?
Those who downvote you say yes. Nuance is important. The rule has two main affects that I see.
- Direct effect (the goal) :Publishers maintain a monopoly on bookselling low value books, the structure of their business preventing any competition.
Okay lets think about #1. Is that good or bad?
- Indirect effect : the members of that society now have a restricted access to knowledge.
Okay lets think about #2. Is that good or bad?
Being critical in thought enough to recognize the flaws of the first quote is key.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.
stembolts@programming.dev 1 week ago
It would be more accurate if you said, “This is not about right and wrong (for me).”
If you say it’s not about right and wrong, dead stop, then you are pledging full faith to the institutions, the very ones we are critiquing.
Basically, you are dismissing my opinion as misguided, dismissing me as missing the point and I am telling you it was expressed exactly as intended.
In short, you are arguing on the wrong conceptual meta-level for me to respond without dismissing my own claim. If I take as True that “this isn’t about right and wrong” (it is), then I am setting aside the power I have in a democratic society to say, “Fuck this I’m changing it.” Maybe we’ve just been stuck in gridlock politics, with a ruling class that strips and monetizes every aspect of humanity that the society today doesn’t realize the power citizens wield.
Not sure. Been fun to think and share thoughts with you though. Thanks for your time and have a nice night.
An impasse is a perfectly acceptable outcome on a sane platform like Lemmy.
Nighed@feddit.uk 1 week ago
They should have poked the bear with a separate legal entity so the obvious resulting legal loss wouldn’t effect their core operations.
I support the idea as long as it’s for dead authors/out of print books, but from what I understand they were just letting people ‘borrow’ anything? That’s just stupid (if idealistic)
whocares314@lemmy.world 1 week ago
(citation needed)
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 week ago
McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access.
—https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-internet-archive-hurt-sales/, lnked in a link in the article
whocares314@lemmy.world 1 week ago
FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?
If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 week ago
Unfortunately, that's like saying everyone has the right to read any book that IA usually archives for free at any time. Do I agree with that? Yes. Does it hurt intellectual property? Yes. There's obviously evidence that readers used the service a lot. I agree with the principle, but they should've just temporarily "merged" with public libraries and increased borrowing limits for books in stock, not allow everyone in the United States to just get a book as long as they have less than 9 other books as well.
Oisteink@feddit.nl 1 week ago
They claimed to use the same protections as others. Is there a more accurate article about how their lending was faulty?
reddig33@lemmy.world 1 week ago
During Covid, they lent out multiple copies of the same book when they only had physical access to one copy. It would be like your local library making Xerox copies of their collection and handing them out.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That’s literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
ABCDE@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That is what happens though, it’s clear about that.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Just want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week ago
It's an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don't poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn't matter if you're "in the right". The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it's what they're best at.
stembolts@programming.dev 1 week ago
“No one should stand up for new rights. Don’t rock the boat bro.”
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week ago
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
doodledup@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Omg this can’t be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?
AmidFuror@fedia.io 1 week ago
"Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor."
How you like them strawmen?
Nougat@fedia.io 1 week ago
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
You should strive to improve as as person rather than be a stagnant asshole
Nougat@fedia.io 1 week ago
I know who I am.
fin@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he’s not an asshole for being right. He’s an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 1 week ago
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
“With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!” ~ERB’s depiction of Walt Disney.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn’t.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I have talked to a few published authors (most unsuccessful) and listened to a few successful published authors, and they all say the same as you. Some of them (esp. successful) give away free books on their website. They just want people to read their books.
The ones complaining here aren’t the authors, but the publishers.
TheTetrapod@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Unequivocally no.
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
ripcord@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Copyright serves a very useful purpose. It’s just been twisted into something it wasn’t meant to be.
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
no?
Redistributing them, especially for money, maybe.