Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win

• bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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• wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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• FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.

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  • stembolts@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.

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    • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I only took issue with your regressive philosophy

      The "regressive philosophy" you're accusing me of holding is the opposite of what I said. There's your misunderstanding to be corrected.

      I don't like the publishers, I think copyright has gone bananas with its various extensions over the years, I want to see them fought and defeated in court. The problem here is who is doing the fighting.

      Imagine a scenario where there's a ravenous man-eating bear in the woods. There's two people available to fight it; a grizzled woodsman who makes it his entire business to go out and fight bears, and the village librarian who's carrying around a backpack full of irreplaceable books. For some reason the librarian is out there poking the bear with a stick, and when the bear didn't initially respond he started whacking it over the nose. Now the bear is chewing on the librarian's leg and the librarian is crying out "oh no, my backback full of books is in danger!"

      Well duh. You shouldn't have been carrying that backpack into harm's way like that. Nobody is in the least bit surprised that the bear attacked the librarian under those circumstances. I don't have to be on the bear's side to understand how this situation was going to go down and call the librarian an idiot for willingly getting into it.

      The woodsman (the EFF) should have been the ones to take this fight. They're better at it, it's their job, and if they fail they don't risk that precious backpack in the process. The librarian should have kept his books safely ensconced until the fight was over and it was safe for him to bring them out. If he really wanted those books distributed in the meantime, there are some sites who are already out there running around under the bear's nose taking that risk for their own reasons; let them continue taking those risks for now.

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• doodledup@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Omg this can’t be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?

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• AmidFuror@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?

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  • stembolts@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas.

    But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…

    “Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”

    So in short.

    Having laws at all is a dictatorship.

    Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.

    Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.

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