Comment by Den_VR
1 day ago
Libraries are not piracy. You’re correct about the need to change laws, but the change goes beyond the Open Library and is more fundamental to citizen rights in the context of digital ownership.
This is just as pivotal to Right-to-Repair as it is to expecting digital assets that have been “bought” not to brick themselves after some arbitrary period.
The Internet Archive's "library" system wouldn't fit the legal definition of a library here. They'd need to register (cheap and easy) and comply with national law (needs review from a lawyer).
The Internet Archive is rife with pirated content and basically a well-intentioned The Pirate Bay when you look at it from a copyright standpoint. The American laws that make it possible for the IA to exist don't apply elsewhere. Things like "public domain" simply don't exist in other countries.
Making the IA work internationally is forcing a square peg through a round hole. It'll only limit what the IA is capable of accomplishing. I'm quite at peace with "the IA is banned from countries incompatible with the IA's mission".
I know. But they're not banning libraries. They're banning access to an entity they can't enforce local laws for.
I think we need law changes around digital ownership for sure, but I don't think this applies here.
PS: big fan of the internet archive. I'm just arguing that we need to do things correctly. And we need to let the authors be able to make a living from their work.
Oh yes, “think of the authors.” That’s propaganda, an idyllic myth.
Literary output and quality have never been solely contingent on authors making a living from their work. The necessity of authors making their livelihood writing is the idyllic myth. Literature can, and has, bloomed from both the pen of the pauper and the privileged.
Jane Austen made perhaps £600 from her writing. Kafka kept a full-time day job and saw zero literary income in his lifetime.
Not to say there’s not people that haven’t made fortunes from those examples, but it sure wasn’t the author.
> Libraries are not piracy.
Libraries are also, at least where I am within the EU, pretty regulated. Libraries follow a compromise between the interests of the author and the public, one that the Open Library has never established.
It sure doesn't help that archive.org is (besides usenet) the single largest central repository of pirated content on the planet, easily measuring in the hundreds of petabytes.
Libraries are not piracy.
Just imagine the pushback if public libraries were invented today. They'd never get off the ground. Lobbyists from the copyright cartel would treat them as a five-alarm emergency, in the unlikely event that Republicans didn't block funding at the state and Federal levels.
Not only can I imagine it, I’m watching it live from the pearl clutching surrounding generative “AI.” The guard rails put in to appease Interests severely limit what’s already technically possible, and that’s still not enough for the monied Interests.