Comment by lousken
6 hours ago
That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.
6 hours ago
That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.
The archive.org story was more nuanced than that. If I recall correctly the full story was that they used to lend digital versions of books they physically bought and scanned with DRM to enforce a sort of one to one at a time restriction.
But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently which started the debacle with the publishers.
> But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently
IIRC, this was 100% it. Lending one digital version of one physical asset was likely already a violation copyright. Lending UNLIMITED digital versions of one physical copy was DEFINITELY a blatant violation of copyright.
Correct, it was switching to unlimited lending instead of one lend per physical book that got them in trouble.
How is lending one digital version of one physical asset a violation of copyright? Since I MAY be able to lend out the physical as well?
3 replies →
Yeah that was it; if I got this right, US libraries got the right to lend out one digital version of a book that they had in their inventory. Archive.org combined those digital versions so that people could check out a digital book if any library in the US had it (digitally) available. But during the 'rona they removed this limit and just lent out books regardless of it being "checked out" digitally from a library.
This wasn't a very smart move of them. I get why they did it but they put themselves at a huge legal risk.
If i recall correctly, they had permission from physical libraries to use their copies as well, so it wasn't just a single copy but many copies, just one of them was converted into digital. Still wasn't enough apparently...
> Publishers should be more careful what they wish for. you think they don't like people destroying their books? if you destroy a book, that increases the value of the others and the unpublished holdings (unfortunately)
Publishers don't care if rare books get shredded?
And, regrettably, The Archive lent books regardless of physical possession.
Publishers had accepted the prior arrangement before The Archive decided to push it, if not explicitly then implicitly by not suing.
I'm a believer in The Archive's mission, and I wish they had treated the goodwill they'd accumulated as something worth preserving and not a currency to be spent.
It has been stated by many before me: lending books should have been handled by a separate entity, especially when they removed the physical backing requirement.
Just to be clear, publishers hadn't accepted the "controlled digital lending" (CDL) premise, not even with the one-to-one ratio. Their position was always "first sale ends when the atoms do". There was even controlling precedent: a few years before IA tried their online lending library thing, there was an "MP3 resale" company called ReDigi that had lost on very similar grounds. The publishers suing IA even made sure to sue in the same venue that had decided the ReDigi case so it'd be controlling precedent.
Furthermore, in the discovery for the Internet Archive case, publishers had already found a case where IA had lent out books despite knowing their partner libraries wasn't actually withdrawing loaned-out copies from circulation. The CDL premise was always just a suggestion, and IA would have still lost their case if they hadn't done the National Emergency Library (NEL) stunt or if they'd been sued in another venue that hadn't had the ReDigi case as precedent.
It's important to note that whenever a company decides to sue for copyright, it is often late, because the company is banking infringements up to the 3-year statute of limitations and because building a meritorious case takes time. The lack of a timely lawsuit proves almost nothing about the intent of a publisher with a valid case against you.
The thing is, I don't even think the whole stunt damaged much of the IA's goodwill? I know of a few people who withheld donations to IA, but that was mainly under the assumption that publishers would be getting a billion-dollar damage award that would immediately bankrupt IA and result in it's archives being sold off to Lexis-Nexis or something. The funny thing is, IA wound up settling for a sum so small they had to promise never to reveal it, and the danger is gone, so the only thing people complain about now is just that the NEL stunt maybe pushed them "above the radar" or something.
It's still insane that shredding books for AI training is legal, but this isn't.
1 reply →
Yeah, why would it be bad for publishers? If anything they'd most likely encourage more book shredding!
There are many reasons but it's just rare books - in general: they are setting a precedent for people to pirate instead of using libraries. In general companies are trying really hard to make people switch back to torrenting, pirate sites, sharing media etc.
of the rare books, which was the rarest of them all? What year was it published?
[dead]
> That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result
How are these things remotely related? If anything, Archive.org’s callous, thoughtless approach nuked the hands of legitimate archival efforts.