It would be a shame if another website pop up and uploaded these removed book to it and call it, idk, Internet Alexandria or something.
It’s great that these projects already exist
but it hurts accessibility that you need to be “in the know” to find out about it.
every media outlet has to mention WayBackMachine; it’s such a great outreach and legitimizing
I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.
Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?
And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.
Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.
Would be a shame if they decided to call it something with the letter z and the word library in it
I’d be all for altering definitions in a way that enables them to do stuff like the controlled lending system (also just digitizing shit generally).
But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.
By “controlled lending system,” do you mean the library? If so, it is ridiculously expensive for them to offer ebooks and audiobooks. One ebook costs $60-100 and they can only lend the licensed copy for two years. You would think audiobooks would be more expensive to do but publishers charge roughly the same.
What Internet Archive did is digitized physical books, then loaned out their “one copy” with DRM. Their assertion is that this constitutes fair use. I don’t really think there’s any merit to that argument based on the law and the body of precedent, and fundamentally tend to dislike legislation from the bench (judges just arbitrarily reinterpreting laws). Passing new laws and restructuring how IP law works is the job of the legislature, not the judiciary.
IA then made this worse by taking the already super tenuous “fair use” argument and throwing it out the window by removing the lending limits during Covid. It was waving a red flag in front of IP holders and begging them to take aggressive action.
I think if they hadn’t abandoned the CDL modern during the pandemic, they could have kept it going indefinitely. Even if it wasn’t likely fair use, it might have been. More than that, it would have been bad press for the publisher to make the first move.
Abandoning CDL during the pandemic was just waving a red flag and giving the publishers a slam dunk case.
I think if IA had just held the line with CDL, they could have over time just effectively established a precedent. Lost opportunity.
But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.
Indeed. I’m a big supporter of IA’s mission, and I’m a big supporter of piracy (copyright has gone insane over the years), but this outcome was obvious from the moment IA did this and it was a mistake for them to fight this fight. They should focus on preservation. Let the EFF handle the lawsuits, and let Library Genesis handle the illegal distribution of books. Everyone focus on what they’re best at.
Their distribution of books is completely legal.
Corporations just have more money to warp the laws in their favour.
That’s why the Archive is appealing: they still believe they are right.
There’s really no credible argument that their distribution of books even might be legal.
Their only defense is fair use, and there’s no precedent for a “fair use” defense justifying copying a work wholesale for mass distribution. (Yes, “one copy at a time” to multiple people is mass distribution.) Copying a whole work has effectively only qualified as fair use when that copy is not re-distributed, and is actually for a personal backup.
This only makes me favor copyright reform more. Should really cut that down to 25 years or less; anything from before the 21st century should be public domain by now.
Definitely won’t find these books on Anna’s Archive /s
Modern day book burning. Done by the writers this time.
Printers*
