Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers
Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers
Appeals court decision potentially reversing publishers' suit may come this fall.
In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt "a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others," who may not have access to a local library or feel "safe accessing the information they need in public."
During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that "those voices weren't being heard." Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA's digital lending potentially hurts publishers' profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers' costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers.
I like the library analogy.
The way things are going, libraries themselves will be outlawed.
Did you know that librarians usually have a penis or a vagina? And the most horrible thing of all is that they bring it with them into the library! They jiggle it all around every time they go around putting books back in their order and such. It's horrible. What kind of message are they trying to send?
I mean regardless of what sexually deviant thing they carry around between their legs, for sure, almost with a failure, with just a few exceptions, all of those deviants bring an anus with them where ever they go. And tits! They are gotta bring their tits like anyone is interested in those things. My God! We need to burn those places down!
Presidents will get to open a merch store that sells a few books after their presidencies now rather than the presidential libraries
But there's a very clear distinction in the law. Libraries are covered under first sale doctrine. You can do effectively what you want with a physical object that contains copyrighted material placed there by the owner.
Digital anything is not covered by the first sale doctrine. Every individual loan is a copy. Every time a "copy" moves between devices is a copy. There is no legal framework for ownership of anything digital. It's always a license, no matter what permissions that license grants you.
You have to pass new laws to match the digital world. Under the current laws, it's extremely clear that lending unauthorized digital copies of a physical book is copyright infringement. Wholesale copies of a work aren't even in the neighborhood of fair use, especially when you're distributing a bunch of them. DRMing those copies is completely irrelevant legally.
I understand your point. But the archive isn't giving you a copy. It will display 2 pages on your screen, using encryption, for up to 2 hours. You can turn pages and see a different 2 pages displayed, but that's it.
Is this a significant distinction from a copy, I don't know. But it does seem different as I cannot take that copy, I can only observe content and even then in a limited way.
With governance across the US destroying libraries left and right, what IA is doing is basically a necessary future.
The IA needs to lay low a bit before we loose them. There's plenty of stuff out there they can archive that we need that won't piss off copyright.
We need an ipfs or torrent library that's out of easy reach of the courts.
It's the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for those curious.
But goddammit they will try