I'm not affiliated, but I am a concerned netizen. All of us here have benefited from The IA. Please help raise awareness as to what is happening.
Read more here, and elsewhere - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/14/cucd-j14.html
> In June 2020, four major publishers—John Wiley & Sons and three of the big five US publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming the non-profit organization, “is engaged in willful mass copyright infringement.”
> The lawsuit stems from the corporate publishers response to an innovative temporary initiative launched by the Internet Archive during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic called the National Emergency Library. Given the impact of the public health emergency, the Internet Archive decided to ease its book lending restrictions and allow multiple people to check out the same digital copy of a book at once.
> Up to that point, the Internet Archive had established a practice of purchasing copies of printed books, digitizing them and lending them to borrowers one at a time. When it kicked-off the emergency lending program, the Internet Archive made it clear that this policy would be in effect until the end of the pandemic. Furthermore, the archive’s publishers said that this program was in response to library doors being closed to the public during the pandemic. Under conditions where the Internet Archive was the only means of access to titles for many people, the policy was justified and a creative response to COVID-19.
They may not understand that none of what they like about the Internet Archive would've been possible without a bold willingness to probe the boundaries of copyright law.
If you'd asked any mainstream copyright law authority in the 1990s, they'd have likely said the entire Wayback Machine was illegal under the letter-of-the-law, and advised against even trying it. "Reckless!"
Only by IA actually doing it – & demonstrating the indispensibility of such a historical record to academics, policymakers, culture, & the courts – were people's mental models gradually upgraded. Now, even with little change to statutory law, most see that the best interpretation of the various traditional categories, exceptions, & affordances of copyright law is the one that finds legal space for a Wayback Machine.
Bulk-scanning books-still-in-copyright, even for private preservation/use? Was legally iffy when Google & IA started doing it; now better recognized as legitimate.
Accepting user/collector uploads of live concerts? Storing, serving, & providing emulated environments for old still-in-copyright retail PC/game/arcade software? Bulk-archiving & replaying TV news broadcasts? All iffy when IA started doing them, becoming accepted as reasonable over time by the demonstration-of-utility.
An Internet Archive that waited for legal clarity before starting such projects would still be waiting today – and we'd have neither the valuable projects, nor the accumulated experience/clarity, from the actual doing, about what is reasonable & beneficial.
Do you know what system they replaced robots.txt with? Email, one that is filed as a DMCA request: https://medium.com/wednesday-genius/how-to-remove-your-websi... https://jonathanwthomas.net/how-to-get-your-website-out-of-t...
Sometimes, it's probably good to not push the envelope without trying to establish consensus in good faith first.
Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31703394 - June 2022 (32 comments)
Help preserve the internet with Archiveteam's warrior - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30524842 - March 2022 (51 comments)
Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23998115 - July 2020 (348 comments)
My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931183 - July 2020 (232 comments)
EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691297 - June 2020 (263 comments)
Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182 - June 2020 (393 comments)
Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391662 - June 2020 (260 comments)
Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23379775 - June 2020 (346 comments)
Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472 - March 2020 (145 comments)
Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22716923 - March 2020 (48 comments)
What I'd love to see improved is the ability to be less "fragile". Currently it's all located in the US and they have a huge focus on the US, both technically and politically.
But why not try to replicate it all over the world? There seems to have been some smaller efforts inside the Internet Archive to make it more decentralized, but it feels like it should be a much bigger focus on it.
[1] https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.as...
Hardly any of that content would exist at the quality level you are accustomed to, without copyright.
I say that as a producer of such content. If anyone could legally copy and distribute my work without my permission, I would not produce it, because there would be minimal financial incentive for me to do so.
The current level of such unauthorized distribution - by which I primarily refer to the republication of my work by others, in its entirety, for their own profit - is staggering. And that is with the existence of copyright law.
And it’s a huge disincentive from publishing more content. Both economically and because it’s demoralizing.
It’s also a huge waste of time, as in order to be able to pay my employees and myself, I have to dedicate time to combating infringement-as-a-business.
If copyright ceased to exist, I and nearly every other producer that I know, would find another line of work.
Fortunately, copyright ceasing to exist is unlikely to happen.
For starters, the wholesale abolition of copyright would violate the United States Constitution.
No, because they would get laughed out of the room.
Currently, only the IA will fall, and anyone who benefited from their seeming folly will have no issues.
What were they expecting? How can they possibly expect to win this lawsuit? I hate copyright with all my soul but this is just stupid. You can't just decide to take the law into your own hand. This is just a waste of money and effort.
The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more.
It's about selecting for the common good over the extremely low-value proposition of helping rent-seekers preserve an infinite zero-effort stream of income.
TIA is one of the best things to emerge from tech, all thanks to the tireless and complete dedication of the founder: Brewster Kahle.
I don't know if they still do it, but pre-pandemic they offered tours of their HQ in San Francisco. It was really cool to meet the team and see their setup, and an amazing opportunity to meet Brewster and hear the conviction in his voice as he described his vision for The Internet Archive. It's a very special thing.. imagine if it didn't exist? I am feeling tears coming just considering such a possible reality.
To be honest, I'm having a hard time getting upset over this lawsuit. As best I can tell, IA isn't getting sued over having scanned the books. They're not even getting sued over lending them out. Instead, they're getting sued over lending out more digital copies than the number of physical copies they had purchased.
The books would be no less well preserved if IA had not decided to do this. Access would have gone down, temporarily. The pandemic would have sucked that one little bit more (though honestly, a drop in the bucket for what the people most impacted were already experiencing). And... that's it. It really has no long-term ramifications, aside from whatever legal precedent it sets (if any).
I really like being able to write open source code in my day job, and I appreciate information freedom. But I don't think those principles apply here. I really do think this is just a straightforward case of an organization overstepping their bounds and getting slapped down for it.
That genuinely may be so, but "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.
Also, what you call "rent seeking" others would call "return on investment". I do think there is a grey area here, "fair use" being one example, but i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance.
The Internet Archive does a lot of good things, most clearly legal, others gray areas that I think should be legal. This stunt was different.
Taking a copyright infringement case before one of the most textualist and conservative courts we have had in decades is not a good plan for people who want a right to whatever it is that the IA was doing read into the Constitution.
If you want access to these works, which you seem to be arguing for, then you are saying these works do have value.
I suspect you are just misusing the term.
I know I've taken advantage of getting software from the IA that is still commercially sold on places like gog.com, so while overall I regard the IA to be "morally in the right", there's little doubt to me personally there is a ton of content on there that shouldn't be.
If you want to preserve human culture, you want to make it possible for the non-rich to help create it.
If you want to write books for free, go to it. But what the IA did was just plain wrong. Plenty of bookstores like Powells were operating remotely during the pandemic. Many libraries had curbside pick up. Amazon was still delivering. There was no reason to run up the pirate flag.
Based on what? Rights-holders are able to make a living because of copyright protections, it makes no sense that your rhetoric raises up these cultural works as vital for preservation but simultaneously dismisses the creators as unworthy of being paid.
I dunno, man. It's hard for me to imagine being in that position and not pressing the button. I imagine the archive (and their lawyers) went into the decision with eyes fully open. I doubt they had zero contingency plans for the worst case.
But if there was no malice or net harm from such technical violations – or indeed if the breaches effectively prevented greater harms – society and the courts will often find such "law-breaking" to be forgivable or even praise-worthy. For example, you are allowed to break trespassing laws to save a life, and in other situations of private or public necessity.
With regard to reading & education in early 2020, publicly-funded schools & libraries that were supposed to be operating were closed with little warning, for a potentially indefinite amount of time. Millions of purchased books that were supposed to be circulating sat idle in locked buildings. A crucial cultural & civilizational function was stopped dead in its tracks.
Against that, the Internet Archive rapidly deployed a novel technological workaround to re-enable some (but not all) of the pandemic-impaired booklending/reading activity. It did so in a way that had no more effect on the publishers' economic prospects than normal-times library operations, and was arguably within the 'fair use' & format-shifting rights well-established for book owners & libraries in the United States.
So I think IA expects to "win" the lawsuit because they did a good deed for the world's readers, as a temporary & reasonable adaptation to an extraordinary emergency situation, that caused negligible harms to the publisher plaintiffs.
Presumably, even if they are hoping to change law with the case - it’s putting up the rest of IA’s (almost irreplaceably invaluable) mission as a gamble on whatever chances they think they have here.
An example is Uber 'invents' smartphone taxi's and says the laws of employment and taxi's don't apply to them. They make a ton of money and here we are.
Maybe I am being overly cynical.
No one, who is anyone, got to where they’re at because they followed the rules. At a certain point anyone who is successful took a risk in their past and it paid off.
When you take a risk for profit, you can hire the lawyers you need to cover for the sins you committed. Most of the time it’s cheaper for parties to settle out of court and this puts you at the negotiating table and integrates your success into the existing power structures. You live long enough to become the villain.
When you take a risk and innovate for the greater good, you don’t have the profit, you can’t hire the expensive attorneys to cover you, and you get eaten alive by the parties you offended. You die the hero, which is why very few do this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_procedu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus
The publishers lawyers will argue they are just a warez site, and use everything in their power to do such, jurisdiction, case law, confusing terms and obfuscation, etc.
Libraries/archives actually have fairly limited exceptions. And the category isn't even especially clearly defined. It's definitely not an anything goes get out of jail free card.
Just think that if people would never take the law in their hands some countries would still have legal slaves, or legal segregation.
See Uber, Lyft, AirBNB..... Just get big enough and buy enough politicians that it's not going to be a problem.
> What were they expecting?
This concisely describes how I felt about Sci-Hub the first few times I read about the project. There are some differences, e.g. the Internet Archive chooses to operate within US jurisdiction.
Of course not! The IA lacks enough money or donations to crooked politicians to get away with that. Strict adherence to the laws is for common folks, so they should have complied.
(Shrug) That's why we're not stuck with a 55 MPH national highway speed limit, here in the US. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
In this case “ask for forgiveness” could mean going out of business in the process. You can only afford to “ask for forgiveness” and break the law if you’re willing to lose it all.
Why the IA did this as part of their long established archive business instead of a separate venture is beyond me.
That only works if you are capable of handling the legal trouble that results.
If they didn't realize that they'd be sued then they're hopelessly shortsighted (there's no "emergency" exemption to copyright laws, even if you can make the argument that morally there should be). If they did know that they'd be sued, the message they're projecting is that they have enough leftover money to burn that they can branch out from their core competencies and try their hand at legal activism.
Maybe they're trying to set a legal precedent, which sounds great. I don't know why but I read your comment in such a negative tone.
"Rebel"gecko indeed
Part of being a good rebel is to choose your battles wisely :) I think IA does a good job at that when they distribute abandonware or public domain materials. Trying to share unlimited copies of Harry Potter seems much more quixotic.
Being a library is their core mission and fighting what they are fighting now is one of the reasons I keep donating to them. I want them to be able to offer a digital library all over the world, this for me is the Internet Archive.
Archival institutions are allowed to make digitized copies of legitimately owned works, and to allow access to that copy on their own "premises".
In the case of an organization like the internet archive which does not have physical premises, would you accept the argument that their 'premises' is the internet?
The question that they want answered is: where exactly is the line between looking at a scanned/microfiched/non-original archival copy of copyrighted material at the library, and viewing that same material over a network connection.
They weren't just handing out unlimited copies of books. They were distributing owned copies of books for exclusive temporary use. The method of delivery is different, but the end result is the same as checking a book out and leaving the library.
Just because public libraries signed shitty deals to get access to lending ebook licenses doesn't mean that the right to lend archival material over the network doesn't exist.
I would love for the courts to establish a first-sale doctrine that applies to digitized books, or that allows shifting a books format (buying a physical copy of a book and converting it to digital)
I don't think that's accurate. This lawsuit didn't happen until they stopped enforcing the constraint that (# of concurrent digital loans) ≤ (# of physical copies IA and their partner libraries have). Thats very different from a regular library, where the number of copies they loan out can't exceed the number of copies they physically posses (or ebook licenses they have, which is a whole nother rabbithole).
There's also a whole other issue around scraping copyrighted public web pages in general but between being a non-profit archive, respecting robots.txt, and (at least mostly) taking pages down on request, TIA seems to have mostly skirted legal attention in that respect.
(Though it's probably a bit legally iffy. If I create an online comics museum and start hosting all sorts of syndicated content, I'm probably going to get a letter from a lawyer.)
That would probably have triggered the same lawsuit. You cannot rent digital copies of physical works no matter how much sense it makes.
How exactly?
One relatively innocuous way to neutralize the hoarders of exclusive rights is a compulsory license. It was proposed in the context of the TRIPS waiver: https://www.communia-association.org/2021/03/22/communia-sup...
Ofc just wait for the case which involves some law they hate and watch the song change.
I will agree with the thought, though, that picking a fight you can't win is probably dumb. I doubt the IA would become a martyr.
From what I can tell, even buying a book and then digitally lending it out, isn't exactly a human right. Regardless, IA was doing that without issue for years.
IA then decided they were going to "lend out"as many books as they wanted. To
What exactly is surprising here ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21012643
In that context, NEL was quite a foolish thing to do.
But wait, that's not its mission - https://archive.org/about explains how IA's mission of 'Universal Access to All Knowledge' and status as a library entail 'paying special attention to books'. That'd be the rationale for NEL, then?
I feel they should be taking steps immediately to ensure that at least the data of the Wayback Archive will outlive the whims of IA-the-organization in the coming decades/centuries, before it's too late. There's probably a lot of people willing to help out with such a replication task.
_However_, they have to operate under the same BS everyone else does, so it seems naïve for them to take reckless actions that could put them in this position
As a nonprofit and public archive/library they do have some special rights, which is why this isn't as clear cut as many think. These range from codified in law https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108 to US Copyright Office decisions like https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2021/ and precedent.
If you did this you'd be sued into the ground and 100% lose. Now, I'm not saying the Archive will get away with what they did or that it was a good idea, just that there might be some non-obvious avenues.
If you have not used the system, spend some time and discover the gems that are included in its collection. https://archive.org Offer suggestions and get involved.
On July 15th I attended the Archive Open House and spoke with Brewster about the ambitious plans through the coming year and the next few decades. There is a lot that needs to be done.
The Archive needs your moral, political, and monetary support. To donate: https://archive.org/donate .
My opinion is that it may be difficult to find enough volunteer storage to fit the entire Archive, but if we focus on prioritizing plaintext HTML, plus perhaps graphics included in web pages constrained to a size limit, we can do it.
Right now it's one of the few easily accessible places on the web that haven't completely caved in to copyright and moderation censorship, the only way to keep web "news media" somewhat accountable by having an actual historical record one can point at.
Once that's gone, misinformation serving pro-US narratives will go into complete overdrive and the web will be dead [0] for good.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
Those pockets are large, and the display of the dollar does more to sway Judges than any real interpretation of the law.
It is safe to say that they will succeed in their (seemingly useless) endeavor.
Who are those corporations and how would they benefit?
Copyright infringement is exactly what makes it possible to provide me with that collection of Windows 7 UI sounds and similar things, but I don't know about books. There are already people archiving books and providing them to people for free, so I think this is not a role the Internet Archive needs to fill.
Save the money and fight battles that matter more ...
We live in a world where one corporation can singlehandedly change copyright for the worse for the majority of humanity, where copyright is actively being used and abused, not just for profit maximation but also for the suppression of information.
In such a world lawsuits sadly are a part of enabling to do what IA is trying to do; Set precedents for what doesn't fall under copyright, fighting for interests that are not 100% based on profits.
Can anybody enlighten me how they have not been sued into oblivion and sit in prison already?
What if the site is simply gone, or now belongs to someone else who is not the owner of the archived content?
Not sure if that's the specific part that lets them do what they do, or if that's from some other rule, just pointing out that this kind of rule exists.
They are also not making a profit from “copied” content, and so damages would be small. Particularly as they would immediately remove the problematic content.
If people don't want their content in such place they can always place it behind login-wall.
I for one commend them for doing a noble thing in a very turbulent time. We didn't know how the pandemic was going to play out early on in 2020 and they went ahead to help out in any way they could. Perhaps the US Federal Government will give them some kind of an exemption (if such a thing exists). I'm sure they can find a case where their action is justified in the eyes of law.
That “hacker spirit” has put years of extremely valuable internet archives at risk for an extremely insignificant gain, all due to a legal issue that anyone could see coming from a mile away.
Hacker spirit and playing fast and loose with the rules might fly when you’re a fresh startup with nothing to lose. It’s just plain irresponsible when you start putting an established business at risk in ways that were trivially avoided.
