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The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.
@ernie while I totally agree from a moral pint of view, IA knew they were flaunting rules and got sloppy / arrogant about it. While the copyright system BADLY needs reform IA brought this world of pain onto themselves knowing that system very well and should have known better.
For me it raises a pressing matter of who archives the archive..? We need redundancy of such important services to protect them against catastrophe be that technological or bureaucratic.
@ernie what IA were doing may have been morally right but we all know morality doesn’t come into copyright law 
@wiredfire I think IA pushed the edges of the program a little too hard during the pandemic but the idea of checking out digital forms of physical books is how things should work. It’s infuriating that it does not
@ernie absolutely, it’s maddening. In a similar way I have a stack of physical books but I just don’t read them, I always pick up the Kobo instead. There is no legal route for me to simply format-shift them to digital. Of course there are plenty of routes I could go to furnish myself with digital copies, but still.
@ernie There was a service that tried to do this for a while, you had to write a message in the book and send photo as evidence and it used that to determine one book = one ebook. Naturally publishers hated this idea and the whole thing fell apart fairly quickly 
@wiredfire @ernie I have never heard of that "write a message in the book to prove ownership" thing and as a librarian who has also worked at Open Library, I am very curious, Do you remember what it was called?
@wiredfire @ernie Thank you!
@wiredfire @jessamyn @ernie I remember some mystification and discussion about names on the tp verso when examples of these started surfacing as discards. There were other apps that worked the same way.
https://www.adweek.com/galleycat/take-a-shelfie-to-get-a-free-ebook-version-of-any-print-book-you-own
@wiredfire @jessamyn @ernie iirc there was also at least one case of a library reporting that they had this strange form of vandalism occur, where a name would be found on the tp verso.
That would seem not very well thought through.
@wiredfire The moral of the story is, it's immoral to try and jump through stupid hoops in order to make the copyright hoarders happy. The copyright hoarders will never be made happy, and they will use not being happy as a pretext for hurting the public in immoral ways.
The moral thing to do is for a library to make copies to everybody who wants one.
@riley @ernie no argument there, I don't believe I've ever philosophically disagreed with what IA did. I think it was shortsighted continue the scheme after covid lockdowns. For me the moral is pissing off copyright holders when you operate legitimately (unlike places like Libgen) is not the way to approach copyright change.
IA had the moral high ground but that didn't help in court. We can all agree on the ethics but the law disagres with us, and really needs change bit this wasn't the way.
@wiredfire Well, if you understand why the system is abusive, why call it "legitimate"? Why justify it?
@wiredfire @ernie Libgen is doing alright.
Piracy is the only tool the public has to restrain copyright holders' behavior.
@wiredfire *hiss*! *boo*!
You're pretending that the "rules" are some sort of objective, knowable, and respectable thing? *hiss*!
@wiredfire @ernie shut the fuck up fed
@wiredfire @ernie How do you go about moving IA to a more federated or at least less centralised system? Figure the data for all of the archives must be into the high end of the petabyte range at this point.
That's not irony. It's capitalism and corruption. It's a system that at its core does not work for the people.
@ernie do you think OpenAI could have got its corpus if text without Internet Archive (and project Gutenberg).
The tragedy of the commons is that some mobster always wants to profit from it at everyone else's expense.
@craignicol @ernie “tragedy of the commons” was more about resources running out. The problem with the idea is that common spaces generally functioned well until property ownership and capital changed the equation.
In other words, human fictions like copyright ruin commons, not some natural law.
@ernie some organizations make enough money by violating the law that they can sue everyone else to extinction.
@ernie If something is done with the intention of making things better for everyone, it's a crime. If something is done to make a profit, despite damaging everyone, it's considered virtuous.
I really dislike that this seems very accurate.
Especially when jobs that help people pay so little or demand all of the time.
@ernie That's what they started out doing. And if they had kept doing that, they probably never would have been sued, or if they were, there's a good chance they would have won.
But then they started entering into agreements with libraries all over the country: let us integrate with your online card catalog, and then we can let people check out one digital copy of any book your currently have on your shelves. Qualitatively different, much more questionable in terms of copyright law.
(continued)
@ernie And then COVID happened and they removed all borrowing limits and let anyone check out any book, infinite copies. And that's when the publishers noped out, decided they had gone too far, and sued.
What they did during COVID was clearly theft and clearly deprived authors of income. There was no ambiguity. It was a shitty, stupid overstep.
They got sued and established a shitty precedent because they went too far and pissed off the publishers too much. It was dumb.
@jik It wasn’t a shitty, stupid overstep. It was a well-intentioned overstep at a time when people couldn’t go to the library.
Was the result damaging and ultimately out of bounds? Yes. But I absolutely draw the line at calling it dumb. The publishers moved out of bounds too here—they didn’t have to go after the whole thing. That was their choice.
Let us not lose context here.
@ernie Ah, so now we're moving the goalposts.
You knew when you posted your first post above what IA _actually_ did, but you chose to describe it inaccurately so you could make IA look better and the corporations who sued them look worse than actually justified by the circumstances?
And then when called out on it, you came back with "well ok, it actually wasn't as bad as I said, but lord, it wasn't good."
Yeah, no.
I don't waste my time here with people who pull shit like this.
*plonk*,,
@ernie omg I hate to be the lazy non-reseacher, but... I knew of the issue with loaning books, but does "a near-extinction-level event" mean the entire site is under threat?!
@sstrader When you have to pay massive legal bills for a long-running case, it doesn’t do amazing things for your financial situation.
@sstrader I think this NYT story really does a great job of highlighting just how dangerous this has all been for the archive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html
@ernie ahhhhh, duh. <he says as he goes to up his monthly donation>. Internet Archive is one of the few sites from the Halcyon days of early tech optimism that truly has lived up to what we all dreamt of.
Goddamn these corporations
@ernie yes. Insane. Aaron is crying.
@ernie both of these are acceptable. Intellectual "property" doesn't exist. You can't steal an idea.
@Fu Copyright law would disagree with you
@Fu I think copyright law is super-broken, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not quite as far as intellectual property not existing.
I think both of these things cause people to be disillusioned by copyright law
@ernie @Fu One talking point of the copyright maximalists is that there's such a thing as an "idea/expression dichotomy." I wrote a blog post on someone's blog post on the subject some years ago.
https://astoundingteam.com/wordpress/2018/02/28/happy-ied-day/
@ernie laws are shit
@ernie why is it extinction-level?
“Near extinction-level”
1) The proposed fines in the case ($150,000 per title) would have bankrupted the organization, though it was eventually narrowed down to 127 titles
2) Legal filings are expensive
3) They’ve had to remove a lot of content already
@ernie didn't realize the fines, thanks a ton
Are the archives of internet pages in danger too? (Genuinely wondering.)
@ernie i don't really consider myself a radical activist, but every once in a while i read about stuff like this and reconsider my stance
@ernie we will just pirate them. It will be fine.
🅻🆄🅴
@ernie archive.org has really tightened its access policy. To read many works now you have to be certified vision disabled.
@ernie
When it's for profit, it's OK 
@ernie copyright has been a broken system since the very inception.
@ernie The lesson is: Instead of investing donations into purchasing copies, they should have invested it into legal, like most companies seem to do
@ernie@writing.exchange Not problem, use Anna archive instead, stop use internet archive for reading books because site admin and team will remove stuff if received message from stingy companies who want to destroy old stuff for profit.
https://annas-archive.org/
@prastow So basically use an archive that doesn’t respect copyright law at all instead of one that is at least trying to show some respect to copyright