Internet Archive Loses in Court. Judge Rules They Can't Scan and Lend eBooks (theverge.com) 96
The Verge reports:
A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create "derivative works," and so would have needed authorization from the books' copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.
The Internet Archive says it will appeal.
The decision was "a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve," argued Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive. In a blog post he argued the decision "impacts libraries across the U.S. who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
The Verge adds that the judge rejected "fair use" arguments which had previously protected a 2014 digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust: Koetl wrote that any "alleged benefits" from the Internet Archive's library "cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers," declaring that "there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive's] copying and unauthorized lending," and that copying these books doesn't provide "criticism, commentary, or information about them." He notes that the Google Books use was found "transformative" because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.
Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was "irrelevant" that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book "borrows" a day.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader esme for sharing the news.
The decision was "a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve," argued Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive. In a blog post he argued the decision "impacts libraries across the U.S. who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
The Verge adds that the judge rejected "fair use" arguments which had previously protected a 2014 digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust: Koetl wrote that any "alleged benefits" from the Internet Archive's library "cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers," declaring that "there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive's] copying and unauthorized lending," and that copying these books doesn't provide "criticism, commentary, or information about them." He notes that the Google Books use was found "transformative" because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.
Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was "irrelevant" that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book "borrows" a day.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader esme for sharing the news.
Searchable (Score:1)
So all they have to do is make their collection searchable for it to be transformative use? Righto!
Re:Searchable (Score:5, Insightful)
So all they have to do is make their collection searchable for it to be transformative use? Righto!
Or... they need the better / more expensive lawyers Google has.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The clever thing to do would have been to implement search in the first place, then Google would have had a reason to come to their rescue.
It's not unclever to do it now, though.
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Invoking the might of google is practical, but doesn't really answer the question.
What is it that makes libraries special?
I submit that there are numerous questions which could be answered, and more than one of them are important.
What makes libraries special is that they lend freely information you would otherwise have to pay to see.
Also, this is American law that is made to apply to the whole world by dint of the intertubes. How is the legal situation elsewhere? Does it make sense to set up the bookshop elsewhere and transfer the archive?
But where will you copy it to? And it won't help evade the law as long as they have a presence here, anyway.
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This kind of ruling is what you get when senile barely-literate octagenarians who can't even open up their own email get to make rulings about digital space. An expiring digital copy is no different from an existing physical copy required to be returned, save that the library has a better recourse (the forced expiry of the digital) rather than having to hunt down / impose fines on / possibly sue under civil statutes the person who failed to return, or possibly damaged, the original.
The publicly accessible
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Also, this is American law that is made to apply to the whole world by dint of the intertubes.
It's American law that's 'made' to apply to the rest of the world via numerous treaties, signed by other national governments.
How is the legal situation elsewhere?
For most countries [wikipedia.org] the situation is exactly the same.
Does it make sense to set up the bookshop elsewhere and transfer the archive?
There are a few countries (given at the bottom of the page linked above) that are not signatories to the various conventions and treaties. Technically any corporation registered in one of them, and with all their infrastructure / hosting there, could ignore this ruling and provide digital loans from that jurisdiction...
...
Re: Searchable (Score:3)
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It's interesting though. They've purchased the book themselves, and are lending the copies they legit own.
If only it were this simple. They are actually lending electronic copies of the physical copies they legit own. It's the making of these electronic copies from their physical copies which is a breach of copyright.
Stupid law, stupid restriction, but a correct judgement based on the current law.
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What if they had a robot that turned the pages and sent you live video of the book while you were reading? Or, buy Internet Archive could buy the e-book, and have the ability to work and view the screen in real time?
Or just host it in a foreign adversary's jurisdiction and fart in their general direction?
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The archive is already searchable, the problem is that the judge is a senile octagenarian digital retard.
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He's in his 70s, actually. And probably more on the ball than you give him credit for.
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Google really should have stepped up on this one and lent their lawyer army to this one.
I mean, for their own sake really. The copyright trolls are coming for them next armed with this precedent.
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Re:Searchable (Score:5, Informative)
No, they won. Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015).
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They already have a searchable database. You can search by author, title, etc. I don't understand this.
This is how you find old editions of ancient works you are writing papers on.... ....despite the fact that no-one is going to find your reflections publishable and few will bother reading them....
One assumes they will appeal, but it looks bad for their lending of in-copyright books. Out of copyright and old editions will not be affected, hope this will carry on.
So! It is official! (Score:2)
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That doesn't seem to be the ruling here at all. There's nothing wrong with ebooks. You just can't openly and blatantly violate the most basic principle of copyright, which appears to be what IA did based on what I've seen of this case. I don't know how they ever thought their lending model was legal or what chance they thought they had of winning in court. They seem to be relying on a "we did it with good intentions" argument, but that's not how most legal systems work, and for good reason.
Re: So! It is official! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: So! It is official! (Score:4, Interesting)
It is that cut and dried, though. IA still has both the paper and original electronic copies in its possession. In contrast, a traditional library doesn't have the copy of the book it loans out. Making that electronic copy, and making another copy to loan out, are both controlled by copyright law.
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But does copyright itself recognize different types of media? That seems to be the licensing game publishers try to pull rather than a core tenet of copyright.
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Yes, copyright law has a number of aspects that address different media. Under US federal law [copyright.gov], anyone must have permission from the copyright owner "to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords", unless one of the statutory or regulatory exemptions apply. Some of the exemptions are very specific about the format of the copyrighted work (audio, audiovisual, sculptural, and so forth). One of [copyright.gov] the exemptions specifically allows people to copy computer programs into the computer memory for the p
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Unless 'a normal library' loses its copy of the e-book if the borrower's device dies, then the library does indeed end up with two copies of the e-book: 1 on their server, and the 2nd on the users device.
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Yes, but those libraries have different licenses for e-books. Libraries do not automatically have e-book-like licenses for books that they buy in paper format, which is why Internet Archive lost here. US copyright law is very specific [copyright.gov] on what libraries can and cannot automatically do with books (absent an e-book license from the copyright owner).
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Yes, but those libraries have different licenses for e-books. Libraries do not automatically have e-book-like licenses for books that they buy in paper format, which is why Internet Archive lost here. US copyright law is very specific [copyright.gov] on what libraries can and cannot automatically do with books (absent an e-book license from the copyright owner).
That's a misrepresentation of the law, IMO. The "e-book" thing is a red herring. Nothing in the law says that a copy of a book must be in paper form, and scanning of a work and presenting it as an image does not create a new work in any meaningful sense, so no derivative work was created in doing so. The only restrictions on digital distribution in that section are in parts (b) and (c), which apply only if the library is creating three copies per physical copy of the work, rather than one.
The grey area,
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The grey area, of course, comes from the fact that they also did OCR, not just pure scanning, but that is covered by section 121A (Limitations on exclusive rights: reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities in Marrakesh Treaty countries).
Sorry, that should be 121(a) Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities.
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You cannot digitally "distribute" a work in the same way that you can a paper copy. Sending it to someone involves a second copy, which is why they cannot claim to be covered under section 108(a).
Section 108(b) does not apply to lending the copies out, only to preservation or non-lending archives.
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You cannot digitally "distribute" a work in the same way that you can a paper copy.
Why not?
Sending it to someone involves a second copy, which is why they cannot claim to be covered under section 108(a).
Even if we accept your theory, that would be a problem only if they own just a single copy. If a library owns, for example, ten paper copies, 108(a) grants them the right to loan ten copies, period, regardless of whether they are in paper form or digital form, and if you assume that they must keep one for themselves so that they don't have to re-digitize the book in the future, then I see no reason why they could not loan out at least nine digital copies.
But IMO, your theory is incorrect, because s
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"Why not?" Go back and read my earlier comments. I already told you why not. It's even simpler than the reason Congress had to write an exception into the law for people to execute software: a copy on a user's hard drive or flash memory or EEPROM or whatever is a copy.
Section 108(a) does not mention digital copies, which means they are treated the same as any other copy. It does not grant permission for a copy that Internet Archive keeps and a second copy that Joe User temporarily has -- whether that se
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"Why not?" Go back and read my earlier comments. I already told you why not. It's even simpler than the reason Congress had to write an exception into the law for people to execute software: a copy on a user's hard drive or flash memory or EEPROM or whatever is a copy.
The courts mostly disagree with you, with the possible exception of the ninth circuit, and even MAI [wikipedia.org] was a grey area, because there were other clear copyright violations involved, and that case involved software that was loaned out in violation of the license agreement, which makes it not inherently precedential with respect to a physical book, which is sold, not licensed.
Section 108(a) does not mention digital copies, which means they are treated the same as any other copy. It does not grant permission for a copy that Internet Archive keeps and a second copy that Joe User temporarily has -- whether that second copy is digital or not. You're trying to apply what you think the spirit of the law is, but that's not what the law says or how it has been interpreted in the past. See this [copyright.gov] and the "Number of Copies as Reasonably Necessary to Result in Single End-Use Copy" section of the linked "Discussion Document" PDF, or the first FAQ here [oregonstate.edu]. (Also read the last FAQ there before you try to comment again.)
Nothing that I saw in there disagrees with what I said. Their concern that three additional copies might not be enough for some reason
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The courts mostly disagree with you, with the possible exception of the ninth circuit, and even MAI was a grey area
Then perhaps you should cite some of them. MAI Systems v. Peak Computer was a case that interpreted the statutory exemption I mentioned, and spurred Congress to modify that exemption, so it takes as a given that my description -- "Congress had to write an exception into the law for people to execute software" -- is correct even as to direct licensees of that software.
Costar v. LoopNet is from the Fourth Circuit, and is about who is liable for copyright infringement, not about what constitutes it. The Seco
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The courts mostly disagree with you, with the possible exception of the ninth circuit, and even MAI was a grey area
Then perhaps you should cite some of them. MAI Systems v. Peak Computer was a case that interpreted the statutory exemption I mentioned, and spurred Congress to modify that exemption, so it takes as a given that my description -- "Congress had to write an exception into the law for people to execute software" -- is correct even as to direct licensees of that software.
MAI arguably has zero bearing on this case, because it was governing licensed software, and the copyright violation was because they used the software in violation of the licensing terms, none of which applies to a book.
Costar v. LoopNet is from the Fourth Circuit, and is about who is liable for copyright infringement, not about what constitutes it.
As I understand it, Costar v. LoopNet's direct infringement claims were regarding whether LoopNet was liable for copyright infringement because their servers were creating temporary copies of content uploaded by third parties as part of serving them, which was separate and apart from their p
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You clearly have some very strong ideas about how copyright law should work, but I will make it simple, since you have entirely missed the point so far: Actual copyright law does not implement your preferences.
You are confusing Costar v. LoopNet and Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings, you are again using the wrong verb ("distribute"), you are ignoring the simple statutory definition [copyright.gov] of "derivative work" that is very much broader than "adds new copyrightable material" and that confuses the creation of a derivat
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you are again using the wrong verb ("distribute"),
You're pedantically correct that that loaning isn't distribution in a strict copyright terminology sense, which applies exclusively to the copyright owner. I was using that term in its colloquial meaning, in which loaning a copy is distribution. This is at best nit-picking.
you are ignoring the simple statutory definition [copyright.gov] of "derivative work" that is very much broader than "adds new copyrightable material"
False. The statutory definition says 'A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound record
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No -- you said "distribute" to mean "loan" when the action being performed is really "making a copy". You have also hallucinated some previous comment about "a destroyed DRM-laden copy", but that is okay, because I am sure it would have been as nonsensical as everything else you have been spewing. Making a copy is making a copy, and you would need to show some reason that it would not count. There are some exceptions in that area for copies that get destroyed later -- particularly for classes taught over
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No -- you said "distribute" to mean "loan" when the action being performed is really "making a copy".
I said "distribute" to mean "loan a copy". The action being performed is loaning a copy, which is clearly authorized under 108(a).
You have also hallucinated some previous comment about "a destroyed DRM-laden copy"
Apparently I deleted that part when editing the post in question. Either way, the whole point of arguing that an encrypted version of content, in the absence of a key, is not a copy, is that destroying the key is tantamount to destroying the copy. And if you don't treat them in that fashion, then a whole lot of publishers will potentially owe back-royalties to authors, etc. B
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Number of citations you have provided that agree with you: Still zero. The fact that "transformative use" has a jargon meaning within the scope of fair use does not mean that the statutory word "transformation" loses meaning. Damn, you're stupid.
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Number of citations you have provided that agree with you: Still zero. The fact that "transformative use" has a jargon meaning within the scope of fair use does not mean that the statutory word "transformation" loses meaning. Damn, you're stupid.
Citations:
That last one is pretty much a show-stopper for your legal theory, as it literally involves a court saying that creating an eBook from a print book does not create a derivative work. If something that involves such a large amount of effort does not create a derivative work, there's no way in h*** that adding a mere DRM wrapper does.
A derivative work is, by definition, a creative work that contains an exist
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Your first four links all talk about what is required for a derivative work to gain copyright protection (as a derivative work) -- not for what defines a derivative work.
Yes, you found a single circuit court decision that says what you wish. But guess what -- it is bad law, and always was. It was sandwiched between Authors Guild v. HathiTrust [casetext.com] and Authors Guild v. Google [casetext.com], both from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (whose jurisdiction includes S.D.N.Y.), and which were cited by the judge in this very cas
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Your first four links all talk about what is required for a derivative work to gain copyright protection (as a derivative work) -- not for what defines a derivative work.
Yes, you found a single circuit court decision that says what you wish. But guess what -- it is bad law, and always was.
No, it really isn't. And if you think it is, that means you don't understand the cases nearly as well as you think you do.
It was sandwiched between Authors Guild v. HathiTrust [casetext.com] and Authors Guild v. Google [casetext.com], both from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (whose jurisdiction includes S.D.N.Y.), and which were cited by the judge in this very case.
Authors Guild v. Google and Authors Guild v. Hathitrust are both completely irrelevant here. Creating a searchable archive of the content of eBooks is clearly transformative and clearly creates a derivative work. That's not the same thing as taking a book, digitizing it, and dumping the scanned images or text into a file that someone can read. Its purpose is searching the contents of
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No amount of spewing nonsense will change the fact that the Second Circuit agrees with me, and so does the judge in this very case. It's in the second sentence of TFS above, in fact. As I told you before, copyright law does not implement your preferences.
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No amount of spewing nonsense will change the fact that the Second Circuit agrees with me, and so does the judge in this very case. It's in the second sentence of TFS above, in fact. As I told you before, copyright law does not implement your preferences.
The judge in this case is wrong. None of the three cases that this case cites as reasoning mention derivative works at all, with the exception of Disney v. VidAngel, in which they explicitly created a derivative work by pre-censoring their copy. That notion literally came out of left field in this case. Those cases are all just about unauthorized copying. And none of those cases requested section 108 protection, though to be fair, the only one of those three cases that even ostensibly could have used se
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You cannot digitally "distribute" a work in the same way that you can a paper copy. Sending it to someone involves a second copy,
That is correct. You can only distribute a copy, and a copy is defined in 17 USC 101 as basically being a tangible object in which a work is embedded. So a paper codex with a work printed in it is a copy of that work; a flash drive with a work stored in it is a copy of that work.
A digital file, divorced from any particular medium it's stored in, is not a copy. When you upload and download you're really just making a new copy because nothing physical is transferred from the server to the client.
But courts
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Thus no reasonable reading of Title 17 could construe what the Internet Archive did as creating a derivative work â" only creating unauthorized copies. That's important, because it means that this decision was quite clearly in error.
I agree; they're not derivatives.
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Unless 'a normal library' loses its copy of the e-book if the borrower's device dies, then the library does indeed end up with two copies of the e-book: 1 on their server, and the 2nd on the users device.
That's arguably true, and by that interpretation, they could only legally loan out the number of copies that they own in physical form minus one. In the grand scheme of things, though, that sort of off-by-one error is noise compared with not limiting the quantity at all.
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Making that electronic copy, and making another copy to loan out, are both controlled by copyright law.
So did you return that bioelectrical copy that you made after checking it out?
Computers work the same way as the brain when it comes to information being passed around. Electrical charges, and the information they represent, can't be "moved around" the same way a physical book can. If you think there's some magical difference between the data from an epub file being copied multiple times from the disk controller to the CPU, and the data from a dead tree being copied multiple times from your eyes to your
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That probably sounded smart inside your head, but it helps to know what the law says. In the US:
"Copies" are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term "copies" includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
That middle parts about being "fixed" and perception, reproduction, or communication mean that your brain isn't making a copy. The law has never been interpreted the way you suggest.
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That middle parts about being "fixed" and perception, reproduction, or communication mean that your brain isn't making a copy.
Funny, I can perceive, communicate, and reproduce a work just fine using the thing. Develop a brain-machine interface and line blurs even more.
Hell, there's already research being done on this front using just fMRI scans. [frontiersin.org] How long it takes to get this into a court room is dependent on when someone publishes a read out that contains the Mouse.
The law has never been interpreted the way you suggest.
All it will take to change that is one cleared check to the right judge / congresscritter and you know it.
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That's a lot of words to say you don't know what "and" means. Read the definition of "copies" more closely.
Re: So! It is official! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it is cut and dry. Copyright law doesn't say you can only lend out as many copies as you have. It says you can't make copies without permission, or without falling within an applicable exception in the law, and it says that you can't lend copies unless they were lawfully made or again, you have permission.
That's how it keeps you from lending out more copies than you have -- you can't make more and can't lend any you made yourself, or you got permission (probably in exchange for a substantial licensing fee).
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What you describe is completely defensible, IMHO. That stretches much thinner when you lend an unlimited number of simultaneous copies (which they did during the pandemic emergency lending).
Reading the brief, they also stretched that limit by "pooling" books with libraries. In this arrangement, a partner library removed a title from circulation (either by moving the book to a refe
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Scan-one/lend-one isn't the case publishers wanted to fight in court. IA probably would have won that.
It's unclear to me how they could have won even that case. I'll quote from UK copyright law (which by virtue of treaty is pretty much indistinguishable from US copyright):
"16 The acts restricted by copyright in a work
(1) The owner of the copyright in a work has, in accordance with the following provisions of this Chapter, the exclusive right to do the following acts in the United Kingdom--
(a) to copy the work (see section 17);
(b) to issue copies of the work to the public (see section 18)
17 Infringement o
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I'll quote from UK copyright law (which by virtue of treaty is pretty much indistinguishable from US copyright):
That's a poor assumption. In the US, copyright treaties have no meaningful legal effect; federal copyright law is what's in Title 17 of the US Code. We are actually in violation of a number of treaty provisions, but we don't care. (For example, check out WTO Dispute 160)
That being said, your analysis is basically correct with regard to the prima facie case of infringement. Frankly, it was clear enough that the court didn't need to spend much time on it.
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The traditional model means that a library has NO copy of a book while it is lent out. Are they willing to scan the paper copy again to lend it out a 2nd to the next patron that wants to borrow it?
Consider a modified ebook model that works like this. After the paper book is scanned in and verified that the scan is all good, the original paper book is destroyed (shredded to a fine powder and used in that form). Each time the book is lent out, the digital copy is erased (written over by the next incoming bo
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Why not train an AI to write similar books in real time?
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Tell that to your local public library.
Are the authors still alive (Score:2)
Are the authors of the books still alive? If not it needs to be public domain including written music.
Re:Are the authors still alive (Score:5, Insightful)
So if an author and their family spend several years living in poverty while writing a masterpiece that would have brought them a well-earned reward, and the author is then unlucky enough to fall under a bus the day after publication, you think all the expected economic benefit of writing and publishing that book should immediately disappear for the author's estate? That doesn't seem fair. The idea of publishing books within a copyright-based legal framework is that if a book is successful then you can enjoy the economic rewards. That's the incentive that makes it worth investing the time and taking the risk of creating the work in the first place. If you take away that reward at the worst possible time if an author is unlucky but others who have sacrificed to help the book get created are still with us then you're not living up to your side of the bargain.
Re:Are the authors still alive (Score:5, Insightful)
So if an author and their family spend several years living in poverty while writing a masterpiece that would have brought them a well-earned reward, and the author is then unlucky enough to fall under a bus the day after publication, you think all the expected economic benefit of writing and publishing that book should immediately disappear for the author's estate?
Immediately? No.
After a certain time? Yes.
And it should be a much shorter time than the time established in Mickey Mouse protection act.
Re:Are the authors still alive (Score:4, Interesting)
He's obviously referring to "author's life plus 75 years".
Seven years was the original deal. Read Sam Clemens's take on it.
Re: Are the authors still alive (Score:2)
Author's life + sounds fair. ... based entirely on stories written by other authors a few centuries (or millenia) earlier.
But I have no respect for those who so aviriciously guard their copyrighted works
Wasn't the original purpose of copyright to send a message that 'after n years these works are a free-for-all' ?
That the focus was on the freeing of the works, not on the protection of the works. On the understanding that releasing stuff after a period of time benefits all of humanity.
Re: Are the authors still alive (Score:2)
'avariciously'
Haven't had my coffee yet.
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Re:Are the authors still alive (Score:4, Insightful)
So if an author and their family spend several years living in poverty
That would be a failure of society for allowing such. People should not have to go into "poverty" just to pursue an interest. Children should not go hungry, people should not be evicted from their homes, and families should not live on the streets for the simple fact that a person wishes to pursue their interest. The society that you are putting forth as the one which we should derive a lesson from is a barbaric society that simply should not, and fortunately for the United States, does not exist. The world we live in is able to extract great wealth and advancement unlike any other age of man ever to have existed, that we have not completely stamped out poverty is not because people wish to chase after their dreams, it is because there exists a subset of mankind that wishes to own everything and leave nothing else for their fellow man. These publishers enshrine this mentality that impoverishes humanity, allows darkness and despair for those who wish to dream to endure, and continues the very ideal that one must go into complete destitution in order to somehow succeed. You sir, have bought hook, line, and sinker the bullshit these companies have fed you and like a good mongrel have regurgitated it on command.
The idea of publishing books within a copyright-based legal framework is that if a book is successful then you can enjoy the economic rewards
But this is hardly the case. Why do we have fifteenth edition of calculus books? Why do we have anti-consumer bullshit like online codes to unlock more information from the book that can only be used once online? Why do we have publishing companies that place great legal burden on book resalers? This is because the publishers take and authors must write. The J. K. Rowling's of the world are such because they are rare. We don't regularly talk about these mega million authors because it's not a regular thing. Publishers pay pittance to the authors that write the books. Whatever economic reward you think there is, it is a lie sold to you. They point out look at this J. K. Rowling, look at this George R.R. Martin, and tell you that "YOU TOO COULD BE THIS PERSON!!" Only that is not the case, 99% chance you will be someone who writes a book and sees "economic reward" similar to a junior data analysis at a investment bank. And then only for a few years, then you will have your publisher indicate to you that they need a new version of your book or they need new material. Otherwise they'll toss you onto the reduced royalties that will pay you roughly the wage of most grocery store managers. Again, your statement here is based in fiction that these companies have sold to you.
That's the incentive that makes it worth investing the time and taking the risk of creating the work in the first place.
Clearly you have never written a book. There are tens of millions of books written every year. No person thinks they're winning the lotto and being the next Stephenie Meyer. This is like asking anyone who programs why they just don't write an app and retire on the profit they gain. It's a absolutely naive statement you have made here.
If you take away that reward at the worst possible time if an author is unlucky but others who have sacrificed to help the book get created are still with us then you're not living up to your side of the bargain
Clearly you've not seen legal disputes between estates and publishers. That bargain is only as good as the family can produce lawyers, if they were impoverish to begin with, that publisher is absolutely going to run them over. What are they going to do? Sue? They need money to hire a lawyer that will put up a good enough defense against their team of lawyers.
Your comment is woefully uninformed of the realities in this world and full of corporate boot licking platitudes. There's no part of what you have
Re:Are the authors still alive (Score:4, Insightful)
...the author is then unlucky enough to fall under a bus the day after publication, you think all the expected economic benefit of writing and publishing that book should immediately disappear for the author's estate?
Yes. That is exactly what should happen.
That doesn't seem fair.
I had cancer and had my leg amputated as a result. That isn't fair either. Life sucks. Get over it.
The idea of publishing books within a copyright-based legal framework is that if a book is successful then you can enjoy the economic rewards.
Yes, that is absolutely true, and that is why copyright was created. BUT, copyright should immediately disappear upon death. If you are dead then you no longer have any need for the economic benefits of copyright.
What about your family? Copyright was created to benefits authors. It was not created to be a welfare system. If I die tomorrow should my employer be required to continue sending my paycheck to my family for the next 90 years? Of course not, no reasonable person would support that, but that is exactly what you are arguing.
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So if the author rights something at 20 and dies at 75, you think the material should remain copyrighted "forever less one day" to the corporation they sold the rights to before they died?
Reasonable copyright was 14 years with one reup.
We have literal *billionaire" authors. And multi-billion dollar corporations. I think copyright has been pushed too far away from being created to encourage new works for the public domain.
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That's the incentive that makes it worth investing the time and taking the risk of creating the work in the first place.
No.
It's an incentive. There are many other incentives as well, and often they are even stronger. Also note that the incentive provided by copyright is somewhat more complex than one might initially imagine.
In any event, I agree that copyright shouldn't be based on the life of the author; it should be for a predictable term of years, perhaps with the option to renew periodically, if desired at the time.
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That's not an issue the court cares about in this case, and also that's a stupid system. Copyright term length should not be based on life of the author in any respect; a term of years, preferably short but with some additional terms if requested timely, is better. It's more predictable for everyone to arrange their affairs around, it's almost always just as good for authors and publishers, it's definitely better for the public, and it worked great for centuries so it's got that in its favor too.
It's all about the money (Score:2)
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Of course publishers act like psychopathic corporations and want to sacrifice all social good for profit.
It's the Court's job to tell them to go to hell.
Sorry, the Law can support any side of an argument it's so complex - a judge needs to judge.
Corruption, of course, is usually effective.
Did they not learn from Napster/Piracy/Streaming? (Score:2)
The Internet Archive suspeded restrictions (Score:5, Informative)
Engadget [engadget.com] has more details. Of particular importance:
Before March 2020, the Internet Archive’s Open Library program operated under what’s known as a controlled digital lending [wikipedia.org] system, meaning there was often a waitlist to borrow a book from its collection..
However, when the pandemic hit, The Internet Archive decided to launch the “National Emergency Library” during the early days of the pandemic where it lifted the restrictions of controlled digital lending. IOW, they no longer only lent according to the number of physical volumes they had.
If this angle is correct, it's hardly surprising that the publishers reacted.
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Yup. At that point they're a publisher. But the slap down appears to be they can't lend them out in electronic form at all, even on a per-copy basis, and maybe they'll win that on appeal so long as the physical copies stay locked away.
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I (for once) have the solution (Score:5, Interesting)
After 5 years, any book that is not available in the market (not including "second-hand" market), aka "the publisher won't allow you to obtain a legal copy", will be available on a National Print-On-Demand System, which will pay royalties to CREATORS directly.
This requires all publishers to send a copy of all published works in PDF using a compatible page size with the print-on-demand system.
There, fixed: you publishers shit on users, then, users get power.
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"Of course all of the books we have are currently on the market", the hypothetical lawyer argued.
"And where is that?" The author replied, skeptically.
"In our book store of course, it's located and open to the public 5 days a week, between the hours of 11am and 3pm, we have copies of it available for purchase at all times and on display"
"You mean the book store that's located around back in the lumber yard, through the unmarked door, behind the sign saying 'Beware the Leopard?'"
"Yes absolutely, that
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Very funny :-D
To avoid this, that's why I included "the publisher won't allow you to acquire a copy", meaning, if you go to the bookstore of your liking and they ask the publisher and he replies "out-of-print", then the 5 year "spare" time has started, even if there's a copy next to the toiled in a remote village in Scandinavia.
Entirely predictable (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that's about what I expected would happen.
There's no doubt whatsoever that this is a prima facie infringement -- copies are being made and distributed.
The question was whether there were any exceptions to copyright that this could fall within.
Fair use was always going to fail. Typically courts consider four factors from the fair use statute (17 USC 107) in determining whether a particular use was fair or not. These are 1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether it is for commercial purposes or nonprofit educational purposes; 2) The nature of the work; 3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used; and 4) the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the work. It's not mathematical, and the factors may not have equal weight. It's very fact dependent. And the same use in different circumstances may change from being fair to unfair or vice versa. In practice, I would say that factor four tends to be key more often than not, but that doesn't mean it should always control.
Anyway, here the issue was going to be factors 1 and 4. Factors 2 and 3 are solidly against the Internet Archive -- the works included all kinds, such as fictional works (protected more than factual ones) and they were copied in full.
Factor 1 includes whether the use is transformative, that is whether the work is being added to or changed meaningfully into something else. This wasn't transformative; the books are still books. Changing their format from hardcopy to electronic doesn't add or change anything. The Court did get it wrong when it said that it was the preparation of a derivative work; it's not that either. It's just straight-up copying, just as if one took a photograph that slavishly reproduced an oil painting.
Things like Google Book Search were transformative in that a searchable book archive is not the same thing as the books in it. But the Archive wasn't making anything like that; they just wanted to lend books basically as usual. (And note that Google Books is careful not to effectively make scanned, copyrighted books readable in full without permission)
Factor 1 also includes the commercial / nonprofit angle. Commercial uses can be fair uses (many parodies are commercial, for example) but fair use is likelier for nonprofits. Here, the Archive was basically just trying to dodge paying licensing fees, and apparently used the free books as a draw to bring in members who might donate, etc. This was in the nature of a commercial use.
Factor 4 was always going to be bad; there is an existing market for ebooks and for ebooks sold or licensed to libraries, and this threatened to totally upend it. Usually good success on this factor comes from uses for which there is no market and not likely to be one (e.g. quoting sources in school papers, or recording videos off of the tv for delayed viewing (The famous Betamax case did not permit people to make their own libraries of permanent recordings), or spaceshifting music from CDs to mp3 players -- at a time when there wasn't much of an mp3 market.
Note also that the only issue is harm -- if a fair use happens to benefit the copyright holder, that's irrelevant.
As for the idea that a scheme (often suggested by online folks) whereby only one copy could be used at a time, making it just like lending of pre-made copies under the first sale doctrine, would help, it was well known from the ReDigi case 10 years ago that that is meaningless. The law prohibits making new copies and distributing unlawfully made copies. The number of copies floating around isn't relevant.
This was all immediately obvious on day one. I have never for the life of me understood why the Internet Archive wanted to take such a stupid risk, and I hope that it doesn't end up killing useful things like the Wayback Machine.
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I don't think so. Even then the relatively low-priced hardcopies, and scans of them that can be used indefinitely, would displace recurring licensing fees. There is a market for e-book licensing to libraries, and this would negatively affect it.
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The fair use factor doesn't care why there's a market, just that there is one, or is likely to be one, and that the use is harmful to it.
Fortunately, most eBooks I've purchased have clearly been reformatted to work well on eReaders.
Bah; I've yet to see an ebook that was decently formatted at all. So far it appears that good typography is available only in print.
There is also a "first sale" doctrine. If I go out and purchase a book and make a poor OCR of it and I then lend you both the physical book and my poor OCR simultaneously, I would probably get away with that.
Only if the making of the OCR'ed copy was legal. Fair use is a case-by-case analysis. Just because Diamond v. RIAA turned out well in 1999 doesn't mean space shifting to OCR would now. (In fact, I'd be very worried that a new round of anti
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Yeah, that's about what I expected would happen.
There's no doubt whatsoever that this is a prima facie infringement -- copies are being made and distributed.
The question was whether there were any exceptions to copyright that this could fall within.
Fair use was always going to fail.
Fair use was moot. The relevant exception is 108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives [copyright.gov].
Ignoring, for the moment, the question of whether they would legally be required to keep one extra physical copy in reserve beyond the number of copies they loaned out, to avoid having to rescan the book whenever the last digital copy was distributed, as long as they were distributing a single copy, even digitally, their use case fell squarely within the exemption in section 108(a), and
Who is valuable, who should be paid ? (Score:1)
If you remove all authors, no more books get created, thats bad.
If you remove all readers, no more books will be read, thats bad.
if you remove all publishers, no more lawsuits, thats ba... well, hmm, let me think
Anyway i wish we would be able to pay Authors for their contribution fairly and not restrict who has access to it. Sadly the world still seems stuck on a system designed when copying was an expensive process
Copyright needs a time limit (Score:2)
The life of copyrights keeps getting extended and it is well beyond what is reasonable. I think something like the life of the creator, or 20 years from date of publication, whichever is longer, is quite reasonable as an absolute limit. With an exception. If the work is unpublished for 10 years, it loses its copyright protection. There's a lot of stuff that is still under copyright protection that you can not legally obtain because of the unreasonably long copyright length.
Those are just example time pe
Oh look (Score:1)
A 77yr old white judge who has absolutely zero clue what he is taking about. IA is in the right here and anyone who thinks otherwise can lick the inside of my asshole.
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IA is in the right here ...
Unfortunately there's a difference between what's right and what's legal.
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And this judge doesn't know the difference either.
After a decade on the square... (Score:1)
I've started using alternative means again. I had stopped but rights-owners of various materials have gotten too greedy.
I was happy to fork over reasonable amounts of cash. But now they have basically decided only top 10% people are valid customers.
Kinda like disney-- sell 100 copies at $1000 each instead of 10,000 copies at $10 each.
Not very surprising, but there are policy question (Score:2)
Not very surprising, because the way they are working does in all cases require them to make a digital copy of a book they lend.
They lend in one of two ways, one is a two week loan, and you download a copy. In this case they have made two copies, one digital one which they hold permanently, and one temporary digital copy they have loaned to you, and which expires after two weeks. And they still have the paper copy.
Or, on many books now, they give you online only access for two hours to a digital copy. In
Technically right can be practically wrong (Score:1)
The last 5 books I've purchased were all > $50. I previewed them on archive.org, made sure they were worth $50 to me and proceeded to order them direct from the publishers/authors.
That's over $250 I spent, that I would not have without IA's 'piracy'. I don't buy cars without a test drive, and I don't buy books without a thumb-through.