Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly.

Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date.

I wish a fraction of the people who are upset about this would actually commit a portion of their time to lobbying and organising for copyright reform. Copyright terms are too damn long, by half a century and then some. This isn't some iron law of nature, this could easily be changed if there were enough of a push for it.

> "I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston.

This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA. It's not like these publishers are losing any money from books that literally nobody can purchase.

Looks like the publishers are doing their best for libgen/ipfs to succeed.

Makes you wonder: Do they even have data on their business growth factors? I don't but I'd guess that:

1. nobody is printing downloaded books

2. instead, people like me _buy_ printed books after browsing through them online

Recently discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084 (4 days ago, 48 comments)

Is there a communuty project that maintains a copy of the 500k books? Is there a libgen torrent or anna's archive torrent?

Why does Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (for example) show up in their 1300 banned books list? It’s not under copyright and is available on Gutenberg.

Is this some legal angle I’m missing which benefits the plaintiffs in some way?

This is why Piracy is good for humanity.

My daughter's favourites list has shrunk by 50 books, about 10%. We read a few every day.

It's a great source of English books for us. Our city library is good, but it doesn't have thousands of picture books.

Libby has about 15 books. We borrow them often enough that it gives the error message that they are unavailable to borrow :/

With this judgement, does this force them to write a tool that determines whether a book is in print or not? Are there any good webservices, or will they just have to scrape Amazon, etc.? I've noticed a lot of their lending library is definitely out of print; is "out-of-print and public domain" just the ars writer's interpretation of the judgement?

If it isn't, a tighter awareness of what is in print and out of print might be able to cut into those 500K, if at all possible. If lending is out, best to be aggressive with what's left.

This is sad. If this was indeed copyright infringement, what was the rationale behind the Internet Archive initially adding these books? The Internet Archive has never been a pirate site, so there must have been some logic or justification for indexing these books.

> And even when IA temporarily stopped limiting the number of loans to provide emergency access to books during the pandemic—which could be considered a proxy for publishers' fear that IA's lending could pose a greater threat if it became much more widespread—IA's expert "found no evidence of market harm."

I feel that IA erred very badly in lifting the one-to-one correspondence that is at the heart of "controlled digital lending" (https://controlleddigitallending.org). It is frankly annoying that they did that, and then still purport to be doing CDL, even though the CDL website clearly states the 1:1 "owned-to-loaned" ratio is a key part of the CDL platform.

For the record I'm extremely pro CDL, but I feel the IA did not do any favors to the CDL movement with this boneheaded "activist" implementation of CDL

Copyright lasts too damn long.

Seems like the “Borrow Unavailable” message should be replaced with “Borrow prohibited by publisher.”

as sad as this ruling is, simultaneously i see a wave of authors who have made their works freely available online, while selling hardcopies. this too from major technical publishers. see for instance ISLR (https://www.statlearning.com/).

speaking from a myopic view, in an age where source code can be freely distributed while maintaining ownership and rights*, why do literature have so much gatekeeping digitally?

while the authors that make their digital versions freely available bestow some trust on the other end (please don't print our work and sell it), simultaneously they can often benefit during the editorial process (many books are available this way before final publishing). moreover, if you write a work of fiction, nobody can run and create a movie based on it just because you can read the book for free.

this was a good opportunity to set precedence, but it has gone the other direction.

Oh this appeal to the public, pithy empty words about openness and shit.

Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk.

They said, there are enough physical books in closed libraries to cover their lending. That's not how this works. They should've asked the publishers for permission first if necessary putting pressure on them via public. This is not a case of it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission because they must have known they won't be forgiven for this. I can't even.

I am not saying this is by any means moral or right. I am saying: this is the law. They actually got relatively lucky for not being fined to oblivion for this.

During the early Covid period there was a general sense that “the rules don’t apply” or “the rules are insufficient” for this crisis and therefore can be safely ignored when they conflict with Covid counter-measures. Even those in authority were breaking some laws to respond to it. In addition any action that could be perceived as “combating Covid” was seen as an automatic good. Combine all that with the extreme fear and uncertainty and you have the perfect environment to make a stupid move. The IA should just admit the “emergency library” was a mistake, move on and stop wasting money and risking the entire project on this.

Robert Miller, global director of books for the internet archive, stated in a documentary in 2013 that there had been an estimated 100 million books published in the world, that the archive had an initial target of 10 million, and that their book warehouse had space for 3 million. Based on those figures, 500k is a rather large number. Maybe some of those 500k are duplicate scans?

[1] https://archive.org/details/archive_documentary_internet_arc...

What I will never understand is why this is needed at all. The books that I do find interesting I buy them. Sure, you can bypass paper by having ebooks. But is it really a replacement for a printed book? There is nothing like a printed book. No power needed, nor devices needed, you can go back to any page, any chapter instantly and if you have stomach even write on them. On the other side having the possibility to just quickly browse through a digital file to check if that title is of your interest or if it will serve you well if a technical book is invaluable. I have literally saved myself hours and money from not purchasing titles that turned out to be not of my interest. Imagine paying ridiculous amounts of money for technical books that then you find out the way a topic is approached is not really for you. Go ahead and check prices of for example Springer, Wiley, Addison Wesley books. And if out of print you pay a leg for a second hand one, effectively limiting access to knowledge only to people with big pockets.

Whatever, there are so many things on IA, that a "couple of books" will not make much difference to the experience. Besides, if you're an avid reader, you will find the books somewhere else also for free.

Possible to set up a server somewhere out there? Just host? What’s stopping that from happening?

Arichive the internet archive, hopefully someone there has done it

I hope they do a data dump or leak of the archive before they comply. It’s a shame to lose so many actually scanned hardcover books.

This will backfire against publishers so hard. Now everyone has to resort to piracy.

Thanks, Chuck Wendig!

This is outrageous. it's difficult not to start hating this cannibalism-capitalism.

There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process. A legally unencumbered free library of all books for all people would be the greatest achievement in all of human history. We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors. We must build alternatives to for-profit publishing, and the only resilient and widely acceptable system I can imagine is one where every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival. In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will.

It would take great effort to build such a system, but open source and digital repositories of machine designs would ensure that efforts are not duplicated. The effort would still be substantial, but what hangs in the balance is the opportunity to assure the freedom of all people and the creation of the most significant repository of knowledge humanity has ever conceived of. If we succeed it will be our greatest achievement as a species.

Why cant another country that des not have copyrite laws host this.

It's a digital equivalent of burning books. Those publishers have the same tactics as Nazi.

They should fire what even nitwit thought this obviously illegal plan was a good idea in the first place. The fallout will likely tank the entire archive in the long term.

Archive.org looks a bit like astalavista these days.

So, when is the IA's incredibly inept board going to stand down, before their stupidity burns down the entire project?

[dupe]

Actual article: https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/let-readers-read/

Some more discussion, including some IA folks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707084