Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers

I really hope the judges rule in the Internet Archives favor. If they don't and those half a million books stay down and more publishers continue to come after the Internet Archive's library until it is completely gutted, that would be a total indictment of our awful, horrible culture. It would be like voluntarily burning the library of Alexandria.

At the same time, I can't help but be saddened by the defenses that the Internet Archive is using, which all seem to lean heavily on the idea of artificially limiting digital information in order to simulate the limitations of physical books. It's so frustrating that we've created an essentially post-scarcity system, where goods can be infinitely shared at almost zero cost without ever running into supply issues, and yet, we are forced to fit this world into the straightjacket of scarcity and property rights, instead of using it to benefit and empower everyone.

Especially since it's just fundamentally absurd; it's extremely difficult to actually make digital information, especially on the internet, actually function like a scarce rivalrous good that you can have property rights to. That's why piracy is such an issue, and fighting piracy will simply require more and more surveillance and corporate control of our computers and our communications until there's nothing left at all of the decentralized, post-scarcity, free-as-in-freedom potential of computers and the internet, because as long as an ounce of freedom remains, then information will slip through the fingers of corporations and the state-like sand, information wants to be free, dammit, and the more we try to deny it, the worse things get. This is no slippery slope argument either. I think the logic for why this progression would happen, the forcing function that will ensure this is pretty clear: if your goal is to eliminate piracy then any freedom on the internet and on someone's computer is a threat to that goal because information is infinitely copyable and redistributable and so the pursuit of that goal will inherently and necessarily always tend toward the complete elimination of software freedom in the long run.

The internet archive could do with one of these new AI companies funding it, since their entire business is built on there being information out there somewhere.

Though more likely they each individually download the entire internet archive and then seek to burn it to the ground to stop others following, in short sighted chase the current quarterly return fashion.

> IA has argued that because copyright law is intended to provide equal access to knowledge, copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.

This seems like the opposite of the intent of copyright? How could the intent of granting an artificial monopoly to one party on disseminating information be to provide equal access to knowledge?

Do they have to show harm? If the goal is just to shut down the digital lending I'd have thought that was a fairly straightforward consequence of the copyright.

I would imagine harm is needed to get damages. Are they asking for damages?

I'd love to see the publishers take some kind of responsibility for making books available to underserved communities, but as I understand it the law is kind of weak of making people be responsible.

Interesting. IANAL but a fundamental part of lawsuits is demonstrating how you were harmed.

I think IA is in the right here, and the court should rule in favor of expanding lending. Otherwise, it just pushes everyone over to Library Genesis.

https://www.libgen.is/