I myself borrowed an old book (which I already owned, but I wanted to compare differences among versions), turned a few pages, but then got distracted and didn't open it again (the virtual loan expired).
I think it's a shame that people are trying to crucify an exemplary organization for doing a charitable act (no good deed goes unpunished, and all that).
And, to be quite honest... Most of the books are at least 20 years old... So it's not like they were distributing best sellers that were actively being sold.
I think it's a situation where publishers "are being forced" to be litigious, because they have an obligation to their shareholders to always take the option that yields more money; the Internet Archive just happened to leave themselves open to being a target, so they _have_ to do it.
This reminds me a bit of Commander Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity, and if I recall correctly, that David Bowie didn't own the rights to his own song and thus was unable to approve or deny an extension for Cmdr Hadfield's video on YouTube (and the controversy of the takedown).
This is not true, and I wish people would stop repeating it like gospel.
The actual standard, from In Re Walt Disney, is that business decisions aren’t reviewable unless “the exchange was so one-sided that no business person of ordinary, sound judgment could conclude that the corporation has received adequate consideration".
In, Shlensky v. Wrigley, the Chicago Cubs were sued for refusing to install lighting for nighttime games: their president believed baseball was best as “a daytime sport." This is absurdly nebulous (and kind of bizarre), but the Cubs nevertheless won. That decision was based on Davis v. Louisville Gas and Electric Co, which says “the directors are chosen to pass upon such questions and their judgment unless shown to be tainted with fraud is accepted as final. The judgment the directors of the corporation enjoys the benefit of a presumption that it was formed in good faith, and was designed to promote the best interests of the corporation they serve.”
While you can get sued for nearly anything, the legal standard is basically "Did you egregiously rip off the company so that you could make money?", not "Could you have squeezed ten cents more out of the public?"
the rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is
virtually impossible to enforce as a practical matter. The
rule is aspirational, except in odd cases. As long as
corporate directors and CEOs claim to be maximizing profits
for shareholders, they will be taken at their word, because
it is impossible to refute these corporate officials'
self-serving assertions about their motives.
— Jonathan Macey
Ford's response to the Dodge Brothers was:
My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the
benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible
number, to help them build up their lives and their homes.
Shlensky has a fairly similar fact pattern. The Cubs decision was supposedly driven by non-economic factors, namely beliefs about 'proper' baseball and possible effects on the neighborhood. However, they left open the door that these factors might themselves affect Cub's business prospects, a door that Ford slammed shut on himself. As a result, the Court found:
“Plaintiff in the instant case argues that the directors are
acting for reasons unrelated to the financial interest and
welfare of the Cubs. However, we are not satisfied that the
motives assigned to Philip K. Wrigley, and through him to the
other directors, are contrary to the best interests of the
corporation and the stockholders. For example, it appears to
us that the effect on the surrounding neighborhood might well
be considered by a director who was considering the patrons
who would or would not attend the games if the park were in a
poor neighborhood. Furthermore, the long run interest of the
corporation in its property value at Wrigley Field might
demand all efforts to keep the neighborhood from
deteriorating. By these thoughts we do not mean to say that
we have decided that the decision of the directors was a
correct one. That is beyond our jurisdiction and ability. We
are merely saying that the decision is one properly before
directors and the motives alleged in the amended complaint
showed no fraud, illegality or conflict of interest in their
making of that decision.”
It makes people scroll side to side to read the quote.
Please don't use code blocks for quotes.
And frankly, the fact that there's no other way to indicate a block quote is absurd.
In Ford v. Dodge, Ford was sitting on $60M, from which it had been paying dividends. These were stopped to reinvest the money in new factories. The Dodge brothers, who owned about 10% of Ford, sued because, per Ford's own comment, his decisions were driven by charitable interests rather than business judgement.
In Shlensky v. Wrigley, Shlensky was a stockholder who believed that the Cubs were leaving money on the table by not holding night games. He sued--and lost--because the Court found that to be a plausible business decision.
In Davis v. Louisville Gas Electric Co., Davis (or actually, his estate) held one type of share in the company, and opposed a reorganization plan that would have converted them to another, to his potential detriment.
In re Walt Disney was a derivative suit by shareholders over the hiring and firing of Michael Orvitz, and whether his (lucrative) compensation was in the company's interests.
The common theme is that the board of directors (and the CEO they appoint, etc) have wide latitude to run the company, even in ways that don't immediately benefit some (Davis) or even all (Shlensky) shareholders. They can certainly go too far (Ford) or fail to exercise much judgement at all (Caremark, where the director sold the company for a value plucked out of thin air), but as Mercantile Trading says "generally [...] courts will not upset the decisions of either directors or stockholders as to questions of policy and business management. An abundance of authority in other jurisdictions might be cited to the same effect"
Publishers have standing and as such they have to file the suit. They are only being forced into this because IA is breaking known law and did so knowing they were.
>The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
Knowledge and culture is not anyone’s property. It is the collective work of all of humanity and ought to be treated as such.
Even setting aside the law, there is a question of ethics. If I give you a license key to my software, and you give it away to 10 of your friends, would you consider your act charitable?
Internet Archive is a nonprofit with a philosophical mission. I don't agree with them all the time, but I view that their responsibility is to act primarily in accordance with their values. Unfortunately, they ended up taking on powers that they may not be able to handle, but I believe that they are in the right and the publishers are in the wrong, which is a more important conversation to me than whether their decision was strategically prudent (probably it was not).
> Even setting aside the law, there is a question of ethics. If I give you a license key to my software, and you give it away to 10 of your friends, would you consider your act charitable?
All software that I have worked on outside of my job is free and open source, so I would. I believe that it should be mandated by law that all non-trivial software be free and open source. To qualify this, I wouldn't do this on an individual level without your consent if, say, you were a small creator and you depended upon licenses for your livelihood. But small creators are not the plantiffs in this case, nor the people who primarily benefit from strict intellectual property laws -- massive publishing companies are.
This is a specious ideology without a mechanism to reward creators. At the moment that mechanism is money, either through sales, or for a rare few patronage. Without reward, creation is limited to the otherwise idle, and the collected work of all humanity lessened.
Personally I advocate the right to buy at a reasonable cost (as reasoned by society). Once a reproducible work is released to the public, you can't refuse my payment for it.
Intellectual property benefits publishers, not creators.
As Abraham Lincoln said “ That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. “
Whenever, you appropriate for yourself the fruits of other people’s toil, you are sowing seeds of tyranny.
They deserve to be paid (eg, by a University), but they do not deserve ownership in terms of exclusive rights to its use. Can you imagine how far back science would be held if any applications of Newton or Einstein’s work required royalties to their estate? Are suggesting that the fact that they aren’t is tyranny?
Nope. They may have standing, but they're responsible for their own actions.
> Seriously the fact that book is well read or old does not matter
It does, because it means the damages (lost potential sales) are low/nonexistent.
Myself, I buy a lot of old books - but from the thrift store. The only reason the thrift store sells them is because people dump their valueless books on them.
Actually, they kind of are forced into action here. Even if they were okay with the IA doing this (which I'm sure they're not) they still have to defend their copyrights, otherwise they could be declared abandoned and the works would then be in the public domain and could not be defended when someone they don't want to use their works then uses them
When they announced it, I wrote a friend at the IA and told him it was a big mistake. I tried to get them to change their mind. They had plenty of warning and thought their good works would insulate them.
They did bad things in regard to endangering their institution. There is nothing objectively, morally "bad" about the National Emergency Library though.
Authors don't "go out of business" if their words are copied without their permission. So the answer to your question will always be "no one". But they have rights to their words nonetheless.
I like the idea one of the Dreamwidth people threw up: it was probably intentionally aiming to bait a court case:
https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1244257620548038656
(Thanks to 'Apocryphon for posting it originally on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734145 )
This doesn't necessarily seem out of line with something Brewster et al. would do, and it is the simplest explanation, so I tend to be on the side of it.
I wonder what they had thought their chance of winning was at GHG height of the panic, and what is it now.
I also wonder why would they risk their other, very valuable and unique work, knowing full well that the chance of turning bankrupt is definitely nonzero.
I'm not annoyed that my donation is being used for this. I trust them to do what they think is best. Although I do have my doubts.
I'm beginning to suspect this is why they tied their actions to the IA in the first place. It's a good excuse to get people to donate who otherwise wouldn't support this action.
This smells of a lack of risk management more than bad risk management.
Maybe they let their political goals eclipse their IA goals, and they thought that tying this lawsuit to the life or death of the IA would force IA fans to donate?
If they win (seems unlikely?) they expand fair use. If they are destroyed, then they become a poster child for the excesses of $150K statutory damages.
Did they think they could draw a confrontation with the publishers and somehow come out victorious? Or that the publishers and their legal teams would voluntarily look the other way?
I still can't tell what their plan was. Or what point they were trying to make. Or how they expected to handle the legal challenge.
It's a shame that they tied this to the Internet Archive. I seriously doubt the people who donated to the IA wanted their funds to be used on this.