It's so uncharacteristic of the way the IA normally behaves. Whatever special rights a lot of people think they have as a library, a lot of their archiving operations are on somewhat shaky ground. BUT they're a non-profit, don't monetize with advertising, bend over backwards (further than many think they should) to take down anything anyone with a legitimate claim wants taken down even retroactively, and generally don't do anything that makes them a particularly attractive legal target. Yeah, you can argue about them collecting so much content on essentially an opt-out basis. But, at the end of the day, they do provide an opt-out so it's probably not very attractive to sue them when you can get the same result by asking for a takedown.

Trying to use a crisis to return sanity to copyright law isn't an overreach. The blame lies squarely on those who have spent decades creating draconian copyright law, and those today who defend it. "I'm an author" or "Think of the publishers!" is no excuse for supporting unjust laws.

The argument is whether actions like this are the best way to "return sanity to copyright law," though, right? It seems to me there's a lot of space between "eternally extending copyright to keep the first Mickey Mouse cartoons from entering the public domain" and "anyone should be able to do whatever they want with other people's work at any point regardless of the creator's objections."

There is a lot of space, which is why you anchor with the opening salvo and then find middle ground. Keep in mind, the Internet Archive only opened the “National Emergency Library” during a global pandemic. Under business as usual, they put limits on access to scanned works.

Copyright isn’t an inalienable right. It was established for the public good, and up for renegotiation at any time. Now is one of those times.

An "opening salvo" has to be more than just throwing ammunition at your enemies. The "but global pandemic" argument will not be very convincing when they roll out authors that also wanted to eat during the pandemic.

No matter what you consider to be the morally correct outcome here, this seems to have been a very risky way to go about things.

> when they roll out authors that also wanted to eat during the pandemic.

This is a tired argument. Please prove authors experienced lost sales due to the emergency library IA offered.

I don't have to. The publishers do. And I'll bet they can make a better legal argument than "oh we just wanted to because pandemic".

Seems to be overreaching to me. They have put themselves into a position where they are likely to be sued into the ground, and force others into a position where the only choice is to lose their income or sue them into the ground. They weren't forced into creating this standoff, so at least share the blame.

I'm not sure what the point of owning a digital copy of a book is if I can, at any time, "loan" one from the IA in <15 seconds. In a way it's even more convenient than owning a copy, your basically using IA as cloud storage.

>"I'm an author" or "Think of the publishers!" is no excuse for supporting unjust laws.

Authors want to get paid, this stops them from getting paid...

>> "I'm an author" or "Think of the publishers!" is no excuse for supporting unjust laws.

What is sad is most of the people that use that excuse do not believe copyright laws are draconian enough, they want STRONGER copyright laws for publishers, they want it to not only be civil but criminal, they want to put people in jail in a cage if you happen to share your favorite song with a friend.

In short, copyright maximalists are insane

The real overreach is copyright law's hundred year plus monopolies on imaginary property and their lip service to fair use and the public domain.

And the solution to broken copyright law is to ignore it, at the expense of working-class authors, rather than ... working on the law?

You realize this undermines the ability of our society to produce the actual written works that we're arguing so damn valuable that we can't abide locking them behind a paywall?

People write for free constantly. We're doing it right now, Tumblr was absolutely full of freely available fiction, and there were plenty of stories and technical knowledge written and passed between people before copyright was even a concept in anyone's minds. The primary thing the copyright industry gets us in regards to writing is that some people can get paid doing things others will do for free, and a large body of advertising is created around the non-free works.

If you stop paying people to write, the only people who write are those who can afford the time. Writing a novel can take years of your life. Books are not fungible, and some books you would want to read will never get written if the author cannot afford to write it.

Sure, but we get into a weird place if we try to argue that every thing that possibly might be written must be written - no copyright law is strong enough, we have a moral obligation to buy books we have no interest in, etc etc.

So why is the current copyright system the exact correct system for getting people paid to write, where any stronger or weaker would be bad? I can think of at least a few other possible systems that would get people paid to write as well - maybe an entirely different set of people, so some things would get written that aren’t today and some things that would get written today aren’t under that system. How can we evidence that our current system works best?

> And the solution to broken copyright law is to ignore it

Civil disobedience is a form of peaceful protest.

> You realize this undermines the ability of our society to produce the actual written works

Creators aren't going to stop. They'll find a way. The solution is to somehow get paid for the act of creating rather than the finished work. Patronage and crowdfunding could be the answer.