I'm not sure why they thought this would be OK without getting permission from rights holders.

It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society.

The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.

This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet archive? They struggle enough as it is to make money without a global financial crisis, and without large organisations taking it upon themselves to give their content away. What’s the “reward ratio” for all the book retails going out of business at the moment, and all the staff they’re laying off? Even if you hate publishers, and for some reason think they’re not entitled to property rights, what’s the “reward ratio” for their employees, or the people who’s retirements are invested in their publicly traded companies?

It’s easy to sympathise with the motivation behind the decision, but really their decision was to summarily strip people of their rights, and the payoff for their hard work. It wasn’t a noble decision, because they didn’t own what they were giving away, and an attempt to rationalize the deprivation it contributed to is really just sad. It was truly a monumentally stupid decision on their part, and they’ve jeopardized their entire mission because of it.

Views like the ones you've expressed here, which frame this as a property issue, will lead more and more to begin to think that intellectual property isn't "property" at all.

Hey hey, property is property of corporations and business entities. We can only have temporary access rights to that property.

This idea, implied in your comment, that information should have the same legal treatment that a physical object it's not so obvious to me.

As I stated in a different response, I don’t think there would be anything immoral about abolishing copyright in general (for newly created work at least). But if you did that then you would most certainly see much less people investing their time and money into creating it, I also imagine it would create a resurgence in draconian practices such as chained libraries. How does cinema-only releases sound to you? For both TV and movies, of course.

However, whatever you think of such an idea, the people who created the content in question did so under conditions where the state had offered them copyright protection. To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.

> To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.

No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything. If they created something today and the law changed tomorrow thereby destroying the economic value of their investment, too bad. That's life.

Copyright and its practically infinite duration defrauds the public out of works that by any reasonable estimate should already be in the public domain. Did Disney worry about that before spending its intellectual property profits on lobbyists in order to get the government to extend the duration of copyright? No. These creators and companies have already made an obscene amount of money, many times over their initial investment. Are we supposed to feel guilty about "defrauding" this industry by changing the laws that enable it?

Please don't do ideological flamewar on HN.

Also, the objection downthread about you posting repetitively is not without a point. Please don't do that; it's bad for curious conversation, and it lowers the signal/noise ratio of the thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Since this is the second time you’ve posted basically the same same comment in response to one of mine, I’ll just copy paste what I said last time. Perhaps you’ll respond to it this time?

> Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.

> No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything.

Technically this is correct. The state is generally able to set whatever laws it likes. It was be a bit difficult in the USA as copyright is enshrined in the constitution. But there are examples in history of governments stripping all sorts of property rights from their citizens. It tends to go quite poorly though, for many reasons, but at least in part because people in that situation tend to view the government as stealing from them.

If the government sets the law in such a way that people who do X will be entitled to Y, then people who did X would be rightly upset if the government summarily decided they were no longer entitled to Y. The only thing that would seperate such a scenario from legally actionable fraud is sovereign immunity.

Most of the anti-copyright comments I’ve seen in this tread seem to really just be thinly veiled anti-private-property comments. So why not just come out and state your case if that’s what you’re getting at?

> It was be a bit difficult in the USA as copyright is enshrined in the constitution.

No, it's not. Like letters of marque and reprisal, copyright is something Congress is authorized to grant in the Constitution, but, also like letters of marque and reprisal, it's not something the Constitution gives anyone a right to expect Congress will grant them.

Copyright isn't guaranteed by the constitution. The ability for Congress to create copyright is guaranteed by the constitution. It would be perfectly fine, constitutionally for Congress to degree "there is no copyright".

People being upset isn't a reason to remove a rule.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. Nothing good, new, or interesting comes of it.

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> There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things.

Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous.

There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.

Copyright has the force of law internationally. Which means that courts, police, and armies back it up.

I would agree that copyright has many problems. But "rule of law" also matters.

Perhaps more importantly, the Internet Archive has chosen to take actions that are likely illegal, and do that in ways that threaten its very existence. Any court in the world might rule against the IA with a financial punishment that would permanently shut it down AND hand all its resources to its enemies. And those rules will be enforced by trained policemen with guns, tear gas, and bulletproof vests.

The IA is very important, and in general I really like the IA. The Wayback machine is a critical resource today. The IA's decision to risk the existence of itself and all its archives, by taking this step, was extremely unwise. I'm disappointed in the IA, I expected smarter decisions.

I hope they get some excellent lawyers that might salvage them so they can at least exist in some form. Right now, the IA and all it archived is at risk of being destroyed, with nothing good to come from it. If they stay in existence, I hope that they get some good lawyers to keep them away from such horrendously bad legal decisions in the future.

Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching.

Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.

As I said:

> Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion

Bringing up another completely seperate category of abuse is again another completely different discussion, and completely not relevant to this one.

You're clueless, it is directly relevant, you said "copyright laws are neither moral or immorral" which is a bs statement because every rule (which it is) has political consequences, you need a giant state to declare "some ideas are not sharable". AKA copyright is a cultural construct that evolved in one particular society at a particular point in history, not a natural law.

So no, you don't get the idea of owning ideas is directly itself an attack on freedom itself, aka if you can claim you own ideas you can use violence against others because you believe in that idea. The problem you're not seeing is that it's impossible to enforce property rights for ideas while not infringing on basic human freedoms. Copyright is backdoor to get rid of property rights for the public by associating it with software/technology.

The idea that we just need "good regulation" to stop the abuses, is bs, since the last 200 years of copyright has always seen its power and abuse expanded and not reduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...

So you're the one making disingenuous arguments. Since our culture is literally being irrevocably destroyed and there's no way much culture during this period will be saved because of the lawlessness of the USA and general idiocy of its citizenry.

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Please don't create HN accounts to do that with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

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> You're clueless, it is directly relevant, you said "copyright laws are neither moral or immorral"

I actually said that copyright itself is neither moral nor immoral, which is a completely different statement.

Any particularly copyright law can be as immoral as you want it to be, but the idea that somebody can retain rights over content they create is not immoral. You could easily create a society that didn’t have such rights, but the outcome would certainly be much less content, and much more restrictions put on it. You complain about copyright destroying video games history, but copyright is the only reason that history exists to begin with.

Your examples harmful copyright abuse are irrelevant first of all because they are not copyright able. The alphabet can not be copyrighted, and neither can an idea (that would be a patent, which is again a completely different thing).

They are made even more irrelevant by the fact that such “harmful” applications of copyright are not relevant to this situation. The copyright in question is not of a word, or the alphabet, or an idea, or the work of some long dead author. The copyright in question here is entire recently released books.

The idea that somebody who writes a book, or creates a movie, or a video game, can retain exclusive rights over its distribution for a certain period of time is not generally classified as copyright abuse. To characterize it that way is a very extreme, niche position.