Legality and morality may be misaligned. It is important to never equate the two in a society of man made laws. This is doubly true when wealthy and powerful interests have so much ability to influence laws through legalized bribing (i.e., "lobbying").

> objectively “wrong”

How so? Can you explain?

Are libraries, too, "objectively wrong” in that analysis?

cheers

From what I understand, they broke the terms of a legally-binding contract with the publishers. They were allowed to act as a “digital library” — and lend out copyrighted works for free — but only one “copy” of the file could be released at a time.

This makes more sense for real-world libraries (where books are physical objects with manufacturing costs) but this doesn’t really translate to digital files.

During the pandemic, when real-world libraries were shut, the Internet Archive took it upon themselves to give away an unlimited number of copyrighted works. Libraries are a net public good to society, and unexpectedly we found ourselves without them. The Internet Archive was uniquely positioned to share knowledge and educational materials with the world, free of charge, at a time when many people had no other access to them.

They do not have a contract with the publishers. Their normal CDL policy (one digital copy loaned out per physical book in the archive) is legal under fair use. The publishers also have a motion for summary judgement, which would prevent them from doing this.

The publishers would rather rent them a digital copy for a lot of money, that is either time-limited or has a cap on the total number of times it can be checked out before the Archive would have to pay again.

That is a good answer

> Given the impact of the public health emergency, the Internet Archive decided to ease its book lending restrictions and allow multiple people to check out the same digital copy of a book at once.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/14/cucd-j14.html

Libraries can rent books they’ve purchased. Generally they can’t fire up the photocopier and make copies of books they’ve purchased.

Anecdotal, but every library I have ever been in had a copier that patrons could use to make copies of books for a couple cents per page.

Some copying is covered by fair use. Making a whole copy of a book, especially in a way that might limit the copyright owner's profits, usually doesn't count. I've seen signs in libraries like this one https://www.shopbrodart.com/Library-School-Equipment/Signage... warning about copyright infringement.

Those signs may seem scary, but they're just stating a basic fact that everyone already knows: If you commit copyright infringement, you have committed copyright infringement.

Likewise.

That's a relatively new development, though. Historically libraries were responsible for making copies of the works they held.

Actually, sometimes you are able to. ILL in academic libraries or special collections/archives sometimes requires doing so (e.g. because the original material is bundled in a giant 10 year journal binding). That said, legal agreements between research libraries and academic publishers are basically opaque dark magic.

When I buy a physical book, I can lend that book to a friend. I own the book.

When a library buys a physical book, they can loan that copy out to patrons. They own the physical book.

For over ten years now, libraries have taken a single physical book, scanned it and removed the book from circulation, and lent out a single ebook. This has been a common practice founded on an interpretation of fair use laws, which allow format shifting (recording a vhs to DVD, for example) and lending, and also copyright laws which explicitly mention the legality of digitizing books for accessibility reasons, to serve the visually impaired.

This "one physical book in storage equals one ebook" lending is the "controlled digital lending" the archive does, and is the issue at stake in this suit. Publishers argue that libraries should not be allowed to lend any ebook except those which they set a specific lending limit to- charging the library a fee every X number of checkouts or every X number of months.

This is obviously not how lending physical books works- the library can buy a hardcover and loan it out to patrons, repairing the spine and binding over and over, eventually moving it to a special collection for viewing on site when it's hundreds of years old and can't be handled.

As a seperate, and legally shaker issue, the internet archive created the "national emergency library" during the pandemic. The logic here was that nearly every library in the country was closed, there were within those libraries physical copies of these books that weren't being lent out, and so the same concept as controlled digital lending could apply. This move by the archive was signed onto and supported by thousands of libraries around the country, who agreed that their uncirculated physical copies could stand in for the extra copies checked out of the archives emergency library.

It's important to note the archive does not loan any book published in the last five years, period. This is a self imposed limitation that your neighborhood library does not work under, but it means that the "lost sales" publishers allege were not of new books. Nobody ever got screwed out of bestseller status because too many library patrons read their book, and that goes doubly so in this case.

All that said, the issue isn't whether the internet archive messed up with it's national emergency library. It's whether the whole concept of loaning a book is limited to printed copies, and thus ebooks must be repurchased by libraries ad nauseum-- or if libraries can keep a physical copy in a storage room and loan out a digital copy one at a time, exactly as they do now.

Bottom line, our libraries (and especially their ebook collections) will be much poorer if this decision goes to publishers.

> Publishers argue that libraries should not be allowed to lend any ebook except those which they set a specific lending limit to- charging the library a fee every X number of checkouts or every X number of months.

so this is yet another attempt at digital feudalism, where you bought something, but must pay the supplier a subscribtion or a cut forever?

A party applies for summary judgment to be entered when, speaking in very general terms, the other side's case is not reasonably arguable. That is, no reasonable jury/judge could find for the other party.

It doesn't have anything to do with morals, it's a procedural process that avoids the need for an expensive trial to defend a hopeless claim.

Of course, a party might lose a summary judgement application but ultimately win at trial.

The general consensus I’ve read on HN is that the IA is pretty clearly guilty. But they’re the ones seeking the summary judgment in their own favour. Hence I respect their position, for taking a moral stance despite not having much of a legal leg to stand on.

HN is generally a bad predictor of what courts will do.

Piracy isn't for the greater good. Copyright is.

Well, that’s very much debatable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

There's a strong argument that copyright is no longer a net good.

Copyright's value proposition is providing a monetization framework by allowing people to prevent others from sharing. Its only function is to limit creating copies. This made sense in the days of the printing press.

Nowadays we have many other monetization models which aren't predicated on limiting sharing. Many large and in some case (open source) leading systems are built on these non-restrictive models.

I think the negative aspects of copyright - the chilling effect on the free exchange of information - is non-linear. The more information we have, the more collective cost is paid by society having to worry about the chilling aspects (is my youtube video legal? Is my software? etc).

If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure.

I think we probably hit this point in the 1990s, unfortunately. We are long overdue to repeal copyright entirely.

> If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure.

I think it's worth considering not just the number of works, but also the number of copiers.

In the days when copying meant printing presses, the physical act of making copies was overwhelmingly a commercial activity performed by a relative handful of businesses. Making a copy of a substantial work was not something the average person had a serious opportunity to do even once in their entire life, so copyright law only meaningfully restricted a small number of entities. By the mid-1980s, with the proliferation of human-scale media technologies like the photocopier, VCR, camcorder, tape deck, and floppy drive, the number of meaningfully regulated entities began an explosive growth that has not stopped since. Copyright law has been amended with hacks like the AHRA and DMCA, but has never come close to a true reckoning with the modern reality of a copy being just a click away for countless millions of people, never mind cultural phenomena like meme generators, mashups, and fanfic that tend to functionally treat authorship less as a matter of negotiable consideration and more as a matter of tribal history.

The greater good that both serve is the availability of creative works. Copyright serves it by rewarding authors of new creative works. Piracy serves it by increasing availability of existing creative works.

Like to keep Mickey Mouse out of public domain every time??

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

I'd agree if there were reasonable terms (maybe 30 year maximum term from publication date), but what copyright has become is not great in a lot of ways.

IA is not disregarding copyright, nor the publishers.. instead IA is changing the rules.. rules in which money does pay a role. A simple lens of conservative -> we want the rules to operate as they have, and liberal -> we want to change the rules .. might apply here.

Casting aspersions with the land-mine word "piracy" does not increase the intellectual level of the discussion, nor is it even accurate here IMO.

I've never thought "piracy" was technically accurate; copyright violation is more like a kind of freeloading: other people are paying for their copies and you're not paying for yours.

At any rate, "changing the rules" can't be a blanket get-of-liability-free card, can it? I mean, if you walk into a convenience store, grab a Coke, and walk out without paying for it, you can't claim "I'm not disregarding payment, I'm changing the rules, rules in which money plays a role." Money plays a role, in the sense that you are expected to pay for the Coke and if you do not, it's theft.

It's uncomfortable to grapple with this, but the publishers were largely looking the other way with respect to the IA's lending library up when they were following the principle of "we've scanned X copies and thus can lend out X copies". Technically, that may still be considered copyright violation, in that the publishers didn't give permission for the copies to be used that way. But they let it slide until the IA decided that the closures of libraries during the pandemic constituted a rationale for "we've scanned at least one copy and thus can lend out as many as we want." SamReidHughes and I don't always see eye-to-eye on many things (hi, Sam), but legally speaking, he's absolutely correct, even if you'd prefer "flagrant copyright violation" rather than "piracy."

I can't believe that the IA did this without knowing full well it was inviting a legal challenge. The original CDL concept at least seems plausible to me, and in any case, I think the terms publishers offer libraries for digital copies are frequently bonkers (e.g., pay $X for a maximum of Y lending times, then be forced to buy a new digital copy). But either the IA deliberately violated copyright with the intent of trying to change the legal standing here -- which necessitates this trial happening -- or they deliberately violated copyright because they are, not to put too fine a point on it, blooming idiots. I would like to think the former, but I'm not sure they have very solid ground to stand on.

Don’t act like there’s an intellectual level to the conversation when they just want to pirate books without paying.

Dont worry, soon you wont be able to use the smart TV, smart dishwasher and smart lights without subscribtion and removing the smart bits from your own property will be an act of piracy.

Ironically, without copyright, all software would be running on servers and locked down computing systems.

So, if I get pulled over doing 200, do I get to just tell the cop ‘I’m in a hurry, I changed the rules’.

Copyright should be limited to 20 years full stop. Nobody deserves to keep making money off of something for longer than two decades.

well it continues after the author us dead, you know, to keep motivaring the dead suthor to create more!