Honestly the dumbest possible move by Internet Archive. IA has gotten more and more ideological as well, and it's been censoring content it doesn't like. I'm not sure if they're in the Wikipedia/Mozilla boat of screwed up political spending, but if they are, this decision should at least temper that down.
I'm sure they'll be able to raise the money needed to pay off this lawsuit. It's true the Archive has a lot of amazing things not found elsewhere. Still, I've been hesitant to give them any money for years.
The replies in that thread are dumb too. I don't think people understand the legal complexities here, what a huge advantage it was for IA to even be able to lend out digital books in the way it was doing, and how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020.
It does show the two tiered system. Amazon, big tech and others massively got away with absorbing huge amounts of money in 2020. This non-profit tried to do equally shady things and it bit them in the ass. You clearly see where the system is tilted towards.
You're writing this as if the National Emergency Library was something way out of left field but Controlled Digital Lending was settled law. It was not: CDL and NEL were both exactly the same amount of out-of-left-field fringe copyright theory. In fact, there was already legal rulings against a digital resale scheme called ReDigi. The law is actually fairly clear that first sale only applies to transferring physical property, you cannot resell or lend an electronic transmission.
People are allowed to be angry about settled law regardless.
I question your use of "ideological" and "censoring", especially with the invocation of Wikipedia and Mozilla. Sounds like you have some political hobby horses to ride. Let us keep in mind that Internet Archive's biggest risk is just running the Wayback Machine. Hosting a copy of every website on the Internet is an extreme legal risk that is mitigated solely by the fact that basically everyone who operates or develops websites has had to fish something out of the Internet Archive at some point. If IA has an ideology, it's "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission".
> how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020.
I haven't followed the details of this case, but as a general notion, that sounds kinda reasonable to me?
Copyright law and enforcement is terribly broken in the USA, with a handful of giant publishers wielding massive, abusive power and the average American being harmed by losing their fair use rights and independent creators being bullied and abused by the giants behind the copyright cartel.
2020 upended society in many ways and created opportunities to fix various dysfunctional parts of society. It changed things as diverse as work-from-home norms to laws around takeaway alcohol from restaurants. The possibility to also improve copyright restrictions seems reasonable.
"IA lifted its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, allowing its digital books to be checked out by up to 10,000 users at a time, without regard to the corresponding number of physical books in storage or in partner libraries’ possession―a practice IA acknowledges was a 'deviat[ion] from controlled digital lending.'"
No argument from me that copyright and fair use is broken (and exclusively in ways that inure to the benefit of enormous publishing houses), but the "National Emergency Library" thing was never going to fly, even if they had found a judge willing to stretch existing copyright law at the edges.
They were getting away with something because it seemed kind of reasonable. They were effectively letting one person effectively remotely view a physical book they owned.
But NEL threw all that out the window. And COVID was a pretty translucent fig leaf. It's not like there is any shortage of public domain works "for the children" out there even if copyright terms should be shorter.
Copyright law is broken in the US, but that doesn't mean that Internet Archive was going to legally get away with what they were doing and escape legal trouble, even if it arguably wasn't morally wrong.
What are you referencing as not following? I'm not in discordance that CDL was likely illegal, simply in how they were making and sharing unauthorized electronic reproductions. At that point, it doesn't even matter how many people they allowed to borrow at one time. My comment on morality was in reference to how some people may argue that the internet archive was not in the moral wrong, but the law isn't based on any one moral code, so this doesn't really matter to the legal question.
Ah sorry, I was referring to the comment about US copyright laws. I assumed you were implying that the US system was uniquely bad/broken/worse but on re reading it, that's just me badly interpreting what you said. Sorry about that!
What content censoring have they been doing, what could I search on to read more about it? When typing "internet archive censoring" into DDG, it just comes up with articles about this case that never even mention the word censoring
> citing an “immediate threat to human life” due to threats and potential criminal actions from Kiwi Farms users [...] Kiwi Farms is known for collecting and publicizing personal details about targets it holds in contempt, many of whom are transgender women
Sounds sensible. I also wouldn't want to host such content tbh, similar to CSAM or pirated movies or so, hosting this material sounds somewhere between being a dick and a shortcut to getting the whole site taken down
I could see the point of keeping it around for research and law enforcement purposes but not the general public
I'm glad to hear this is not about censoring for a political agenda, that would have been a huge blow to how I value and trust the IA with what I've come to find a very useful function on the internet
An odd position to take seeing that the same article mentions the IA refusing to take down "terrorist content." "Terrorist content" is certainly worse than piracy or people being dicks online and obviously presents an greater threat to life.
I must admit that I don't know much about terroristic content. I've heard what harassment does to individuals even when it's not paired with entire groups of people interested in using the available information to seek you out (that's what this Farm site desceiption sounds like). The chance of being impacted by terrorism on the other hand are astronomically small and, the more attention we give it, the better it works, so based on that idea I've never looked into it. What even is terroristic content, do they try to convince you to join their cause or is it announcements of bombings or what should I even imagine this is?
I'm sorry but the number of people directly affected by terrorism and the followers of terrorism is of orders of magnitude higher than those affected by the dicks on Kiwi farms and their followers. Even if I count only those literally killed by terrorism. Thus the chances of such as well.
Calling Kiwi Farms an "immediate threat to human life" is not even remotely close to sensible. You can justify pretty much any censorship if you allow that rhetoric.
> I'm sure they'll be able to raise the money needed to pay off this lawsuit.
1) The relevant statute actually remits statutory damages for libraries.[1] Though this exception went untested because...
2) The parties negotiated a damages settlement between themselves before the trial court heard evidence and arguments on damages, but they agreed to let the summary judgment appeal go forth to establish firmer precedent.
[1] It's a qualified exception, but the IA was in a much better position in this regard than on the merits. And undoubtedly this limitation on damages figured into their original decision to test the waters.
Does "remits" mean reduces here, along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittitur? It was an unfamiliar term to me and I'm not sure I've found the right meaning.
It means to refrain from exacting, which is one of the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions. Here's the usage in context:
> [...] The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords
I think there actually does need to be some re-evaluation of some of the copyright/fair use issues raised by this case, but the NEL thing they did in 2020 was a totally unnecessary risk.
I'm sure they'll be able to raise the money needed to pay off this lawsuit. It's true the Archive has a lot of amazing things not found elsewhere. Still, I've been hesitant to give them any money for years.
The replies in that thread are dumb too. I don't think people understand the legal complexities here, what a huge advantage it was for IA to even be able to lend out digital books in the way it was doing, and how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020.
It does show the two tiered system. Amazon, big tech and others massively got away with absorbing huge amounts of money in 2020. This non-profit tried to do equally shady things and it bit them in the ass. You clearly see where the system is tilted towards.