A federal judge heard oral arguments in a lawsuit filed by four major book publishers against Internet Archive for alleged copyright infringement on Monday. The lawsuit was first filed in 2020 and could be a landmark case when it comes to digital libraries and copyright.
According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl seemed skeptical about whether copyright law's fair use doctrine allows Internet Archive to offer the scanned books without the publishers' permission.
The lawsuit was filed by Hatchette Book Group, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins Publishers, all of whom say that digitizing books without requiring payment hurts writers and the publishers who lose out on payout. The lawsuit claims Internet Archive's "actions grossly exceed legitimate library services, do violence to the Copyright Act, and constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale."
[...] The lawsuit says although Internet Archive claims it works to promote education, that has been a long-running function and aim of publishing houses who have invested time, money, and resources into creating and distributing books, not to mention the researching and writing efforts of the author.
By scanning and distributing digital books to readers free of charge, the lawsuit claims Internet Archive is exploiting "the investments that publishers have made in their books, and it does so through a business model that is designed to free-ride on the work of others." The book publishers say this practice makes Internet Archive "nothing more than a mass copier and distributor of bootleg works."
The publishers received support for their lawsuit from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Maria Pallante, chief executive of the association, criticized Internet Archive's practices, telling the Wall Street Journal, "If this conduct is normalized, there would be no point to the Copyright Act." She added, "It would effectively render the rights of authors, including the right to market and monetize their works, meaningless."
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Preliminary Court Setback for Libraries and Digital Lending
The Internet Archive has published a post about their ongoing fight in the lower courts over Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), specifically from the case Hachette v Internet Archive. This potentially affects all libraries with digital resources and the Internet Archive will appeal the court's decision.
Today's lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
But it’s not over—we will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundaion (EFF) pointed out that libraries have already paid publishers billions of dollars for their print collections which are being digitized at great expense as means of preserving these slowly decaying artifacts. CDL helps make full use of the books that the public have already bought and paid for in their libraries. Gizmodo had a piece a few days ago, giving a heads up about this setback: Internet Archive Faces Uphill Battle in Lawsuit Over Its Free Digital Library.
Hachette and several other publishers are fighting the Internet Archive in court to stop the practice of CDL. Basically, CDL is a model where artificial restrictions are imposed to create artificial scarcity of digital resources in emulation of the old model based on physical artifacts. This attack on basic library service is just the latest in decades of such attacks. Glyn Moody provides some context about other, long-term general attempts to remove libraries from the picture.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday March 22, @06:24PM (13 children)
I mostly assumed that the books on the archive was things that was out of print and not really of much general interest to the publishers anymore. Sort of like book abandonware. At least those are the kind of books I usually find there. It's not like they, publishers, are keeping all their old stock in print or even print on demand. That said if the archive was going to start scanning and sharing new and current books I guess they might have more of an issue with it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday March 22, @06:58PM (9 children)
The issue here, to me, is TIA started doing unrestricted lending. It seems defensible to lend out one copy of a book at a time. That's not notably different than packing it in a box and mailing it to someone. It's far more difficult to justify lending them out to multiple people simultaneously. I haven't seen any data on how widespread that practice was.
As for recent works, I've seen a few e.g. a handful of Make Magazine from 2020+.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday March 22, @07:03PM
That might be one of the issues, also it's not like anyone pays for it so they can't kick back a tiny little sliver of a share to the publishers. Still if it's mainly old things I guess it's, or should be, less of an issue one would think.
How recent the work is always turns into a bit of an issue with these archives as people can upload and share almost anything. It's the same with say Sci-Hub etc where people could upload anything and at one time it had a massive archive of cartoons in .cbr/.cbz format (just packed and renamed). Clearly not what the site was intended for but there it was.
So it could indeed be somewhat interesting to see some data from them about what it is that gets checked out and how often etc. How common these more recent things are compared to older versions or things that are clearly out of print etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by owl on Thursday March 23, @02:29AM
And this is what ticked off the publishers. TIA had a 'restricted lending' system already in place, and IIRC, this was publisher approved (or at the very least was not ticking the publishers off).
The 'unrestricted' aspect was what caught the publishers attention, and resulted in the lawsuit. TIA's reasoning for 'unrestricted' was all the local libraries were closed for lock-downs, so they (TIA) were allowing folks to still access otherwise inaccessible books. I suspect that had they limited themselves to "one copy per closed library branch" or preferably "one copy per closed library branch that also contained a physical copy" that they might not have caught the publishers wrath.
(Score: 1) by Woodherd on Friday March 24, @09:22AM (5 children)
Yes, but such restrictions are enforcing an artificial scarcity, for the purpose of rent-seeking. In no way does this serve the original purpose of copyright, which is " to promote the progress of useful arts and science". So the claim that
is rather preposterous on the face of it. It begs the question of what "legitimate library services" are, assuming that it must be to serve as a revenue source for copyright holders.
It once was that publishers provided a service, since print was the only means of encoding human knowledge, and it entailed costs of production and natural scarcity implicit in the physical media, so compensation was deserved. But this is no longer the case, and when publishers try to enforce the old "buggywhip" rule of limited number or duration of "lends", they are forming a hindrance to the progress of useful arts and science. As such, they should be punished, or at least ignored.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday March 24, @02:12PM (4 children)
I understand your point, and as much as I want information to be free I do see the publisher's point here. If it's allowable to scan a book and distribute unlimited copies of it, it would be allowable to record a movie and distribute unlimited copies of that too. Our current copyright system isn't built for that. Lending one copy taken from one physical book at a time is fine; Lending a thousand copies taken from one physical book at a time is not.
(Score: 1) by Woodherd on Saturday March 25, @11:38AM (3 children)
Movies? I ask, what, in principle, is wrong with sharing a thousand copies? Not possible, economically, under prior technology, but perfectly feasible now. Only the antiquated notion of intellectual property stands in the way, now. And I do mean it stands in the way of progress in the useful arts and sciences. But I have seen admissions of who your employer is, so I understand your misgivings.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 25, @12:17PM
Internet Archive just lost the first round of its case.
Copyright law is standing in the way. Have we ever seen a reduction rather than expansion of copyright? Maybe some would argue the DMCA since it can give pirate sites immunity if they respect the letter of the law but still accept tons of infringing content constantly.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday March 26, @04:53AM (1 child)
My employer notwithstanding, I do favor greatly reducing the term and scope of copyright. We're going to have to change something. Laws made for honest-to-god phonographs aren't going to cut it anymore.
(Score: 1) by Woodherd on Sunday March 26, @10:33AM
Agreed. I found this comment insightful:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=54423&page=1&cid=1297655#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
They have had a very long time to find another way to promote the useful arts, and sciences, but instead have insisted on rent-seeking. Your turn of phrase intrigues me, though, "honest-to-god phonographs"? Is there any other kind? Right up there with "legitimate library services".
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 25, @12:12PM
The "lending" system put JPEG files for each page in your browser cache. You could manually save them and have the whole book. I know someone who did exactly that.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by GloomMower on Wednesday March 22, @07:37PM
The articles claims it lists as examples 127 titles. I quickly searched and saw listed things like Gone Girl, Lord of the Flies, "For Dummies" books.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22, @07:50PM
The publisher's issue with TIA giving out old books is that if you are reading a fifty year old classic, then you are not buying one of their new books. Apart from public domaining Steamboat Willie, the main reason the rest of the publishers keep trying to extend copyright is to reduce free alternatives to what they are selling. Just look at what happens to anyone who tries to import "grey" books*.
---
*Legally published books from another country where the publisher is charging less.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Wednesday March 22, @11:18PM
It is not necessarily abadonwear...but books that have been donated by people to TIA. It started during lockdown for people to access books. They scan them and you can check out a copy for a time limit.
I do believe they respect the number of checkouts, at any given time, to be matching the number of books donated to them.
Go and checkout any book which is still in copyright...you'll see you have to access them online for a time limit etc...
I suspect the publishers do want libraries to buy their digital copies and not lend scans of donated books !
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gznork26 on Wednesday March 22, @07:22PM (2 children)
What interests me is the objective of this case. Do they want to simply stop the Archive from lending the books it has, or would they like to shut down the Archive entirely, using the book issue as the wedge? The Archive is a valuable resource, after all, and I'd hate to see it shuttered.
If I were being paranoid, I'd wonder whether the objective was to fully control people's ability to know about the past. Web site content can be altered, so without a record of what the web once contained, a vast amount of information about the past would be voided. Someone once said that if you control the past, you control the future.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday March 22, @09:02PM (1 child)
Let me introduce you to A Letter from 2020. [soylentnews.org]
Here is the first bit of the letter.
The main subject of the letter talks about history and how nobody in the year 2020 knows about the ancient past back in the year 2000.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 1) by Bean Dip on Thursday March 23, @07:18PM
A great read, thank you DannyB. Recommend to explore the slashdot.org link before going to the archive.org link.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday March 22, @09:11PM
I love Internet Archive (even though I use it less than I did 10 years ago), I thought it's function was to archive web pages. In other words public facing things that seemed to disappear. Didn't google get into legal trouble over the same stunt?
Anyway a rational judge would rule that they stop scanning and posting books in copyright.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 22, @11:32PM (1 child)
There it is, an implication that Copyright is somehow beyond question.
Yes, by all means, do violence to (C), because it's a terrible law and should be abolished. Publishers, authors, and other artists have had decades to work out other systems to "promote the progress of sciences and useful arts", and have largely failed. They have disparaged or ignored other methods. I suppose it was too much to expect any other result, since a solid majority of them are all convinced (C) is their bread and butter. I had hoped that at the very least those in the SF genre would grasp that copyright has fatal flaws, but no, even there we are treated to all kinds of advances ranging up to the really fantastic, but when mentioned at all, copyright has somehow stayed the same or even gotten stronger.
(Score: 4, Touché) by MIRV888 on Thursday March 23, @12:52AM
I was just confused about how you can be violent to a piece of legislation.