Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Internet Archive was recently found guilty of copyright infringement in a case related to its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) service, which provides users with free access to a digital library of books. US District Judge John Koeltl decided that the IA infringed the copyright of four publishers when it relaxed its CDL limitations during the pandemic, but now the Archive has seemingly reached an agreement with said publishers which could clear the way for an appeal.
The consent judgment between the Archive and Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House will require the IA to pay an unspecified amount of money to the four publishers if the appeal is unsuccessful. The publishing companies are "extremely pleased" with the proposed injunction, as it extends the copyright controversy to thousands of books still in their catalogs.
The IA was sued in 2020 after it started lending free digital copies of its books during the pandemic, a practice the Archive compared to book lending from traditional, physical libraries. The CDL service was protected by the fair use doctrine, the Archive argued, but Koeltl decided otherwise. The Archive was lending free ebooks that were being licensed to traditional libraries, the judge determined.
If accepted, the consent judgment will provide the Archive a chance to overturn Koeltl's unfavorable decision in the appeal. The publishers defined the CDL service as a mass copyright infringement operation, but the Archive now says that its fight is "far from over." The IA team firmly believes that libraries should be able to "own, preserve, and lend digital books" outside the limitations of temporary licensed access (i.e., copyright).
[...] Current efforts to curb the strength and presence of digital libraries – and the Internet Archive itself – are cutting off the public's access to truth "at a key time in our democracy," [Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle] said. Strong libraries are paramount for a healthy democracy, and that's why the IA is appealing Judge Koeltl's decision.
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As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.
IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.
To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.
[...]
IA will have an opportunity to defend its practices when oral arguments start in its appeal on June 28."Our position is straightforward; we just want to let our library patrons borrow and read the books we own, like any other library," Freeland wrote, while arguing that the "potential repercussions of this lawsuit extend far beyond the Internet Archive" and publishers should just "let readers read."
[...]
After publishers won an injunction stopping IA's digital lending, which "limits what we can do with our digitized books," IA's help page said, the open library started shrinking. While "removed books are still available to patrons with print disabilities," everyone else has been cut off, causing many books in IA's collection to show up as "Borrow Unavailable."
[...]
In an IA blog, one independent researcher called IA a "lifeline," while others claimed academic progress was "halted" or delayed by the takedowns."I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston.
[...]
In the open letter to publishers—which Techdirt opined "will almost certainly fall on extremely deaf ears"—the Internet Archive and its fans "respectfully" asked publishers "to restore access to the books" that were removed.
OpenAI could be fined up to $150,000 for each piece of infringing content:
Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT's dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.
NPR spoke to two people "with direct knowledge" who confirmed that the Times' lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary "to protect the intellectual property rights" of the Times' reporting.
Neither OpenAI nor the Times immediately responded to Ars' request to comment.
If the Times were to follow through and sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, NPR suggested that the lawsuit could become "the most high-profile" legal battle yet over copyright protection since ChatGPT's explosively popular launch. This speculation comes a month after Sarah Silverman joined other popular authors suing OpenAI over similar concerns, seeking to protect the copyright of their books.
[...] In April, the News Media Alliance published AI principles, seeking to defend publishers' intellectual property by insisting that generative AI "developers and deployers must negotiate with publishers for the right to use" publishers' content for AI training, AI tools surfacing information, and AI tools synthesizing information.
Previously:
Sarah Silverman Sues OpenAI, Meta for Being "Industrial-Strength Plagiarists" - 20230711
Related:
The Internet Archive Reaches An Agreement With Publishers In Digital Book-Lending Case - 20230815
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday August 17 2023, @03:52AM (8 children)
I love the work the internet archive does, but if they keep fiddling around with copyright they're going to get shut down. It's a problem.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2023, @04:07AM
Pirate sites fulfill the role of digital libraries nowadays. Internet Archive wanted to be like that and respectable too, doesn't work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2023, @05:19AM
Yeah to me it's obvious they infringed.
Those limitations existed for copyright reasons. They should have got permission from the copyright holders first. If they didn't get permission from the relevant parties to change the deal then they're infringing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ingar on Thursday August 17 2023, @07:52AM (5 children)
The problem is not with the Internet Archive.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Common Joe on Thursday August 17 2023, @09:34AM (4 children)
Well, yes and no. Both you and ElizabethGreene are correct. Ultimately, it's a huge problem because we, the everyday people, are the ones who are most affected by these shenanigans. And that's the biggest problem. (Honestly, we should have more than one entity saving the information stored on the Internet Archive.)
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Thursday August 17 2023, @11:05AM (2 children)
Maybe recursion is the answer? Time to start the Internet Archive archive...
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday August 17 2023, @11:12AM
The term you're looking for is "distributed data".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday August 17 2023, @01:30PM
Project Gutenberg has a way to do it: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html [gutenberg.org]
They're a fair bit smaller than the Internet Archive and are operating in a different capacity. Project Gutenberg is hosting Public Domain book/magazines/etc. While the Internet Archive is run much more like an Abandonware site which isn't exactly legitimate.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of what Internet Archive and even potentially the Google Books scanning project (if that even exists anymore) are doing. It's just not necessarily codified in law.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2023, @09:51AM
archive.is is another site I use.
As for archive.org there's lots of stuff that have vanished just because of a robots.txt https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine-pay-attention-to-robotstxt [archive.org]
So if you want to keep copies of stuff, you can't just rely on archive.org - keep your own copies.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2023, @08:34PM
Warning, that's a dog whistle almost entirely used exclusively by authoritarians trying to take away our civil rights. Weird, coming from that guy of all people. Just a warning.