26 votes

In a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, the largest corporations in publishing want to change what it means to own a book

Posted by spit-evil-olive-tips
Tags: internet archive, legal, lawsuits, publishing, law, copyright, archives.digital, author.maria bustillos, source.thenation, paywall
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/publishers-are-taking-the-internet-to-court/

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Title
Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court
Published
Sep 10 2020
Word count
2410 words

7 comments

  1. spit-evil-olive-tips
    Link

    Publishers approve of libraries paying for e-book licenses because they’re temporary, just like your right to watch a movie on Netflix is temporary and can evaporate at any moment. In the same way, publishers would like to see libraries obliged to license, not to own, books—that is, continue to pay for the same book again and again. That’s what this lawsuit is really about. It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that publishers took advantage of the pandemic to achieve what they had not been able to achieve previously: to turn the library system into a “reading as a service” operation from which they can squeeze profits forever.

    The Internet is 31 years old, and in those three short decades the virtual world we’ve come to depend on has slowly eroded the idea of private ownership—literally, your right to call your belongings your own. Things you used to buy just once, such as your own private copies of software like Photoshop or Word, your privately owned vinyl discs and CDs, or movies on VHS—have increasingly begun to come through dispensing services you pay for every month, from vendors like Adobe, Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify. And you’ll never stop paying.

    20 votes
  2. cfabbro
    Link
    Obligatory archive.org/donate link. Their work (and especially winning this lawsuit) is super important, and well worth supporting, IMO.

    Obligatory archive.org/donate link. Their work (and especially winning this lawsuit) is super important, and well worth supporting, IMO.

    18 votes
  3. Thrabalen
    Link
    This trend toward licensing physical objects instead of selling them is nothing more than feudalism (land lords owning the land and the tools, and serfs renting out the ability to farm their own...

    This trend toward licensing physical objects instead of selling them is nothing more than feudalism (land lords owning the land and the tools, and serfs renting out the ability to farm their own land), and anyone who considers personal liberty an important thing should be up in arms about it.

    12 votes
  4. [2]
    MetArtScroll
    Link
    Scattered thoughts: IIUC the main idea underlying the National Emergency Library was that there were many books (paper or electronic) temporarily unavailable from locked libraries. A possible...

    Scattered thoughts:

    • IIUC the main idea underlying the National Emergency Library was that there were many books (paper or electronic) temporarily unavailable from locked libraries. A possible remedy would be making such emergency transfers legal, i.e., if a brick-and-mortar library becomes locked, then they can let an electronic library lend, with the standard restriction that the lent e-books correspond to the locked books.
    • A common argument by copyright maximalists is that “without copyright, poor authors would starve.” According to the article,

    Brewster Kahle… acknowledged that authors and publishers would also be harmed by the pandemic, urged those in a position to buy books to do so, and offered authors a form for removing their own books from the [National Emergency Library] program, if they chose.

    • The article makes a very important point that what libraries do is not limited to buying and lending, but it also includes preservation. This reminds me of another copyright maximalist argument which was against abandonware. Namely, they explicitly supported the rights to completely discontinue computer games so that old products do not compete with new ones.
    • However, IMNSHO the biggest problem is the current copyright length.
    11 votes
    1. vord
      Link Parent
      Seconding this. Copyright as a system of attribution and owner getting paid (instead of an authorized third party) is a pretty good idea. The problem boils down to our current implementations and...

      However, IMNSHO the biggest problem is the current copyright length.

      Seconding this. Copyright as a system of attribution and owner getting paid (instead of an authorized third party) is a pretty good idea. The problem boils down to our current implementations and expectations.

      I think 10 years, for owner (and direct family for case of single-owner works) would be a sufficiently long time in this modern age. Perhaps with an exponentially increasing fee to renew for 5 years at a time ($1000, $100,000, $100,000,000).

      Possibly even do away with the vast majority of it, merely mandating that original creator has rights to attribution and rights to first sale (nobody selling in other mediums without permission), but permit free redistribution and adaptation ala a Creative Commons license. Revenues for big projects like movies/tv shows could be resolved by pre-funding ala Kickstarter. For perpetual careers (like artists/authors/musicians), a Patreon model could work well.

      Edit: Just codify Creative Commons (with share-alike) and GPL, banning all other licenses, and that'll solve 90% of my issues with copyright.

      5 votes
  5. post_below
    Link
    I hadn't heard about the buy, digitize and loan out to only one person at a time concept. What an elegant solution. If publishers win this we're more plutocracy than democracy.

    I hadn't heard about the buy, digitize and loan out to only one person at a time concept. What an elegant solution.

    If publishers win this we're more plutocracy than democracy.

    7 votes
  6. elcuello
    Link
    It's paywalled as if to make a point.

    It's paywalled as if to make a point.

    4 votes