The publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive (Hachette v. Internet Archive) has resulted in the removal of more than 500,000 books from our lending library, including over 1,300 banned and challenged titles. We are actively appealing this decision to restore access for all our patrons.
We want to hear from you! How has losing access to these books affected your reading or research? What does it mean to you that these 500,000+ books are no longer available? Please share your story below.
Your feedback may be featured in our blog posts and other communications to highlight the impact of this significant loss on our library community.
They sued the Internet Archive for doing the exact same thing libraries do, and only with books that are not in print. Much like why you trust Wikipedia over the EFF, why you think that’s something worth defending I don’t know.
So why aren’t they suing libraries for doing those “exact same things?” Why target the IA specifically, and not other libraries?
Could it be that the IA did not in fact do the “exact same thing” as libraries?
I am not “defending” the publishers. They are the villains here. I think current copyright laws are insanely overreaching and have long ago lost the plot of what they were originally intended for.
This is like a horror movie where there’s a slasher hiding in the house and the dumb protagonists say “let’s split up to find him more quickly”, and I’m shouting at the idiot who’s going down into the dark basement alone. The slasher is the publishing companies and the idiot going down the stairs is the IA. It’s entirely justified to shout at them for being an idiot and recommend that they just run away, without being accused of “defending” the slasher.
Because publishers suing every public library in America would take a lot of time since it would involve every separate library system and also wouldn’t exactly look good from a PR perspective.
You really don’t have a good eye for the obvious.
Exactly, it’d be bad PR. I’ve argued this before in other threads, the publishers don’t want to destroy IA. They just want IA to not flagrantly interfere with their business. They only sued IA when IA poked them too hard for them to ignore.
You may note that the settlement agreement they reached with IA lets IA continue to host books that the publishers haven’t released as ebooks themselves, for example. Even now they’re not being as harsh as they could be.
As the husband of a librarian who is now a library administrator, you cannot be more wrong. If publishing companies had a way of shutting down all the public libraries in America or charge everyone a per-lending fee, they would absolutely do that. They hate public libraries. They are as hostile to them as they can be without getting lawyers involved.
So why aren’t they? If libraries are doing exactly what IA is doing, why not sue them too? The judge issued a summary judgement in their favor so it’s pretty open-and-shut, isn’t it?
It’s because the libraries know where the line is and they’re careful not to cross it. IA jumped merrily across the line and shouted about it from the rooftops.
See above re: PR.
Also, libraries cross that line all the time.
https://www.nypl.org/research
Exactly, PR. The IA was fine as long as they weren’t flagrantly bragging about how they were letting everyone download as many copies of everything as they wanted. If they’d stuck to their original pattern (shared with libraries) of only letting one digital copy out at a time then the publishers would have grumbled and not done anything about it because it would have been bad PR to attack IA under those conditions.
Are you referring me to the Digital Research Books beta?
Where on the NYPL can I download unlimited copies of books that are currently in print from these major publishers under non-free licenses?
The IA did not have books that were currently in print and they also told publishers that if they found any that were in print that were uploaded, they would be removed.
Too bad that U.S. copyright law doesn’t recognize CCLs or you’d have a point. They are violating copyright law by allowing them to be downloaded an unlimited number times and saying they are under a CCL is irrelevant. On top of that, the creator may grant a CCL but a publisher can claim they own the rights and then it is up to the NYPL to decide who is right until it goes to court, so even suggesting that somehow a CCL makes it legal doesn’t actually mean the CCL itself is granted by someone who doesn’t actually own the rights to grant it.
Libraries do not make unlimited copies of books so everyone can check it out at the same time without wait. Obviously the EFF doesn’t want to admit its client did that because it destroys their case, but that’s what the judge found the IA stupidly did.
Libraries use CDL all the time.
Libraries buy licenses to do so from the publishers, but that’s unrelated to what I said.
I’m saying the judge found that IA violated its own CDL, so even if its interpretation of the law was correct, the IA would still be liable.