I worry that the Internet Archive is playing with fire. There are other things it's doing that are clearly a public good, yet extremely dubious from a copyright law perspective:
- Their e-book library during normal times, with the one-borrower-at-a-time restriction (the one whose temporary removal is at issue here). Even with that restriction, "it seems like a stretch" from a legal perspective. [1]
- Their online emulators for old computer software and games. Copyright lasts for around a century, so those are all still copyrighted unless explicitly released by their authors. Some of them are orphan works, which might make a difference under EU law [2], but not under US law, and some of them aren't even that.
If someone sues the Internet Archive over the National Emergency Library, there's a good chance they could get a ruling that lending e-books without permission from the copyright holder is illegal regardless of restrictions, effectively forcing them to shut down the library completely.
The emulators probably wouldn't be directly affected by a lawsuit over the library, since there are different issues and different copyright holders involved, so I'm less concerned about them. Still, I fear that a lawsuit could lead to increased scrutiny and criticism of the Internet Archive in general, which could possibly lead to someone else suing over the emulators.
Their online emulators are explicitly authorised via a DMCA exception granted by the Library of Congress, c.f. https://archive.org/about/dmca.php
> Following deliberation, the Copyright Office ruled in late October 2003 that four exemptions should be added to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, to be valid until the next Copyright Office rulemaking in 2006, including two that are related to the Internet Archive's original comments:
>
> Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
> Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.
The DMCA exemption process is specifically for the DMCA's anticircumvention clause, basically a ban on circumventing DRM. Actual copyright infringement is a separate offense (and in fact largely orthogonal), and the exemptions don't apply to it.
If it weren't for libraries, those publishers and authors would have a lot lower visibility and readership.
And, as Internet Archive points out in its rebuttal, published today [0], "On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close.... In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable...."
Considering how the publishing industry has treated libraries that buy e-copies, labelling IA's action "a cynical play" is ironic. Maybe those publishers which can most afford it can double their payments to authors during this time.
The so-called 'Great Recession' managed to kill off most of the used bookstores I shopped in where I live. If this event killed off commercial bookstores, I'd shed no tears.
""With mean writing incomes of only $20,300 a year prior to the crisis, authors, like others, are now struggling all the more — from cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work, income supplementing jobs, and speaking engagements," the Authors Guild, a professional group that provides legal assistance to writers, said in a statement released Friday."
Maybe if the Authors Guild spent more time pushing publishers to raise their rates rather than backing publishers....
I wish more authors would self publish. I know this isn’t about academic authors specifically, but the fact that we still rely on libraries and journals for access to that makes no sense to me: I don’t understand why you couldn’t get all the benefits of peer review, publicity, access, money, and prestige simply by getting the right endorsements or having your article linked to in some sort of compilation site (a journal with links rather than the articles themselves), and just have people pay you a small fee directly for access (supplemented by donations and organizations that compile papers). The same thing should apply to non academic authors as well.
There’s something deeply ironic about the fact that we can distribute and run fully featured modern applications on the web, but the academic papers it was originally designed for always seem to be in pdfs locked down behind paywalls. I can run powerful physics engines in the browser, but I can rarely click a link in an academic document.
Oh boo hoo. I'm playing "my heart goes out for you" on the worlds smallest violin.
The dramatically expanded access to information and the positive benefits of this far outweighs the benefits of the profits to publishers (and the minuscule subset of those profits which filter down to the authors). It's not even in the same ballpark.
The standard deviation of author profits is massive. Don't trust their claim that most authors are hardly earning more than 20k a year as evidence that small time authors gets screwed over. The ones who earn that much are almost never targeted for piracy. Pirates go out of their way to minimize the impact that their actions have on small time authors. It's the same with video game piracy. It's the ones who are making hundreds of thousands a year who are going to lose out.
Make this library permanent for the good of society.
This is patently untrue. I looked up the wife of my colleague who is the epitome of small itme author and sure enough it's there. You go on mobilism, it's there. Do not try to paint pirates in a positive light. I know them inside out: I have been a software pirate since 1985, I have been the co-sysop of the one of the largest warez FTP sites in Central Europe in what now seems a different life (this was decades ago, it was mostly over by 2003 and fully over in 2004). Noone, absolutely noone cares what they steal. And these days I still pirate my ebooks but then I order the physical book and donate it to the local library and then delete the pirated copy. Only way to deal with DRM and lack of physical space.
This has been the argument for software piracy for the longest time and it's a convincing one: a student can't afford Adobe Photoshop but if they use a pirated copy once they are at a company they will want to use it. Or, in less charitable terms, you can't get blood from a stone, so why bother.
This argument is so untrue for books it's not even funny. There is a huge treasure trove of free ebooks available and very often you can get a used mass paperback for less than a dollar. And there's no win from a pirated copy.
Books, like movies, videogames and often software tools, aren't substitutable. If I like Photoshop, or want to use it because it's popular, I'm unlikely to accept GIMP as a free alternative. If I want to read or watch The Expanse, I'm 100% not going to read some random free e-book or dollar paperback, because that's a different book. You can't substitute Shrek for Star Wars, nor Slime Rancher for Call of Duty.
Commodities don't get pirated. Commodities get market competition.
So you decided on not just merely passing the time with reading but reading a specific book and because you can't afford to pay for it, now you think you are entitled to it for free because why? If I want to buy a Vuis Luitton suitcase but can only afford American Tourister then I can just help myself to it? How is that right?
> If I want to buy a Vuis Luitton suitcase but can only afford American Tourister then I can just help myself to it? How is that right?
If you could 3D-print yourself a copy that looks just like the original, then sure, I'd say it's absolutely right to do. But that's my opinion, I'm not a fan of the concept of intellectual property. Regardless, what you did here is trying to equate piracy with theft, which is incorrect. Copying does not make the original disappear. Copyright infringement may be a crime, but it's a different crime than theft, both legally and morally.
> but reading a specific book and because you can't afford to pay for it, now you think you are entitled to it for free because why?
Well, if I can't afford it, I'm not going to buy it anyway. The publisher loses nothing over me making a copy. And there's an argument to be made that popular works of art are essential, because they form a shared cultural background; not having access to them means being excluded from the discussions your society is having.
There have been many occasions in my life where I've pirated some Adobe product. I was about to do so again a few months ago and was worried about downloading malware until I had the realization: "Wait, I have a job now. I can just buy the software!"
It felt good to give Adobe my money, and I am not certain I would have paid for the product today had I not donned my peg-leg and eyepatch growing up.
Another factor usually ignored is the effect on substitutes. That student who can't afford several hundred dollars for Photoshop? Maybe everything they actually need to do can be done with Pixelmator and they could afford the $30 for that. But they pirate Photoshop instead.
Or maybe GIMP can do everything they need so nobody needs to get paid. But if nobody gets paid anyway, might as well copy photoshop instead. Legal issues aside, it doesn't seem that irrational.
I think in practice, the moral argument just doesn't work too well for intellectual property, and creators need to deal with it. Which, unsurprisingly, they do, in different ways (be it through making payment convenient like Netflix, prosecuting individuals like MPAA, or focusing on enterprise deals like Adobe, ... or still pushing the moral angle because a statistical effect is better than none).
At least 50% of scene release readmes tell you to buy the game/book if you can. That proportion approaches ~80% the smaller that the developer/author is.
I am a small time author myself. If someone gives away a pirated copy of one of my books for free, but includes a readme inviting people to buy the book, I do not feel they are 'minimising the impact on me'. In fact I do not feel that makes any difference whatsoever. The best way for them to minimise the impact on me would be to not give away my book in the first place.
- Their e-book library during normal times, with the one-borrower-at-a-time restriction (the one whose temporary removal is at issue here). Even with that restriction, "it seems like a stretch" from a legal perspective. [1]
- Their online emulators for old computer software and games. Copyright lasts for around a century, so those are all still copyrighted unless explicitly released by their authors. Some of them are orphan works, which might make a difference under EU law [2], but not under US law, and some of them aren't even that.
If someone sues the Internet Archive over the National Emergency Library, there's a good chance they could get a ruling that lending e-books without permission from the copyright holder is illegal regardless of restrictions, effectively forcing them to shut down the library completely.
The emulators probably wouldn't be directly affected by a lawsuit over the library, since there are different issues and different copyright holders involved, so I'm less concerned about them. Still, I fear that a lawsuit could lead to increased scrutiny and criticism of the Internet Archive in general, which could possibly lead to someone else suing over the emulators.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/internet-archive...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Works_Directive