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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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I was looking for resources for a custom LLM and noticed they had a ton of copyrighted books and wondered to myself how the heck that was legal
I guess this answers that
Just like regular libraries have copyrighted books: they lend them to one person at a time.
Which IA failed to do, which is why they got sued, and why they can’t lend those publishers’ books at all anymore.
I have no sympathy.
Just want to let you know why you're being downvoted. It's not because you're wrong. From a legal perspective you're right. This court case was decided this way because you're right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There's a meme for this.
"You're not wrong. You're just an asshole."
It's an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don't poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn't matter if you're "in the right". The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it's what they're best at.
"No one should stand up for new rights. Don't rock the boat bro."
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
What does the Mafia do? Show up, "Wow you got a lot of valuable things here Be a shame if someone broke them. Best listen to us."
The Mafia leverages potential of damage to existing value to extract cooperation.
I see very little difference here between the Mafia and the plaintiff.
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
Yes, let's just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it's a quote! That's fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting "I don't care about your rules, just try and stop me!" was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It's a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I'm not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don't deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised... but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.
One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I'm open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.
The "regressive philosophy" you're accusing me of holding is the opposite of what I said. There's your misunderstanding to be corrected.
I don't like the publishers, I think copyright has gone bananas with its various extensions over the years, I want to see them fought and defeated in court. The problem here is who is doing the fighting.
Imagine a scenario where there's a ravenous man-eating bear in the woods. There's two people available to fight it; a grizzled woodsman who makes it his entire business to go out and fight bears, and the village librarian who's carrying around a backpack full of irreplaceable books. For some reason the librarian is out there poking the bear with a stick, and when the bear didn't initially respond he started whacking it over the nose. Now the bear is chewing on the librarian's leg and the librarian is crying out "oh no, my backback full of books is in danger!"
Well duh. You shouldn't have been carrying that backpack into harm's way like that. Nobody is in the least bit surprised that the bear attacked the librarian under those circumstances. I don't have to be on the bear's side to understand how this situation was going to go down and call the librarian an idiot for willingly getting into it.
The woodsman (the EFF) should have been the ones to take this fight. They're better at it, it's their job, and if they fail they don't risk that precious backpack in the process. The librarian should have kept his books safely ensconced until the fight was over and it was safe for him to bring them out. If he really wanted those books distributed in the meantime, there are some sites who are already out there running around under the bear's nose taking that risk for their own reasons; let them continue taking those risks for now. The IA's job is to protect the archive.
"Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor."
How you like them strawmen?
It's a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I'm usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it's essence. Tho it doesn't seem very deep..
So in short.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I'd ignore. It's easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
You should strive to improve as a person rather than be content being a stagnant asshole
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn't have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we'll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I'm not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren't originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn't worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that's effectively indefinite.
It wasn't just "the corpos", you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
"With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!" ~ERB's depiction of Walt Disney.
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he's not an asshole for being right. He's an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn't.
I have talked to a few published authors (most unsuccessful) and listened to a few successful published authors, and they all say the same as you. Some of them (esp. successful) give away free books on their website. They just want people to read their books.
The ones complaining here aren't the authors, but the publishers.
Unequivocally no.
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
Copyright serves a very useful purpose. It's just been twisted into something it wasn't meant to be.
Exactly. Copyright used to last 14 years and required an application for a one-time extension. Let's go back to that.
100%.
The whole point was to "promote the useful arts" by allowing creators SOME time to make money off their work. People would be way less likely to write a book, a news artucle, make a movie, etc if someone else could just instantly sell copies and you couldn't support yourself with the work.
But the whole point was to give you enough protections to make it worth your while.
If you can't make enough money off of the work in 14 (or 28) years for it to have been worth it, then it's not worth it.
No one has ever said "if this isn't going to give me the exclusive right to make copies for 80 years after my death, then there's no point making it". And that was the only point to copyright. Doing the minimum to allow people to realistically make new stuff.
No.
They should have known better..
"Because what is legal is always right.
And what is right is always legal."
No?
In a fascist state, your mindset is welcome, "Well they broke the rule, they must pay," but do you never abstract one more level? Is the rule itself breaking something?
Those who downvote you say yes. Nuance is important. The rule has two main affects that I see.
Okay lets think about #1. Is that good or bad?
Okay lets think about #2. Is that good or bad?
Being critical in thought enough to recognize the flaws of the first quote is key.
This isn't about right or wrong though. It's explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say "Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won't you little chickenshit." then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I'm not holding my breath.
It would be more accurate if you said, "This is not about right and wrong (for me)."
If you say it's not about right and wrong, dead stop, then you are pledging full faith to the institutions, the very ones we are critiquing.
Basically, you are dismissing my opinion as misguided, dismissing me as missing the point and I am telling you it was expressed exactly as intended.
In short, you are arguing on the wrong conceptual meta-level for me to respond without dismissing my own claim. If I take as True that "this isn't about right and wrong" (it is), then I am setting aside the power I have in a democratic society to say, "Fuck this I'm changing it." Maybe we've just been stuck in gridlock politics, with a ruling class that strips and monetizes every aspect of humanity that the society today doesn't realize the power citizens wield.
Not sure. Been fun to think and share thoughts with you though. Thanks for your time and have a nice night.
An impasse is a perfectly acceptable outcome on a sane platform like Lemmy.
They should have poked the bear with a separate legal entity so the obvious resulting legal loss wouldn't effect their core operations.
I support the idea as long as it's for dead authors/out of print books, but from what I understand they were just letting people 'borrow' anything? That's just stupid (if idealistic)
They claimed to use the same protections as others. Is there a more accurate article about how their lending was faulty?
During Covid, they lent out multiple copies of the same book when they only had physical access to one copy. It would be like your local library making Xerox copies of their collection and handing them out. There’s no protections for that.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/4/2/21201193/emergency-library-internet-archive-controversy-coronavirus-pandemic
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That's literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
That is what happens though, it's clear about that.
The Wikipedia article explains and has sources.
They definitely weren't monitoring the one at a time rule... I downloaded the file and now have it forever
Sounds like a you problem. ;)