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Pipe-International t1_jdtb62l wrote

Reply to comment by poboy975 in Internet Archive Loses Lawsuit Over Ebook Copyright Infringement. Here’s What to Know... by Halaku

No it isn’t any different (still illegal), but I don’t think the biggest publishers in the country are concerned about you as a singular person, maybe if you started a global online archive that was sharing untold amount of titles to untold amounts of people for free without permission, then maybe they’d take notice.

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blizzard36 t1_jdtg748 wrote

Actually, a copy for personal use is quite legal. Publishers HATE it, and have been doing their best to overturn it for a long time. (Video game publishers especially.) The only thing clearly established as illegal after this ruling is that IA couldn't lend more copies than they had, which honestly was pretty clear before and I think the IA was banking on consideration for the circumstances.

The publishers are using this as an avenue to attack being able to make a copy in a new format (which is the thing that has always angered video game publishers especially). They would like to force people to buy new copies of a product every time there is a new popular format, where right now people do it because generally it's pretty cheap and definitely more convenient than making your own copy. There are books and games I have 5 legal copies of simply because it's way easier to spend a couple bucks to get them on a new service than going through the steps to convert my existing copies.

Everyone should be concerned about the publishers stretching the ruling to that point, because it won't take long for them to introduce new formats to push repeat sales.

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Iz-kan-reddit t1_jdtnssd wrote

>Actually, a copy for personal use is quite legal.

Personal use isn't sharing with others.

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Pipe-International t1_jdtnq6h wrote

‘Personal use’ not to all and sundry. And publishers hate it because it’s pirating a product THEY paid for. When was the last time YOU put up the 10s of thousands or even millions of dollars it costs to publish books??? I don’t know much about computers, what I do know is, if you’re sharing my book, cool, but don’t take advantage of me. Pay me for my work for those extra copies. Or in this case, stop sharing my shit for free just because there are a lack of regulations online as of yet.

Edit: and if it’s for a good cause like the library shutdowns over covid (even though most libraries are online anyway), like at least ask first, damn. People just think they are entitled to everyone else’s work. Like I didn’t write a book for free, the publisher didn’t produce & market it for free, the original copy wasn’t free, so why should a global archive that’s not even a real library be able to duplicate it into a different format and share it for free?

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CptNonsense t1_jdurc1j wrote

>When was the last time YOU put up the 10s of thousands or even millions of dollars it costs to publish books???

Tens of thousands and millions are vastly different sums of money. And we are talking about ebooks so the price of publishing is vastly cheaper, especially if the cheap out on ebook features for digital works that don't already include them by default, which I can only imagine they do.

>I don’t know much about computers, what I do know is, if you’re sharing my book, cool, but don’t take advantage of me. Pay me for my work for those extra copies

Do.. Do you think the publishers created those books?

>why should a global archive that’s not even a real library

A library is a concept, not a building.

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Pipe-International t1_jdwx308 wrote

Book budgets differ depending on their projected return & editor. 10k or a million, point is you’re not paying for that book.

I know publishers don’t create books but they pay the authors, editors, artists, production, marketing and distribution. If an online global archive can just make copies and give them away that affects the whole industry right down to the author.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an ebook (which these copies weren’t), at the end of the day they were giving out free copies of peoples work.

The IA is neither a physical building or an online library. Libraries share copies they have purchased or were given or can use freely (public domain) , they don’t make extra copies from an original and share them.

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