>U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl said that the Internet Archive was making “derivative” works by turning print books into ebooks and distributing them.

Right call? Wrong call? Thoughts?

Sounds like a no brainer to me. Just because you’re a registered not for profit org doesn’t mean you can just start pirating

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You think conservatives are going to rule against corporate interests here?

Interesting since Internet Archive has DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) exemptions for other types of things

So long, Internet Archive.

(￣ー￣)ゞ

The publishers could have also recognized the effort for what it was, a temporary program to help get through a crisis, and gotten on board for some goodwill.

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Sure, but not doing in goodwill isn’t against the law (were they even asked?). This isn’t a case of what is morally right but what is objectively against the law, which copying somebody’s book and sharing it en masse without paying for the extra copies in circulation is. No different from “sharing” music & movies online.

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Except i can copy a paper book and share it without issues. It's not much different

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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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.

The fine is incredible, but reportedly something IA can weather.

Right call. IA was in blatant violation of copyright law. Even as somebody who wants copyright law heavily reformed, what they were doing was a step too far.

Obvious conclusion. It's idealistically nice that books could be free but it's plainly against the law.

‘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?

>Except i can copy a paper book and share it without issues. It's not much different

No, you can't.

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

Personal use isn't sharing with others.

Wrong call

libs certainly aren't. Look at this thread for instance.

Right call. Buying a physical book doesn't automatically give you an ebook lending license, let alone an infinite number of them.

The IA will be fine.

It wasn't a temporary program. The UNLIMITED LENDING was a temporary program, but the IA still asserted the right to make a digital ebook from a physical copy and lend it "one at a time", which it turns out they didn't have the right to do.

Actually, you can't, except in very limited circumstances (teaching, accessibility, etc.). Photocopying a paper book and setting up a library distributing those photocopies would be HIGHLY illegal.

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This is good for authors. Readers can still get books from libraries or IA will have to adjust its model to comply with lending laws. They’ll be fine, and so will the consuming public.

I guess my days as a librarian are numbered.

Would this apply if book is out of print? There's no way to buy the book from the publisher and for the publisher/author to make money.

I mean, that may be true, but not because of this. Libraries pay for each copy of a book they lend.

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Sure my ebook budget will keep paying $120/shitty James Patterson title on OD Advantage (compared to the retail of $30/hardback or, really a wholesale rate of like, $19 or we). It’s a totally sustainable /s.

They are price gouging libraries out of digital existence, which only means patrons and access will suffer. This is totally by design.

Carp! Keep fighting!

Can't think of a better way to encourage piracy.

Wrong call. This is about the rich not sharing.

Govment gon have to pry my late victorian etiquette manual's from my cold dead hands

The book being OOP may be exactly what the author or publisher wants. The right of copyright includes the right NOT to have your work sold.

This reminds me of all those fan-game projects that sit in a comfortable legal grey area until someone decides to put everything up on Steam and move things from "maybe legal" to "definitely not legal."

When IA were still tying their digital lending to physical copies of individual books, they might have had a slim chance in court. Once they allowed for unlimited lending - regardless of their motivation for it - this chance evaporated.

From an ethical perspective... It's messy. Arguably, archiving out-of-print books from the 60s is probably a good thing. However, distributing unlimited digital copies of an active author's book from the 2010s is somewhat less defensible. If we have a situation somewhere in the middle, who the hell knows?

Libraries pay for each copy, and they pay about 30x as much per copy. And each copy can only be lended a certain number of times (40 or 50 times) before it has to be repurchased.

IA are definitely in the wrong here, but I’m afraid that the publishers will use this win to push for even more restrictions on normal libraries. As it stands, a normal library has to pay exorbitant amounts of money per copy of an ebook they buy, and the ebook can only be lent a certain number of times before it has to be repurchased.

Combined with libraries getting less and less funding every year, this is going to turn into a death knell for libraries.

Bye bye second hand books then haha!

Yeah ebook restrictions are often absolutely absurd, which is why I disagree with this ruling on principle. Physical books are not 'licensed' to be artificially withdrawn and repurchased year on year. These virtuous publishers make more profit % than Walmart, Bank of America, Toyota, they all go barely 10% profit. Ebook publishers? -- 35%-40% profits. On average, ebook cost has 37% upmarked just for profit. It's an artificial greed market where none should exist.

Excellent doco on the academic papers and textbook ebook side of this issue: https://vimeo.com/273358286

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No that is right of first sale. If you have a physical object it is yours to with as you please. You have the explicit right to resale it.

The issue is that that right goes away as soon as things go digital as you can’t prove who has the one true paid for copy.

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Where is the US pirate party when we need them! 🏴‍☠️

Woah really? Why are the library versions so expensive? Is it an option for libraries to purchase retail copies instead?

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Walmart actually has a very low profit margin, <2%.

Walmart makes its money on volume.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit-margins

Just a reminder that your average author is not wealthy, and if you enjoy a book series, pirating it can actually hurt an author’s chance at getting more work published if sales aren’t high enough.

Further if you take a book out from a library, the author still gets paid, and while ebook licenses obviously need to be thrown out the window like the garbage they are, IA’s model isn’t the answer either.

>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.

>Just a reminder that your average author is not wealthy, and if you enjoy a book series, pirating it can actually hurt an author’s chance at getting more work published if sales aren’t high enough.

Attacking the ability to resell products you own is some take.

No, it’s not an option for them to purchase retail copies. They are legally required to purchase special “lending license” variants of books because book publishers lobbied that libraries cost them too much money by just existing.

Afaik, the lending limit only applies to digital copies of books, as physical copies naturally wear out or get lost with time, and thus will require repurchase either way unlike a digital copy. The physical copies are still hellishly expensive.

Exactly. As a librarian I believe in more access to knowledge, information, and books, but at the same time I have some published authors as friends and when this story about the potential lawsuit first broke, they went to check if their works were available through IA, found out it was, and they were livid about e-copies of their books being available to borrow for free by unlimited amounts of people.

That’s definitely not what I was saying, nor is that what IA is doing.

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It's not what the IA is doing or what you meant, but is 100% what you said and another major bugbear of the publishing industry

Greedy companies promote piracy better than anyone else possibly could.

Agreed, just like you're allowed to rip a DVD movie to your computer, but doing so does not make it a derivative work and doesn't give you the right to distribute it willy nilly.

By the IA's rationale, printing an ebook would also be derivative and would negate copyright protections.

They were doing nothing wrong until they started "lending" more than one copy of a given book.

So they're still correct. Just a weird way to prove their point.

Username checks out.

Why? Because I pointed out your entire argument applies to the resell market? Ok, penguin & Schuster.

Reddit hivemind says piracy isn’t stealing and that authors are asking for it by making ebooks.

Huh. I always was under the impression that royalties weren’t earned on library lending. Interesting to learn about this.

It's been a while but I think I remember how to torrent

They don't ON the lend. They do ON the single library purchase.

Only if you exclude their second paragraph.

They acknowledge the author only gets paid once, but that is better than zero.

The resale market is not the same as the piracy market.

There wouldn't have been a lawsuit if they keep to the controlled lending flow.

It’s more like the Internet Library tried to give out digital copies during Covid Lockdowns, didn’t go through the proper procedures to do that, then had authors who weren’t getting any benefit from unlimited digital rentals on Internet Library, those authors raise a stink then the publishers decide to get litigious.

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This also has nothing to do with the Authors of the books....this has everything to do with the publishers' profits. Authors get next to nothing for their efforts...

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I think the law on copyrighted materials is pretty clear and I am not surprised the court ruled to protect intellectual property in this manner. Google claimed the right to take such property at will several years ago and I think they faced the same outcome.

I can't take property from someone, duplicate it, and give it to anyone who wants it. It doesn't matter if my motives and intentions are "good." I have still taken something that isn't mine and harmed the rightful owner.

I’m referring to the UK Public Lending Rights Scheme of 1979 which supposedly does lead to royalties per loan.

Not exactly. IA purchased and digitized 1 book, then put the physical book away while the ebook circulated- ie no “double dipping.” Was it all kosher? No, but no one lost out except the publishers who are trying to squeeze every last penny out consumers- libraries or otherwise…

Charge me what you charge a regular person for an ebook; don’t quadruple the price to force demand (that James Patterson ebook that cost small town library USA $120 also has about 500 on hold for it).

Also, as a legit public librarian I want to point out that I don’t support just pirating- our code of professional ethics require balance between rights holders and the public, see number 4.

OK. I was talking in the US, for printed books. Since this article was based on a us lawsuit

“Was it all kosher? No”

Then that’s all they need to hear?

Yeh, let’s do/try nothing and let the publisher digital monopoly destroy reading. Good plan for that well-informed citizenry /s.

Pops open the bottle of rum

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Right and only logical call.

And will be fined!

Technically correct (the best kind) but an IP lawyer would have to clarify about legally correct. The E-book definitely isn't a copy because of the change in medium (it's a series of bits on a drive not ink on paper) but there might be more important legal distinctions.

Probably do another few fundraisers, I'm sure.

It's sad that when our elected officials can come together it's only to protect corporations or to support wars.

I'm on IA'a side, and publishers have been circling, looking for a vulnerability for years. But IA did technically break it's one one-for-one rules during COVID, as an emergency library, so more people could borrow the same books at the same time.

Digital media often has a 3 year or 30-50 ish licensing. And they pay roughly 3x for ebooks and audiobooks from what I've seen. I haven't seen or heard of anything near 30x before though

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The Internet Archive is available worldwide.

And yet, they bought one copy of each book in exactly one jurisdiction.

They didn’t bother to buy Canadian, UK, European, Asian, African, etc copies so that the all of the author’s publishers, some of whom might be tiny niche houses like Poisoned Pen or Canongate or Europa Editions who took a chance on an unknown author, also got some income to help them and their staff during the pandemic.

The IA also didn’t bother to limit borrowing to the one jurisdiction where they had bought each book.

The IA ignored the fact that other countries pay authors – not publishers, but straight into the pockets of actual authors – for how often their works are borrowed from libraries through schemes like the UK’s Public Lending Right.

If the IA had won the US court action, they’d have been sued in other courts around the world and they’d have lost repeatedly.

This isn’t publishers bad, IA good.

This is a bunch of tech bros deciding that it’s okay to defraud authors globally out of what could be thousands in income for them.

You’re right that it’s not double dipping. It’s considerably worse than that.

Do I think that the hugest publishing houses act like a monopoly in the US? Yes.

Has anyone yet come up with a way to disrupt that which is fair to authors? No. And they deserve to eat. (As do copy editors and typesetters and everyone else in publishing.)

Only if you're trying to sell a photo copy of the book...

Thank you for clarifying that point 🙂

Yeah so idk why you are arguing with me. I just stated reality. Internet Library did something they weren’t allowed too, functionally stole money from publishers, and now publishers want their money. It honestly doesn’t even sound evil even if it’s obscenely greedy

As I’ve commented up-thread to someone else, the IA made books available worldwide, so they defrauded authors globally, as the UK isn’t the only country to pay authors per loan.

You can't lend copies, full stop. By law, you may only lend the exact item you purchased. They would have to be mailing physical books to people in order to be following the law.

FSD also doesn't protect PC software.

I’m sure this still holds true, but finding books online has certainly resulted in me buying more books. If I enjoy a book I’m reading I almost always buy a hardback copy. I don’t think I would have bought many (realistically almost all of them) without having read them partially before. It feels like the digital equivalent of reading part of a book in the bookstore.

So much this.

How would you like to have your work stolen and not get paid for it?

None of us would want to work for free, why do we expect authors to?

You should tell them to get Neil Gaiman to explain it to them.

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Sorry but the downvoted comment you are responding to has this correct: the lawsuit was precipitated by the Archive deciding copyright law was null and void “because Covid.”

Instead of “controlled digital lending” which is what you describe at the start of your comment, the Archive was offering unlimited copies of everything it had in its collection.

Note: I fully support format shifting and contend that it’s a logical extension of the Betamax case (time shifting necessarily involves format shifting) and I’m absolutely incensed about those assholes at the Archive doing their level best to give the court an excuse to rule in favor of the publishers.

The publishers could not have asked for a better set of facts to litigate if they had tried.

>Only if you exclude their second paragraph.

No, including the second paragraph. The author never makes any money from resells or the used book market.

>They acknowledge the author only gets paid once, but that is better than zero.

But not as good as "every sale", which is what publishers want.

>The resale market is not the same as the piracy market.

According to other people crying about the money authors aren't making (ie, publishers), it totally is

You're a librarian and you think library books are free?

Very odd that you've had to pay to loan books out from your library.

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It's certainly cheaper than that bureaucratic crook, The Wallet Inspector, at least.

We make a product that gets easily damaged, so we will charge libraries an obscene amount of money for a format that doesn't.

IANAL. If IA had only allowed a single copy of the book to be loaned out at one time would they have won their case? From my layman read, I think so.

Wait, y’all still pay premium for old ass books?

Not really. Many libraries work that way. And the ones that don't, you're paying for through taxes. The books are paid for.

Step one be incredibly successful and wealthy like Neil Gaiman.

I'd say step one is to be a good writer, like Neil Gaiman.

Physical library books are unlikely to be loaned as much as 50 times before being withdrawn from the shelves. Both age and wear and tear will cause them to be withdrawn long before that number is reached.

Tons of good writers don't reach the level of success he has and he is my favorite author.

Yep. In two semesters I've bought one single textbook, used the archive for all the rest. Will be terribly devastated if the archive's forced to stop, don't want to pirate but also can't afford 6 text books per semester (at minumum) for the next 6 semesters. Judging from the article though, the case is against what they did during Covid, so maybe they can keep at a limited lending schedule.

Yup, and tons of not very good writers become successful and wealthy. The point being, whilst piracy might affect direct sales of a particular book, there's good evidence to suggest it leads to people going and buying more books by that author. This in turn leads me to believe that piracy might piss off the publishing industry when they heavily market a particular book(s) but there's probably a net financial gain for individual authors across all their work.

Not relevant in this case, but yes.

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They were in the wrong. There definitely needs to be a balance between making all books accessible and making sure the authors get paid for their work. Piracy is not the answer.

Libraries pay a higher amount for limited use. Ebooks are paid per use also. The same way Blockbuster would pay a huge amount to buy movies to rent out. I remember it being $200-$500 per DVD. I’m sure it’s the same with movie theaters but at a higher cost. Entertainment costs money and man hours to create.

You would think that people in a books sub would have read at least one book and hence have a brain. Why do idiots here keep downvoting factually correct answers that at not antagonistic?

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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.

I wasn’t disagreeing so much as reinforcing with more accurate information.

People like to shit on Walmart.

While a lot of the points are technically correct, the whole point is to bring lower prices to the consumer.

Walmart simply cannot correct many of their issues without raising prices, because they already have a very low profit margin. It would quickly flip from making money from volume to losing billions.

That was a misleading headline.... *stop clickbait*

And IA paid for these books as well. They usually have a 1 to 1 digital lending system but the court struck that down as well, so they can't digitally lend at all. Again it's sort of disturbing that you're advocating a library function the same as a bookstore. Libraries do not function this way. A non standard patron or patron of a niche library might pay for membership but as you say, most standard libraries are covered by taxes. They are a public good. I would not expect the homeless or poor to have to pay to loan a book -- libraries are one of the few places they can go and not be charged for use of service.

As I've said elsewhere, there will come a time when physical libraries become either outdated or irrelevant. Then we will only be able to lend ebooks, and if this 1 to 1 system is not in place, publishers will make sure libraries cease to exist through unaffordable fees and conditions. They are already holding libraries hostage to their ebook collections through extreme pricing we have to pay for access. Especially so at academic libraries where Elsiever and the rest have libraries over a barrel on pricing and access.

Publishers want us gone. It's that simple.

Except that this ruling isn't only about the emergency library it also targets controlled digital lending.

What was misleading about the headline Time magazine used?

Yes.

Yes, I fully understand that, which I think is reflected rather clearly in how incensed I am at the morons that invited the suit with their idiocy.

I’m just a bit confused where you thought I was talking about the resale market at all.

The right of first sale has nothing to do with the right not to print more copies.

I'm more shocked that so many professed book-lovers are anti-author. Yes, I'm sure if you're a Cory Doctorow acolyte you hate copyright, but pretty much everyone else would find the majority of the authors they enjoy are lined up against the IA on this issue.

This is like the fourth time I've gone from being called a boomer for torrenting only for it to become relevant again.

Style never goes out of fashion, I guess

It's alright. Not only an average author from my personal library isn't wealthy, poor fella is as dead as a doornail too!

The people who try and pretend the IA are entirely blameless in this drive me insane. Yes, they do a lot of incredibly important work in the preservation and spreading of knowledge. That is exactly why it was so fucking stupid of them to put it all at risk with such a massive, obvious, and public violation of copyright law when they pulled their "emergency library" stunt.

Yeah, I think the IA is great, but this seemed like a dumb move. A real library would never have tried it, I don't know why they thought they would get away with it.

they're free-book lovers. they care about their ability to leech but not at all about the authors they read.

if the Court grants an injunction to take down all the borrowing, IA has to shut it down regardless of their financial situation

Per Rule 3.6: No distribution or solicitation of pirated books.

We aren't telling you not to discuss piracy (it is an important topic), but we do not allow anyone to share links and info on where to find pirated copies. This rule comes from no personal opinion of the mods' regarding piracy, but because /r/books is an open, community-driven forum and it is important for us to abide the wishes of the publishing industry.

I didn't share any links

Shutting down this particular lending program doesn't mean the end of everything else the Internet Archive does, including the Wayback Machine and the provision of public-domain and CC works. So all the people acting like the Internet Archive is about to be dismantled and their servers thrown into the ocean are overreacting a little.

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In this instance it's when an incredibly important and otherwise legitimate institution for the preservation of knowledge and culture decides that COVID means they can just publically become a full-on piracy site for ebooks, freely providing infinite copies of any book they have in their database. A noble idea, sure, but also 100%, unambiguously illegal.

Yes, Oh master of the obvious! But why do they have to pay more for an electronic book than a physical book?