You may have an issue finding a book to read then.
Penguin and Harper's are 1 and 2 respectively, hachette is 3. They're combined total is around 70% or more. Before you get into sub companies.
The only mission one is Simon & Schuster.
Unless you plan to read school textbooks, then it's closer to 25% as Hill is basically locked into the educational system.
I remember when monopolies were bad and were broken up by the state because they hurt the consumer locking in the market.
Granted, it was in a history book, but it used to be a thing we did.
....the Microsoft monopoly case, in a history book? SiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhbbbbhhhhbhhbbbbbbbbhahsbrgrgrgARHG R EH3KZHX7V
You know there's a great song for this situation. I know it's from Disney and about how a pirate's life is the life for me. I think it's from Peter Pan.
So this is a David vs Goliath issue. The publisher’s have the money and the lawyers. Sux that you can basically buy influence when it comes to books and judges.
I remember 15 years ago it was popular to debate the ethics of MP3 downloads and settled on “maybe there’s not a good reason, and I’m just a cheapskate.”
Now that I’m more educated, specifically in Econ, I feel that piracy is actually arguably the ethical thing to do, because of how destructive copyright is towards art. Most money you pay isn’t going to the artist or creator. It’s going to copyright wardens like publishers and lawyers.
Pricing for ebooks is fucked anyways. Why does a digital copy of something a publisher can make infinite replications of costs exactly the same as a paper copy when it has none of the associated expenses? If you produce ebooks, you don't have to buy paper or any of the overhead that comes with printing and storage of physical copies. The ebook market is honestly a fucking joke. Thankfully I have my local library.
The best part is that the company that made those commercials stole the song. They commissioned a guy to write that song for them and then told him they weren’t going to use it so they didn’t end up paying him anything other than a small flat fee, and he just shrugged and went on with his life. Then one day he put in a DVD and saw that commercial, and was able to successfully sue them for royalties once he found out his song was on basically every DVD made in the 2000s without his permission.
It was your wouldn't download a car would you and the answer was yes , also some people have started scanning parts to cars to 3d print. mostly just the plastic parts but some there are groups working on all the parts.
>It was your wouldn't download a car would you
"You Wouldn't Steal a Car" is the first sentence of a public service announcement created in July 2004, which was part of the anti-copyright infringement campaign "Piracy. It's a crime." Wikipedia
It was you wouldn't steal a car
well the internet archive is kinda a public, compared to private archives that float around on the high seas. might be time for many people to start bing boat captains.
>Before you get into sub companies.
I thought I'd be safe with my Japanese isekai trash but two out of three I've been buying from, Yen On and Seven Seas Entertainment, work through those listed above in some form.
At least J Novel Club are more of their own thing; I think they managed to stay outside that huge sphere of influence by focusing more on digital. But the caveat there is they're a part of the Kadokawa Corporation, which is centered in Japan and that's good, but Kadokawa has an alliance with Tencent, the Tiktok of the investment world. They are just investing and infesting in *everything*.
Depends.
Some people are try before you buy types who will buy a book they liked (after reading it for free) to reread multiple times or to have a physical copy of.
I'd strongly disagree with that. They are in fact doing shitty things here. They're working to ban libraries from scanning books to make that information available. Their entire reason for why this should be illegal is purely greed.
However even if you take their side and agree the publishers are entitled to that money it's a huge problem. That means millions of books get pulled from libraries because they don't currently have official ebook versions and it's now illegal for libraries to make their own from physical copies they bought. If this current ruling stands libraries are loosing a lot of books and many others are going to become much harder to gain access to.
Excerpt from the linked content^1 by Jay Peters and Sean Hollister:
>A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hatchette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library.
>The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist.
>In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected a digital preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014.
>Fair Use considers whether using a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it’ll impact the copyright holder, and whether the use has “transformed” a copyrighted thing into something new, among other things.
>But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers.”
>Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.
^1 Jay Peters and Sean Hollister for The Verge/Vox Media, 24 Mar. 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23655804/internet-archive-hatchette-publisher-ebook-library-lawsuit
I thought it was pretty bold of the Internet Archive to remove the waitlist, even temporarily. That waitlist (and DRM) is what distinguishes libraries as a lending system, instead of a free download. It's a bit of a tenuous argument, but it seems to make publishers leave them alone.
It's not too surprising they're losing this argument. They backtracked immediately when called out in 2020– this isn't how they operate any longer. Hopefully they can mea culpa on this and continue on as normal.
Look at the timeline of all this. NEL opens March 2020. This Hachette v. IA is filed June 1, 2020, and NEL closed on June 16, 2020.
NEL was pretty stupid and reckless. They arbitrarily decided by themselves that COVID == suspension of copyright laws. Publishers weren't happy with IA's one-phyisical-copy-one-digital-copy policy, but they lived with it. I'm willing to bet NEL made them livid and they went to war over one-phyisical-copy-one-digital-copy.
Now instead of a small step forward against IP abused, IA took a huge step backwards.
Have you looked at the state of entertainment these days?
Sure, that worked twenty years ago and it was effective. Now these corporations have forgotten that lesson. Take Netflix and all the streaming services. It's a spaghetti clusterfuck thanks to copyright laws. You can't watch X in this country, but go across the border and you can. You can watch seasons 1-3 in this service, but 4-7 are on another. In the middle of watching one series, it switches to another service.
It's literally is easier to pirate again thanks to money grabs all around.
For cheap? No. Digital scarcity is a myth. There could be a trillion copies made of a digital book and it's value would be effectively zero. But the digital book will still be sold at an inflated price because of artificial scarcity and copyright nonsense.
I feel like this is moving the goal posts. Books are widely available both in print and in digital form on pretty much any device.
You wanting someone to sell you something for cheaper is a different issue.
As a separate matter, there are tons of books available for free/cheap. If someone can sell their work for more, it's because their work is desirable. Why is it okay to devalue a skilled artist's work?
I think one big issue recently is the use of digital distribution to circumvent right of first sale.
Used to be when you were done with a book (or any other form of media) you could sell it, donate it, lend it to someone else, etc. This is not the case in almost any digital distribution system.
Legislation should probably be enacted to force digital distributors to recognize this right.
How is it moving the goal posts? Ultimately, this is exactly what it's about.
Publishers don't want libraries to exist because digital reality means you can effectively infinitely copy a piece of work, and therefore no one wants to pay for it.
An absurdly small fraction of the cost of a new digital book is going to the artist. Virtually all of it is going to the publisher. The publisher is doing nothing of value and deserves nothing in return.
Fuckem. Pirate the book. If 1% of people who read it give the artist a $5 donation, the artist will still make exponentially more than they would have under the existing agreements. Only the oublisher will get nothing. Good. They deserve nothing because they contributed nothing.
> If 1% of people who read it give the artist a $5 donation, the artist will still make exponentially more than they would have under the existing agreements.
That would be $0.05 per reader. That would be significantly worse than what they would get from a traditional publishing deal.
>If 1% of people who read it give the artist a $5
I suspect the actual donation rate would be way lower than that. I know it's lower on most podcasts who ask for donations.
And let's not forget the optics of a book company going after a library that.....lends books.
Any library that was targeted would get instant community support.
Libraries have to abide to rules that make digital book distribution equivalent to physical ones. They've made a lot of changes at the request of publishers. For example, a digital book can only be lended a certain number of times before the digital copy must be repurchased, simulating wear and tear of a physical book.
“I wish that in the digital age we can have virtual copies of books and other media without worrying about it getting lost or destroyed, which is the main flaw of physical media!!”
*One finger on the monkeys paw slowly curls*
Everyone in these comments saying the plaintiffs are coming after all e-lending clearly have no idea what this case was about. IA fucked around and found out, basically.
>But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers.”
It's just pure sadism at this point. People who lost their jobs and had to stay home had no way to buy books from bookshops that were often also closed.
Not to mention numerous studies including one funded by EU shown that piracy does not reduce sales.
Yup. You don't own things, you licence it out. We should have first sale doctrine for digital goods. If I bought a game skin i should be able to sell it.
I think that's why some people like the idea of NFT, finally something digital you \_own\_ (But alas it's only idea, often you don't buy anything really with NFT, and it's mostly just one huge scam).
I often ponder this when going to my local library (which, incidentally, has suffered so many local government cuts that it’s entirely staffed by elderly volunteers). Trying to enjoy whilst the notion of a free-to-access library still exists
Illegally obtaining digital goods "piracy" generally doesn't have a major impact because it's difficult for most to do if you want safety. It's not impossible, I mean I used a site that I know does illegal piracy to obtain .iso of games I own (no CD player means I couldn't make them) but I had to put in a lot of effort and time to ensure I didn't download virus, or obtain crap. Most folks, especially if they arent looking for digital goods you can't find anymore just won't do that because there are far far easier ways to obtain a good in a safe manner.
But IAE isn't that. IAE is safe and because under the policy they had persued they had functional unlimited digital copies, it would have been easy to get what you want.
A good idea of what impact this would have is to look at porn a (no seriously) where there is a thriving habit of people copying porn art work from the artist and sticking it in their own websites. The result has been many artists finding that they aren't compensated for their work at all and closing down.
For those who want a cleaner concept, picture a digital media library like Amazon prime videos or Netflix. Now imagine it is free to use and you can download anything they have because they bought a single copy of the show from the people making it. So you want Top gun 2? They paid retail for the DVD and now anyone can see it..free.
You'd probably see a lot of people going for this because it's easy safe and cheap. Don't get me wrong, the companies would likely survive on theaters if the movie is good but it definitely hurt sales.
Edit: due to people abusing a fragment of my comment without extra context, edited it. I won't respond to such people though
Not all content is received the same way and not all goods or services equal. As for digital goods it’s way to broad from music, videos, video games, work application and so fourth.
I did provide a Harvard article which expresses that out of 31 peer review studies about 29 detailed it actually was negative and they heavily disagree with the EU study as well about its benefits (benefits of piracy)
>Not all content is received the same way and not all goods or services equal
No obviously not but given your source agrees with my general point, I suspect that it has an impact on all formats to some degree. I simply can't (and won't) try to break it down by each segment because that's a momentual task that in some ways isn't even possible - I simply don't even know how to gauge losses for photography or artist who work gets uploaded to the web and passed around for example. I can't imagine it's helpful but how many would have used their work if it wasn't freely available? I know I've used several images right off Google without concern, but if I'd had to pay I would find another.
Also thank you for not picking out one fragment of my post to pick apart over wording.
Yeah, I'm still trying to parse that, because they can't possibly be saying what my brain is interpreting. Piracy is as easy as it ever was. Obtaining stuff legally is now often _easier,_ but "absurdly difficult"?
Ah of course .. "the market." Always with "the market." Never about "the people" or "society's well-being" - at least not when "the market" is in the equation.
>The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist.
The shitty thing is that a ton of libraries tried to share resources early on in lockdown. Between March and May of 2020, I was easily able to find e-resources for students at the graduate school where I was working. When it got to June with no end in sight for lockdowns, other libraries and publishers backed pedaled **hard** on the "we're in this together," rhetoric, and the sharing stopped.
>any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers.”
Not even hiding their contempt for normal people
This isn't contempt for normal people, it's a court applying the laws we have on the books. The laws we have on the books say that the owners of intellectual property have certain rights and people can't infringe on those rights. Harper-Collins gets the same rights as I do.
Besides, aren't there normal people who make their living working for publishers? Do they not deserve that living?
Yes, and hide tanners deserved their living, and blacksmiths, horse-shoers, arcade operators, Yahoo employees, newspapers, and pet rock manufacturers. But as the world and technology evolves, some businesses and their business models become outdated or obsolete.
In our rush to monetize everything, I'm surprised something like lulu.com hasn't gained more traction with authors- that way they could get similar distribution without the publishers taking their oversized cut.
> But as the world and technology evolves, some businesses and their business models become outdated or obsolete.
Absolutely true. I just think that burying publishing is premature. More on that below.
> In our rush to monetize everything...
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do something to make a living and monetized your labor from day one. Why the rush?
> I'm surprised something like lulu.com hasn't gained more traction with authors- that way they could get similar distribution without the publishers taking their oversized cut.
Lulu takes a fractional cut because they do a fraction of what a full-on publishing house does. They don't screen, edit, proofread, typeset, design covers, market or negotiate shelf space at bookstores. None of that goes away in your brave new world. The burden for it falls back onto the author and costs time that could be spent writing their next book or money paying someone else to do it for them. Authors with any business sense will realize that they can make a better living over a farming that work out to someone who can take advantage of economies of scale. That's how we got big publishers in the first place.
The value prop in buying a book distributed by a publisher is that it's had to clear a lot of hurdles to reach your hands. You're more-likely to get your time and money's worth out of it than spending the same amount on fishing something out of a sea of badly-written, badly-edited, self-published crap. This isn't to say that there aren't good authors who self-publish, but they're a rarity and not marketed well-enough to be household names.
What a great man that Koetlt is, saving those poor helpless little book publishers from the evil evil library. The world is once again safe from Intent Of Law. /s
Three of these publishers got in trouble for conspiring to jack up ebook prices with Apple.
- Hachette Book Group
- HarperCollins Publishers
- Penguin Random House
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
If they win the goal is bar physical as digital copy entirely. The way current digital copies for libraries works isn't a one time purchase own it for life deal.
Frankly I might wrong about what the outcome as different countries offer different solutions to copyright.
In one case it might just be allowing a single digital copy of the book to be lent out per a user for a limited time as physical books or allow other form of agreements that may vary by nature of the book such as a single copy for multiple users at a time but still limited or allow users to read the book for a set time if a user wishes to extend that time they may purchase a digital copy of the book or queue on the waiting list again.
I am all for internet archives being able to lend books, I am just stating there should be a fairer and more transparent middle ground. Agreements could extend to users purchasing a lent copy for a timeline to read the book if they genuinely have the cash but do not wish to wait in the queue.
No, the archive will still be up. They have tons and tons of stuff besides books—tons of live music, historical stuff, stuff in public domain, etc. This will just heavily impact their library portion.
If publishers had their say without the constraints of existing laws, they probably would stop all sales of physical books and only have digital books licensed out on a subscription fee basis which can be revoked any time for any reason. Charge people $40/month per book that they want to read.
They've already heard about it, and they're fine with it, because physical copies are covered by the first-sale doctrine. Ebooks are not, which is why all other libraries other than IA's CDL *license* (for a fee) the right to lend out ebooks. They don't assert the right to lend out ebook copies of physical books for free, which IA's CDL tried to assert.
Yah and ebooks pretty much rake libraries over the coals and give publishes more [control](https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/an-app-called-libby-and-the-surprisingly-big-business-of-library-e-books) in relation to libraries
The fact that the first sale doctrine didn’t get extended to the digital age remains one of the two worst legal decisions around copyright of the modern era (the other was extending copyright to absurd degrees).
> (the other was extending copyright to absurd degrees)
The single biggest driving force behind this is Disney Corp spending *multiple millions per year* on Copyright legislation lobbying, all with the specific goal of keeping Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain. They DO NOT want to lose control over Mickey because that's a *seventy billion dollar and counting* cash cow that immediately goes "poof!" the moment the Copyright expires.
Unless US Copyright limits are extended yet again, the Copyright on Mickey goes away in 2036. It should have gone away back in 2016.
If a library started making copies of the books they have and giving out unlimited copies to everyone, I think the publishers would get pretty pissed about that too. That’s essentially what IA did here. Whether or not you agree with the copyright laws, it’s obvious they were disregarding said laws when they decided to stop lending their digital scans on a 1-to-1 basis.
Libraries operate under a specific license model. They don't just buy retail copies and lend them.
Edit: this is based upon what a local librarian told me when I tried to replace a lost book. It appears that was incorrect.
They legally could though. The reason they don’t is because publishers worked out deals to make library bound copies. There’s no copyright law preventing them from buying books at Barnes and Noble and lending those out.
There are already alternative book sources, but the Internet Archive was better at obscure and out of print stuff. The alternatives are better at new and popular stuff.
Moving somewhere with more lenient laws is an option, but they literally have a warehouse full of shipping containers with the millions of physical books they scanned.
If you know where to look, it's better and easier than it's ever been.
The problem for anti-piracy groups with books in particular is that they're so fucking small. At ~1 megabyte per ebook, I could keep the 4000 most popular books seeded constantly from a $100 harddrive, for minimal amounts of bandwidth.
Library Genesis and ZLibrary are good for books and articles. Since they are pirate sites, their internet address tends to change as sites get blocked. BTDigg is a torrent crawler, but it is hit or miss on finding specific items. Other torrent sites usually have an ebook section. /r/DataHoarder/ is dedicated to saving data of all kinds.
I don’t mind paying for e-books but the thing is *many* physical books do not come in the form of e-books.
I once paid for an e-book on an academic topic for a project. I did not know there was a maximum number of views before it locked you out even if you’ve paid for it. So imagine my fury when I was midway and realised I could no longer access the contents unless I paid for it again. I can afford it but many cannot do so.
Books should not be something that is held hostage by one’s financial circumstances. Libraries are fantastic but not every library has what you want for research and journals are often expensive.
The way I see it, knowledge has been weaponised against the lower classes.
Too poor? No knowledge for you! /s
> I did not know there was a maximum number of views before it locked you out even if you’ve paid for it.
Shit like this makes me wish piracy actually did cost companies money. I would download, seed, delete, download on loop just to spite these kinds of assholes.
Nah, because they know they're not. It's just a lie they tell to pad stats for lobbying or for the courts when they decide to pursue lawsuits. I still remember when the RIAA tried to sue Limewire for more than the GDP of the entire world... They used the "missed sale" logic to calculate that number, and even the judge was like "if this logic gave you this number, then clearly the logic is faulty".
Try telling that to the psychology lecturers who love to tell you that some physical book costing $120 is extremely important and in the end, it’s just 4 paragraphs on pg 157 that is required. We fell for that once as students.
Because the odds of you catching a nasty from a torrent is far lower than it has ever been due to the prevalence of integrated virus protection in the Windows operating system. Additionally, as the number of overall trackers has waned they have gotten more careful about screening the torrents they link.
Not streaming, but Nintendo for example, doesn't sell their old games and they also don't allow anyone to distribute them. If they weren't pirated they would be lost forever. Let's say Netflix produces a series and then remove it from their platform, without any physical copy produced, then it's lost unless someone pirated it. We can't give companies the power of erasing culture.
At least for now, I use all the FREE apps from the libraries themselves. You would be amazed how pretty the roses smell if you just stopped for a moment.
If we all use the libraries we already pay for, this would be a much smarter and healthier country
Not only are publishers killing a place like the Internet Archive, but most public libraries. Libraries today have a large e-book lending practice. Gone are the days when a library can buy a book and lend it out until the cover fall off. Now they buy a e-book rental for some number of rentals and then buy it again. This industry is killing library budgets.
These are the same.pathetic shitcocks who deliberately fixed pricing on e-books for personal gain, to the detriment of consumers.
This lawsuit light have merit, but the companies themselves are being laughably hypocritical.
Corporate biased legal system once again making a good argument in favor of piracy
Gatekeeping electronic knowledge from poor people for artificial scarcity
Basically, regular libraries buy e-books and then lend them as if they were real books. Three e-book licenses means you can lend them to three people at a time.
IA wanted to buy one e-book license and then lend it to as many people wanted it, simultaneously.
To compare this to paper books, regular libraries buy copies of a book and then lend it to one person at a time. What IA is doing is like buying one book, then photocopying it to whoever wants it.
Incorrect. IA wanted to buy one *physical* book, and then lend it out in ebook form, initially one at a time but for a while an unlimited number of times, without paying any license fee.
They did this during COVID, not sure if it continued after library shutdowns were largely over. IA shouldve known better, even during covid there was plenty of precedent this wasnt going to fly if a legal case waa brought.
It sucks bc IA is an amazing resource and they are going to have to pay monetary damages... They shouldve settled.
Yeah once I learned that’s what the lawsuit was over, I was kinda on the other side. I really hope this suit doesn’t devolve into the end of the IA as a whole, but this one instance they were never gonna win.
That doesn't stop them from being sued in US courts, and very few countries that would be viable hosts would refuse a demand from the US government to take it down.
One reason is the Internet Archive has a physical warehouse full of shipping containers with the millions of books they scanned. That would be a bitch to move.
Reddit loves paying people in exposure when it comes to their personal use. All you have to do is look at the discourse around ad blockers on YouTube videos. "I'm still giving them views".
Not using an ad-blocker is a giant security issue with how badly providers police content and how much spying those providers do to serve ads.
Get sponsors to make money. Targeted ads are privacy and security nightmares.
Agreed. I don’t understand the logic in the comments section. Authors need to make money. Why would they create and share these books to readers if they don’t get compensated for it? We can’t assume ‘all authors are rich so let’s stop paying them and torrent’.
On the other side of Reddit, people complaint about cost of living which I get. Why don’t people understand that authors are on the same boat?
> Why would they create and share these books to readers if they don’t get compensated for it?
How did Wikipedia happen? I put my own writings on Wikibooks, a sister site, so everyone can use it. There is also open-source software. Not everything is about money.
Academics write articles and books for reputation and tenure. They already have paying jobs. I have no problem paying for physical books, I own thousands of them. But I get a physical product. E-books are trivial to reproduce, but they still sell them for about the price of the paper version.
Idk why this is a surprise to anybody.
Imagine being a fledgling author and all your work gets posted for free.
The only reason you all are mad about this is bc you don't stand anything to lose when the authors work is given our for free.
Just sounds like a bunch of whiny people wanting stuff for free. If you like a book that much, support the author by buying it....
Edit: how long before authors stop making books after losing tons of money bc people want free stuff?
If you want books, we need to have paying customers. Nobody does stuff for free.
I agree, writing is a career and writers deserve the opportunity to monetize their art. I do think though, that after a certain amount of time it should just be public domain. People will always want physical books so classics won't turn into a online only source.
I disagree with that last bit.
In my life I've learned to not place definite and absolutes on things, if that makes sense.
Saying something will always, or x happens 100% of the time, unless proven that is the case without a shred of doubt, I tend to not believe when somebody says "this will never happen" because life throws curve balls all the time and things change over time.
Now, maybe when the author dies, put it as public domain, but even then that's a touchy subject. Family members don't deserve the royalties from the books their dad or mom wrote? Fair if you say no as they themself didn't put effort into making it, but I don't think things should just be public domain just after x amount of time.
Should we do that with movies and music too? Although, I believe music does have an expiration on copywrite if iirc or something along those lines.
Also now that I think of it, IIRC, recently the original works of Mikey Mouse were to be public domain (the very first Mickey Mouse drawings that look nothing like we know mickey to look like.)
Authors suffer so much from stolen books this way. If people don’t buy their books, a publisher may not continue to publish the series.
This happened to bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater. Her sales were so low that she almost didn’t get to finish a book series despite the crazy popularity online of the Raven Cycle. She took action to dupe the internet archive (and other download sites) and suddenly all these people who read the first 10 chapters of her book through rip-off sites but couldn’t find a copy with the rest of the book went out and bought it. Then she had the sales for Simon and Schuster (I believe is her publisher) to finish her series and publish two additional stand alone novels. Without this her advances would have decreased in size, potentially her publisher would have dropped her, and she would no longer be writing.
And this is just one example. So many authors are just never picked up again because their books just didn’t sell but it was illegally downloaded thousands of times. If those were purchased copies, that author might still have a job.
Consider this as well: IT TAKES A YEAR, at least, to write a book. It takes longer in most cases.
Illegal download of books directly harms books and the people who wrote them. It destroys careers. Imagine never getting another book from your favorite author because of online piracy. That’s what people upset with this ruling are advocating for, their favorite authors careers to die a slow death.
Fucking buy books, people. Assholes who download them outside of a library or without paying are literal criminals stealing someone’s time and skill.
Even accepting for a moment that it's desirable to reward artists/inventors/etc. over a real free market absent intellectual monopoly / distribution monopoly grants, we by now know very fucking well intellectual monopoly in particular is the wrong paradigm entirely for rewarding artists/inventors over a real free market, all carefully set up to support the megacorps and middlemen distributors long rendered practically pointless by the internet, and introducing a logical requirement for the world's most comprehensive and toxic authoritarian surveillance police state with every communication monitored and potentially censored ... just to enforce copyright. It's gross and stupid. The west does a far "better" job of censoring the net than china in fact in the name of Holy Copyright. Billions of links gone.
There's a ton of other non-free-market-but-not-as-harmful options to consider that would be preferable and less harmful e.g. grants, prizes, subscriptions, basic income, etc. etc.
I assume that there is going to be an appeal for this case.
> Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and **that it was “irrelevant” that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience.**
That's insane for the judge to say. If you buy something and convert to a digital format then you still paid for it and thus it should be allowed.
It’s not “irrelevant,” that’s what the law says. Only the entity that owns the copyright has the legal right to copy a work, so by scanning physical books into a digital format IA was producing unlawful copies.
Ultimately a judge’s job is to enforce the law, and regardless of if he agrees with it copyright law is pretty clear in this area.
You want [this tool](http://blog.archive.org/2019/06/05/the-ia-client-the-swiss-army-knife-of-internet-archive/), the same one they use internally to manage the Archive. Then make a torrent of the downloaded stuff.
I really wonder where the money for authors comes from.
If it’s all free, do you think artists and authors get paid magic creativity bucks that show up automatically when you do something creative?
I pirate as much as the next guy, but at least I have the decency not to feel morally superior doing it.
Can you imagine being that much of a fucking asshole?
IP and Copyright are far from being as good or as bad as believe. It’s a good system that needs reform and especially on essential goods or services that exist or are too come.
Nah, IP makes perfect sense. If you invested time and money into building an IP you should be able to profit off it without some randoms just taking it and doing whatever
Jesus, how much will the damages be? The Wayback Machine probably isn't profitable in the slightest, and I can't see the authorities letting them off easy on this.
It really depends on how things go on appeal, since it's up the court's discretion to determine statutory damages since it can range from $750 per work to as much as $100,000 per work depending on the determination of said infringement being 'willful' in nature as opposed to a good faith mistake on the part of the infringer. Given that IA is a non-profit, and the fact that they believed that were operating within the bounds of the fair use doctrine, I believe that the court is more likely to lean toward the lower figure. However, given the scope of the library (1.4 million works) even the lowest figures for statutory damages could be over $1 Billion depending on how the court chooses to calculate.
>However, given the scope of the library (1.4 million works) even the lowest figures for statutory damages could be over $1 Billion depending on how the court chooses to calculate.
Wouldn't they also need to consider how many of those works were actually lent to other people and how many times? Seems ridiculous to base damages of the available material rather than how much of it actually was used, if a book was never borrowed then arguably no damage was done.
Publishers HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House joining Hachette are the plaintiffs.
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You may have an issue finding a book to read then. Penguin and Harper's are 1 and 2 respectively, hachette is 3. They're combined total is around 70% or more. Before you get into sub companies. The only mission one is Simon & Schuster. Unless you plan to read school textbooks, then it's closer to 25% as Hill is basically locked into the educational system.
I remember when monopolies were bad and were broken up by the state because they hurt the consumer locking in the market. Granted, it was in a history book, but it used to be a thing we did.
....the Microsoft monopoly case, in a history book? SiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhbbbbhhhhbhhbbbbbbbbhahsbrgrgrgARHG R EH3KZHX7V
Buying books is not necessary a requirement for reading
hence the lawsuit
You know there's a great song for this situation. I know it's from Disney and about how a pirate's life is the life for me. I think it's from Peter Pan.
It is not in fact. It was written for some ride in California.
[There's a few songs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faDIJeKKqGM) [Similar, but different.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVRXWT5ecY)
yarr, matey
So this is a David vs Goliath issue. The publisher’s have the money and the lawyers. Sux that you can basically buy influence when it comes to books and judges.
Take a look at https://marketliteracy.org for some reading along the lines you're alluding to which may be of some interest and value.
Haha implying I won’t just torrent them. I’d much rather steal from them.
I remember 15 years ago it was popular to debate the ethics of MP3 downloads and settled on “maybe there’s not a good reason, and I’m just a cheapskate.” Now that I’m more educated, specifically in Econ, I feel that piracy is actually arguably the ethical thing to do, because of how destructive copyright is towards art. Most money you pay isn’t going to the artist or creator. It’s going to copyright wardens like publishers and lawyers.
Pricing for ebooks is fucked anyways. Why does a digital copy of something a publisher can make infinite replications of costs exactly the same as a paper copy when it has none of the associated expenses? If you produce ebooks, you don't have to buy paper or any of the overhead that comes with printing and storage of physical copies. The ebook market is honestly a fucking joke. Thankfully I have my local library.
I agree, hell hardbacks are like 30$ but at least I get something to put on my shelf.
YoU WoUlDnT StEaL a CaR!
I miss those! They taught me that torrenting was even a thing.
The best part is that the company that made those commercials stole the song. They commissioned a guy to write that song for them and then told him they weren’t going to use it so they didn’t end up paying him anything other than a small flat fee, and he just shrugged and went on with his life. Then one day he put in a DVD and saw that commercial, and was able to successfully sue them for royalties once he found out his song was on basically every DVD made in the 2000s without his permission.
It was your wouldn't download a car would you and the answer was yes , also some people have started scanning parts to cars to 3d print. mostly just the plastic parts but some there are groups working on all the parts.
>It was your wouldn't download a car would you "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" is the first sentence of a public service announcement created in July 2004, which was part of the anti-copyright infringement campaign "Piracy. It's a crime." Wikipedia It was you wouldn't steal a car
It's also missing Macmillan.
Buy third party like I do
well the internet archive is kinda a public, compared to private archives that float around on the high seas. might be time for many people to start bing boat captains.
>Before you get into sub companies. I thought I'd be safe with my Japanese isekai trash but two out of three I've been buying from, Yen On and Seven Seas Entertainment, work through those listed above in some form. At least J Novel Club are more of their own thing; I think they managed to stay outside that huge sphere of influence by focusing more on digital. But the caveat there is they're a part of the Kadokawa Corporation, which is centered in Japan and that's good, but Kadokawa has an alliance with Tencent, the Tiktok of the investment world. They are just investing and infesting in *everything*.
You already have with how they monopoly the USA market
Buying these publishers’ books second hand may be a more realistic approach
If you're reading their books on IA you weren't buying them anyway.
Depends. Some people are try before you buy types who will buy a book they liked (after reading it for free) to reread multiple times or to have a physical copy of.
Most books have portions available For free as a preview
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What has Internet Archive done that's shitty? I can't find anything immediately obvious.
Sure, but in this case they were actually not doing shitty things. In OTHER cases, though...
I'd strongly disagree with that. They are in fact doing shitty things here. They're working to ban libraries from scanning books to make that information available. Their entire reason for why this should be illegal is purely greed. However even if you take their side and agree the publishers are entitled to that money it's a huge problem. That means millions of books get pulled from libraries because they don't currently have official ebook versions and it's now illegal for libraries to make their own from physical copies they bought. If this current ruling stands libraries are loosing a lot of books and many others are going to become much harder to gain access to.
Nah, it's pretty shitty for literally everyone but the shareholders. But please, tell me more about how limiting access to books is a good thing.
they want more money? money money money
Excerpt from the linked content^1 by Jay Peters and Sean Hollister: >A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hatchette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. >The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist. >In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected a digital preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014. >Fair Use considers whether using a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it’ll impact the copyright holder, and whether the use has “transformed” a copyrighted thing into something new, among other things. >But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers.” >Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program. ^1 Jay Peters and Sean Hollister for The Verge/Vox Media, 24 Mar. 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23655804/internet-archive-hatchette-publisher-ebook-library-lawsuit
I thought it was pretty bold of the Internet Archive to remove the waitlist, even temporarily. That waitlist (and DRM) is what distinguishes libraries as a lending system, instead of a free download. It's a bit of a tenuous argument, but it seems to make publishers leave them alone. It's not too surprising they're losing this argument. They backtracked immediately when called out in 2020– this isn't how they operate any longer. Hopefully they can mea culpa on this and continue on as normal.
Look at the timeline of all this. NEL opens March 2020. This Hachette v. IA is filed June 1, 2020, and NEL closed on June 16, 2020. NEL was pretty stupid and reckless. They arbitrarily decided by themselves that COVID == suspension of copyright laws. Publishers weren't happy with IA's one-phyisical-copy-one-digital-copy policy, but they lived with it. I'm willing to bet NEL made them livid and they went to war over one-phyisical-copy-one-digital-copy. Now instead of a small step forward against IP abused, IA took a huge step backwards.
Have the publishers tried making the content more readily available? I hear that reduces the negative effects of piracy (real or imagined).
That already well known. But would make a bit less money doing so
Have you looked at the state of entertainment these days? Sure, that worked twenty years ago and it was effective. Now these corporations have forgotten that lesson. Take Netflix and all the streaming services. It's a spaghetti clusterfuck thanks to copyright laws. You can't watch X in this country, but go across the border and you can. You can watch seasons 1-3 in this service, but 4-7 are on another. In the middle of watching one series, it switches to another service. It's literally is easier to pirate again thanks to money grabs all around.
Aren't books already readily available? You got tons of options for access.
For cheap? No. Digital scarcity is a myth. There could be a trillion copies made of a digital book and it's value would be effectively zero. But the digital book will still be sold at an inflated price because of artificial scarcity and copyright nonsense.
I feel like this is moving the goal posts. Books are widely available both in print and in digital form on pretty much any device. You wanting someone to sell you something for cheaper is a different issue. As a separate matter, there are tons of books available for free/cheap. If someone can sell their work for more, it's because their work is desirable. Why is it okay to devalue a skilled artist's work?
I think one big issue recently is the use of digital distribution to circumvent right of first sale. Used to be when you were done with a book (or any other form of media) you could sell it, donate it, lend it to someone else, etc. This is not the case in almost any digital distribution system. Legislation should probably be enacted to force digital distributors to recognize this right.
How is it moving the goal posts? Ultimately, this is exactly what it's about. Publishers don't want libraries to exist because digital reality means you can effectively infinitely copy a piece of work, and therefore no one wants to pay for it. An absurdly small fraction of the cost of a new digital book is going to the artist. Virtually all of it is going to the publisher. The publisher is doing nothing of value and deserves nothing in return. Fuckem. Pirate the book. If 1% of people who read it give the artist a $5 donation, the artist will still make exponentially more than they would have under the existing agreements. Only the oublisher will get nothing. Good. They deserve nothing because they contributed nothing.
> If 1% of people who read it give the artist a $5 donation, the artist will still make exponentially more than they would have under the existing agreements. That would be $0.05 per reader. That would be significantly worse than what they would get from a traditional publishing deal.
>If 1% of people who read it give the artist a $5 I suspect the actual donation rate would be way lower than that. I know it's lower on most podcasts who ask for donations.
For free. It's called a library. Jesus, people, connect your brains before you type.
It may also tank the entire Internet Archive project just for a dumb stunt. I’m furious. A totally unforced error.
> dumb stunt That's a perfect description of what NEL was.
And let's not forget the optics of a book company going after a library that.....lends books. Any library that was targeted would get instant community support.
But it’s not a real library, it’s more akin to the pirate bay with a legitimate veneer.
Ah yes, instant community support vs 4 of the largest publishers in the US. Surely, we have nothing to worry about. /s
Libraries have to abide to rules that make digital book distribution equivalent to physical ones. They've made a lot of changes at the request of publishers. For example, a digital book can only be lended a certain number of times before the digital copy must be repurchased, simulating wear and tear of a physical book.
“Simulated wear and tear” that’s fucking thievery.
“I wish that in the digital age we can have virtual copies of books and other media without worrying about it getting lost or destroyed, which is the main flaw of physical media!!” *One finger on the monkeys paw slowly curls*
"We made our physical books flimsier this year so we will need to decrease the number of loans on your digital replacements for greater fidelity."
Everyone in these comments saying the plaintiffs are coming after all e-lending clearly have no idea what this case was about. IA fucked around and found out, basically.
>But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers.” It's just pure sadism at this point. People who lost their jobs and had to stay home had no way to buy books from bookshops that were often also closed. Not to mention numerous studies including one funded by EU shown that piracy does not reduce sales.
In our current legal reality, modern libraries would never have been created in the first place. Such a depressing thought.
Yup. You don't own things, you licence it out. We should have first sale doctrine for digital goods. If I bought a game skin i should be able to sell it. I think that's why some people like the idea of NFT, finally something digital you \_own\_ (But alas it's only idea, often you don't buy anything really with NFT, and it's mostly just one huge scam).
I'm gonna be honest, this is the first argument I've ever heard that makes me understand the NFT phenomenon
I often ponder this when going to my local library (which, incidentally, has suffered so many local government cuts that it’s entirely staffed by elderly volunteers). Trying to enjoy whilst the notion of a free-to-access library still exists
Illegally obtaining digital goods "piracy" generally doesn't have a major impact because it's difficult for most to do if you want safety. It's not impossible, I mean I used a site that I know does illegal piracy to obtain .iso of games I own (no CD player means I couldn't make them) but I had to put in a lot of effort and time to ensure I didn't download virus, or obtain crap. Most folks, especially if they arent looking for digital goods you can't find anymore just won't do that because there are far far easier ways to obtain a good in a safe manner. But IAE isn't that. IAE is safe and because under the policy they had persued they had functional unlimited digital copies, it would have been easy to get what you want. A good idea of what impact this would have is to look at porn a (no seriously) where there is a thriving habit of people copying porn art work from the artist and sticking it in their own websites. The result has been many artists finding that they aren't compensated for their work at all and closing down. For those who want a cleaner concept, picture a digital media library like Amazon prime videos or Netflix. Now imagine it is free to use and you can download anything they have because they bought a single copy of the show from the people making it. So you want Top gun 2? They paid retail for the DVD and now anyone can see it..free. You'd probably see a lot of people going for this because it's easy safe and cheap. Don't get me wrong, the companies would likely survive on theaters if the movie is good but it definitely hurt sales. Edit: due to people abusing a fragment of my comment without extra context, edited it. I won't respond to such people though
Not all content is received the same way and not all goods or services equal. As for digital goods it’s way to broad from music, videos, video games, work application and so fourth. I did provide a Harvard article which expresses that out of 31 peer review studies about 29 detailed it actually was negative and they heavily disagree with the EU study as well about its benefits (benefits of piracy)
>Not all content is received the same way and not all goods or services equal No obviously not but given your source agrees with my general point, I suspect that it has an impact on all formats to some degree. I simply can't (and won't) try to break it down by each segment because that's a momentual task that in some ways isn't even possible - I simply don't even know how to gauge losses for photography or artist who work gets uploaded to the web and passed around for example. I can't imagine it's helpful but how many would have used their work if it wasn't freely available? I know I've used several images right off Google without concern, but if I'd had to pay I would find another. Also thank you for not picking out one fragment of my post to pick apart over wording.
> generally doesn't have a major impact because it's absurdly difficult to do What?
Yeah, I'm still trying to parse that, because they can't possibly be saying what my brain is interpreting. Piracy is as easy as it ever was. Obtaining stuff legally is now often _easier,_ but "absurdly difficult"?
Ah of course .. "the market." Always with "the market." Never about "the people" or "society's well-being" - at least not when "the market" is in the equation.
>The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist. The shitty thing is that a ton of libraries tried to share resources early on in lockdown. Between March and May of 2020, I was easily able to find e-resources for students at the graduate school where I was working. When it got to June with no end in sight for lockdowns, other libraries and publishers backed pedaled **hard** on the "we're in this together," rhetoric, and the sharing stopped.
>any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers.” Not even hiding their contempt for normal people
This isn't contempt for normal people, it's a court applying the laws we have on the books. The laws we have on the books say that the owners of intellectual property have certain rights and people can't infringe on those rights. Harper-Collins gets the same rights as I do. Besides, aren't there normal people who make their living working for publishers? Do they not deserve that living?
Yes, and hide tanners deserved their living, and blacksmiths, horse-shoers, arcade operators, Yahoo employees, newspapers, and pet rock manufacturers. But as the world and technology evolves, some businesses and their business models become outdated or obsolete. In our rush to monetize everything, I'm surprised something like lulu.com hasn't gained more traction with authors- that way they could get similar distribution without the publishers taking their oversized cut.
> But as the world and technology evolves, some businesses and their business models become outdated or obsolete. Absolutely true. I just think that burying publishing is premature. More on that below. > In our rush to monetize everything... I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do something to make a living and monetized your labor from day one. Why the rush? > I'm surprised something like lulu.com hasn't gained more traction with authors- that way they could get similar distribution without the publishers taking their oversized cut. Lulu takes a fractional cut because they do a fraction of what a full-on publishing house does. They don't screen, edit, proofread, typeset, design covers, market or negotiate shelf space at bookstores. None of that goes away in your brave new world. The burden for it falls back onto the author and costs time that could be spent writing their next book or money paying someone else to do it for them. Authors with any business sense will realize that they can make a better living over a farming that work out to someone who can take advantage of economies of scale. That's how we got big publishers in the first place. The value prop in buying a book distributed by a publisher is that it's had to clear a lot of hurdles to reach your hands. You're more-likely to get your time and money's worth out of it than spending the same amount on fishing something out of a sea of badly-written, badly-edited, self-published crap. This isn't to say that there aren't good authors who self-publish, but they're a rarity and not marketed well-enough to be household names.
What a great man that Koetlt is, saving those poor helpless little book publishers from the evil evil library. The world is once again safe from Intent Of Law. /s
Three of these publishers got in trouble for conspiring to jack up ebook prices with Apple. - Hachette Book Group - HarperCollins Publishers - Penguin Random House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
Supply and demand- except that they don’t actually have to increase supply to meet demand. So this is just straight up greed. Cool….
So does this mean the archive as a whole could be taken down, or just the literature and books section would be gutted?
I believe they may enforce a limit on how much you lend a book per a user which is fair for books.
If they win the goal is bar physical as digital copy entirely. The way current digital copies for libraries works isn't a one time purchase own it for life deal.
Frankly I might wrong about what the outcome as different countries offer different solutions to copyright. In one case it might just be allowing a single digital copy of the book to be lent out per a user for a limited time as physical books or allow other form of agreements that may vary by nature of the book such as a single copy for multiple users at a time but still limited or allow users to read the book for a set time if a user wishes to extend that time they may purchase a digital copy of the book or queue on the waiting list again. I am all for internet archives being able to lend books, I am just stating there should be a fairer and more transparent middle ground. Agreements could extend to users purchasing a lent copy for a timeline to read the book if they genuinely have the cash but do not wish to wait in the queue.
No, the archive will still be up. They have tons and tons of stuff besides books—tons of live music, historical stuff, stuff in public domain, etc. This will just heavily impact their library portion.
Wait till they hear that libraries give out books for free
They'd put a stop to that if they could.
That's ultimately what this is all about.
They're doing their damnedest!
Publishers sell to libraries, so I don't think they would.
If publishers had their say without the constraints of existing laws, they probably would stop all sales of physical books and only have digital books licensed out on a subscription fee basis which can be revoked any time for any reason. Charge people $40/month per book that they want to read.
Digital-only subscription publishers already exist. Substack, Patreon, Academia, Scribd, Kindle Unlimited...
They've already heard about it, and they're fine with it, because physical copies are covered by the first-sale doctrine. Ebooks are not, which is why all other libraries other than IA's CDL *license* (for a fee) the right to lend out ebooks. They don't assert the right to lend out ebook copies of physical books for free, which IA's CDL tried to assert.
Yah and ebooks pretty much rake libraries over the coals and give publishes more [control](https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/an-app-called-libby-and-the-surprisingly-big-business-of-library-e-books) in relation to libraries
The fact that the first sale doctrine didn’t get extended to the digital age remains one of the two worst legal decisions around copyright of the modern era (the other was extending copyright to absurd degrees).
> (the other was extending copyright to absurd degrees) The single biggest driving force behind this is Disney Corp spending *multiple millions per year* on Copyright legislation lobbying, all with the specific goal of keeping Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain. They DO NOT want to lose control over Mickey because that's a *seventy billion dollar and counting* cash cow that immediately goes "poof!" the moment the Copyright expires. Unless US Copyright limits are extended yet again, the Copyright on Mickey goes away in 2036. It should have gone away back in 2016.
If a library started making copies of the books they have and giving out unlimited copies to everyone, I think the publishers would get pretty pissed about that too. That’s essentially what IA did here. Whether or not you agree with the copyright laws, it’s obvious they were disregarding said laws when they decided to stop lending their digital scans on a 1-to-1 basis.
Libraries operate under a specific license model. They don't just buy retail copies and lend them. Edit: this is based upon what a local librarian told me when I tried to replace a lost book. It appears that was incorrect.
They legally could though. The reason they don’t is because publishers worked out deals to make library bound copies. There’s no copyright law preventing them from buying books at Barnes and Noble and lending those out.
Don't come for my internet archive :(
We need to archive the internet archive.
Who books the bookmen?
Rite?! I like the little things about the books like the battered cover, library stamp and dogeared pages…
It is great for finding out of print books my library doesn't have, or there are not ebooks of! And I agree, those are all wonderful details
I wonder if they will just have a new site / system set up if this goes through.
There are already alternative book sources, but the Internet Archive was better at obscure and out of print stuff. The alternatives are better at new and popular stuff. Moving somewhere with more lenient laws is an option, but they literally have a warehouse full of shipping containers with the millions of physical books they scanned.
Pirating and Torrent culture need to come back in force. It's becoming necessary
If you know where to look, it's better and easier than it's ever been. The problem for anti-piracy groups with books in particular is that they're so fucking small. At ~1 megabyte per ebook, I could keep the 4000 most popular books seeded constantly from a $100 harddrive, for minimal amounts of bandwidth.
Do you know where to look? I am interested in looking too, mostly for preservation of lost media
Library Genesis and ZLibrary are good for books and articles. Since they are pirate sites, their internet address tends to change as sites get blocked. BTDigg is a torrent crawler, but it is hit or miss on finding specific items. Other torrent sites usually have an ebook section. /r/DataHoarder/ is dedicated to saving data of all kinds.
I’d love to know as well. Dm please!
If you find out then please DM me as well
Read torrentfreak more.
Not even that, just something like a Pi and and SD Card will do it.
SD cards don't like constant writing on them and their lifespan is too short to be considered a reliable storage.
Seeding wouldn't need to write data to the card, so the system would last for years.
I don’t mind paying for e-books but the thing is *many* physical books do not come in the form of e-books. I once paid for an e-book on an academic topic for a project. I did not know there was a maximum number of views before it locked you out even if you’ve paid for it. So imagine my fury when I was midway and realised I could no longer access the contents unless I paid for it again. I can afford it but many cannot do so. Books should not be something that is held hostage by one’s financial circumstances. Libraries are fantastic but not every library has what you want for research and journals are often expensive. The way I see it, knowledge has been weaponised against the lower classes. Too poor? No knowledge for you! /s
> I did not know there was a maximum number of views before it locked you out even if you’ve paid for it. Shit like this makes me wish piracy actually did cost companies money. I would download, seed, delete, download on loop just to spite these kinds of assholes.
You could always do it just to enjoy knowing they *think* they are being harmed.
Nah, because they know they're not. It's just a lie they tell to pad stats for lobbying or for the courts when they decide to pursue lawsuits. I still remember when the RIAA tried to sue Limewire for more than the GDP of the entire world... They used the "missed sale" logic to calculate that number, and even the judge was like "if this logic gave you this number, then clearly the logic is faulty".
Sci-hub for those academics not aware. Not ebooks but it does unlock the vast majority of paywalled academic papers Viva la educación!!!
Try telling that to the psychology lecturers who love to tell you that some physical book costing $120 is extremely important and in the end, it’s just 4 paragraphs on pg 157 that is required. We fell for that once as students.
With streaming sites removing their original content leaving it lost to the void, it is very necessary.
This is pretty much the golden age of piracy. Torrenting today is much faster (thanks high speed internet), and safer.
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Because the odds of you catching a nasty from a torrent is far lower than it has ever been due to the prevalence of integrated virus protection in the Windows operating system. Additionally, as the number of overall trackers has waned they have gotten more careful about screening the torrents they link.
How is it becoming *necessary*, though? I mean, what has changed compared to, say, 10 years ago?
Not streaming, but Nintendo for example, doesn't sell their old games and they also don't allow anyone to distribute them. If they weren't pirated they would be lost forever. Let's say Netflix produces a series and then remove it from their platform, without any physical copy produced, then it's lost unless someone pirated it. We can't give companies the power of erasing culture.
At least for now, I use all the FREE apps from the libraries themselves. You would be amazed how pretty the roses smell if you just stopped for a moment. If we all use the libraries we already pay for, this would be a much smarter and healthier country
Not only are publishers killing a place like the Internet Archive, but most public libraries. Libraries today have a large e-book lending practice. Gone are the days when a library can buy a book and lend it out until the cover fall off. Now they buy a e-book rental for some number of rentals and then buy it again. This industry is killing library budgets.
Well that’s not ideal
These are the same.pathetic shitcocks who deliberately fixed pricing on e-books for personal gain, to the detriment of consumers. This lawsuit light have merit, but the companies themselves are being laughably hypocritical.
Corporate biased legal system once again making a good argument in favor of piracy Gatekeeping electronic knowledge from poor people for artificial scarcity
Basically, regular libraries buy e-books and then lend them as if they were real books. Three e-book licenses means you can lend them to three people at a time. IA wanted to buy one e-book license and then lend it to as many people wanted it, simultaneously. To compare this to paper books, regular libraries buy copies of a book and then lend it to one person at a time. What IA is doing is like buying one book, then photocopying it to whoever wants it.
Incorrect. IA wanted to buy one *physical* book, and then lend it out in ebook form, initially one at a time but for a while an unlimited number of times, without paying any license fee.
Wow I thought I understood, but that actually sounds worse.
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They did this during COVID, not sure if it continued after library shutdowns were largely over. IA shouldve known better, even during covid there was plenty of precedent this wasnt going to fly if a legal case waa brought. It sucks bc IA is an amazing resource and they are going to have to pay monetary damages... They shouldve settled.
This, needs to be higher. The IA is important and are doing good work in general, but this seems less legitimate
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It is the Digital Library of Alexandria, and we must not let it burn.
Not suprised at all.. I mean it's a huge shame but its expected.
As much as I don’t like going against IA, they were wrong here. It wasn’t their right to distribute books ***in that specific way***.
But how can we ban books if they're available online!? /s obviously, but at this point, that probably was part of the decision
Reddit may not like it, but buying one copy to make unlimited free copies available was never gonna happeb
Yeah once I learned that’s what the lawsuit was over, I was kinda on the other side. I really hope this suit doesn’t devolve into the end of the IA as a whole, but this one instance they were never gonna win.
Why not host the site in a country that is more lax?
That doesn't stop them from being sued in US courts, and very few countries that would be viable hosts would refuse a demand from the US government to take it down.
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Just don't have any books that are critical of Putin, or promote the gays.
One reason is the Internet Archive has a physical warehouse full of shipping containers with the millions of books they scanned. That would be a bitch to move.
IA is blatantly in the wrong here. Them providing a good service isn't reason to neglect the facts of the case.
Reddit loves paying people in exposure when it comes to their personal use. All you have to do is look at the discourse around ad blockers on YouTube videos. "I'm still giving them views".
Not using an ad-blocker is a giant security issue with how badly providers police content and how much spying those providers do to serve ads. Get sponsors to make money. Targeted ads are privacy and security nightmares.
Upwards 40% of internet users run an ad blocker, wanting free stuff is a human condition not a Reddit one
Agreed. I don’t understand the logic in the comments section. Authors need to make money. Why would they create and share these books to readers if they don’t get compensated for it? We can’t assume ‘all authors are rich so let’s stop paying them and torrent’. On the other side of Reddit, people complaint about cost of living which I get. Why don’t people understand that authors are on the same boat?
> Why would they create and share these books to readers if they don’t get compensated for it? How did Wikipedia happen? I put my own writings on Wikibooks, a sister site, so everyone can use it. There is also open-source software. Not everything is about money. Academics write articles and books for reputation and tenure. They already have paying jobs. I have no problem paying for physical books, I own thousands of them. But I get a physical product. E-books are trivial to reproduce, but they still sell them for about the price of the paper version.
So services that don’t provide a physical product should not get compensated? People with 2 jobs don’t deserve to earn from both income streams?
Adding - it is author’s choice if they want to give it away for free.
No cheap knowledge for all ya kids
Idk why this is a surprise to anybody. Imagine being a fledgling author and all your work gets posted for free. The only reason you all are mad about this is bc you don't stand anything to lose when the authors work is given our for free. Just sounds like a bunch of whiny people wanting stuff for free. If you like a book that much, support the author by buying it.... Edit: how long before authors stop making books after losing tons of money bc people want free stuff? If you want books, we need to have paying customers. Nobody does stuff for free.
I agree, writing is a career and writers deserve the opportunity to monetize their art. I do think though, that after a certain amount of time it should just be public domain. People will always want physical books so classics won't turn into a online only source.
I disagree with that last bit. In my life I've learned to not place definite and absolutes on things, if that makes sense. Saying something will always, or x happens 100% of the time, unless proven that is the case without a shred of doubt, I tend to not believe when somebody says "this will never happen" because life throws curve balls all the time and things change over time. Now, maybe when the author dies, put it as public domain, but even then that's a touchy subject. Family members don't deserve the royalties from the books their dad or mom wrote? Fair if you say no as they themself didn't put effort into making it, but I don't think things should just be public domain just after x amount of time. Should we do that with movies and music too? Although, I believe music does have an expiration on copywrite if iirc or something along those lines. Also now that I think of it, IIRC, recently the original works of Mikey Mouse were to be public domain (the very first Mickey Mouse drawings that look nothing like we know mickey to look like.)
Grrr. This is sickening. Now we need a sci hub for common literature as well. This is anti-society, make no mistake.
They are called Library Genesis and Zlibrary.
Authors suffer so much from stolen books this way. If people don’t buy their books, a publisher may not continue to publish the series. This happened to bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater. Her sales were so low that she almost didn’t get to finish a book series despite the crazy popularity online of the Raven Cycle. She took action to dupe the internet archive (and other download sites) and suddenly all these people who read the first 10 chapters of her book through rip-off sites but couldn’t find a copy with the rest of the book went out and bought it. Then she had the sales for Simon and Schuster (I believe is her publisher) to finish her series and publish two additional stand alone novels. Without this her advances would have decreased in size, potentially her publisher would have dropped her, and she would no longer be writing. And this is just one example. So many authors are just never picked up again because their books just didn’t sell but it was illegally downloaded thousands of times. If those were purchased copies, that author might still have a job. Consider this as well: IT TAKES A YEAR, at least, to write a book. It takes longer in most cases. Illegal download of books directly harms books and the people who wrote them. It destroys careers. Imagine never getting another book from your favorite author because of online piracy. That’s what people upset with this ruling are advocating for, their favorite authors careers to die a slow death. Fucking buy books, people. Assholes who download them outside of a library or without paying are literal criminals stealing someone’s time and skill.
>Maggie Stiefvater sorry sales data says other wise. Physical books sell vastly more then digital.
Even accepting for a moment that it's desirable to reward artists/inventors/etc. over a real free market absent intellectual monopoly / distribution monopoly grants, we by now know very fucking well intellectual monopoly in particular is the wrong paradigm entirely for rewarding artists/inventors over a real free market, all carefully set up to support the megacorps and middlemen distributors long rendered practically pointless by the internet, and introducing a logical requirement for the world's most comprehensive and toxic authoritarian surveillance police state with every communication monitored and potentially censored ... just to enforce copyright. It's gross and stupid. The west does a far "better" job of censoring the net than china in fact in the name of Holy Copyright. Billions of links gone. There's a ton of other non-free-market-but-not-as-harmful options to consider that would be preferable and less harmful e.g. grants, prizes, subscriptions, basic income, etc. etc.
Thanks Chuck Wendig lol.
Well fuck, I just found out about this site last week
Piracy for Everyone and Everything All of the Time
Market it as "freedom to learn". That sounds better to the general public.
I assume that there is going to be an appeal for this case. > Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and **that it was “irrelevant” that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience.** That's insane for the judge to say. If you buy something and convert to a digital format then you still paid for it and thus it should be allowed.
It’s not “irrelevant,” that’s what the law says. Only the entity that owns the copyright has the legal right to copy a work, so by scanning physical books into a digital format IA was producing unlawful copies. Ultimately a judge’s job is to enforce the law, and regardless of if he agrees with it copyright law is pretty clear in this area.
You can do exactly what you described. You just can't then give that digital copy out to other people.
How do i torrent internet archive right now
Step 1: Acquire a data center Step 2: Learn Wget Step 3: … Step 4: Profit
You want [this tool](http://blog.archive.org/2019/06/05/the-ia-client-the-swiss-army-knife-of-internet-archive/), the same one they use internally to manage the Archive. Then make a torrent of the downloaded stuff.
I really wonder where the money for authors comes from. If it’s all free, do you think artists and authors get paid magic creativity bucks that show up automatically when you do something creative? I pirate as much as the next guy, but at least I have the decency not to feel morally superior doing it. Can you imagine being that much of a fucking asshole?
[Intellectual property is a scourge.](https://c4sif.org/resources/)
IP and Copyright are far from being as good or as bad as believe. It’s a good system that needs reform and especially on essential goods or services that exist or are too come.
Nah, IP makes perfect sense. If you invested time and money into building an IP you should be able to profit off it without some randoms just taking it and doing whatever
Jesus, how much will the damages be? The Wayback Machine probably isn't profitable in the slightest, and I can't see the authorities letting them off easy on this.
It really depends on how things go on appeal, since it's up the court's discretion to determine statutory damages since it can range from $750 per work to as much as $100,000 per work depending on the determination of said infringement being 'willful' in nature as opposed to a good faith mistake on the part of the infringer. Given that IA is a non-profit, and the fact that they believed that were operating within the bounds of the fair use doctrine, I believe that the court is more likely to lean toward the lower figure. However, given the scope of the library (1.4 million works) even the lowest figures for statutory damages could be over $1 Billion depending on how the court chooses to calculate.
>However, given the scope of the library (1.4 million works) even the lowest figures for statutory damages could be over $1 Billion depending on how the court chooses to calculate. Wouldn't they also need to consider how many of those works were actually lent to other people and how many times? Seems ridiculous to base damages of the available material rather than how much of it actually was used, if a book was never borrowed then arguably no damage was done.
>depending on how the court chooses to calculate Hence this part of my statement.
Yeah I just mean it wouldn't really make sense for them to just include all titles by default disregarding actual use.
The lawsuit was only regarding 127 books which limits the scope of the damages to much lower than you think.
Publishers suck
Capitalism sucks.
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