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- technology@lemmy.ml
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- technology@lemmy.ml
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The Internet Archive picked a dumb fight that it couldn’t win. I want to donate money to the Wayback Machine, but I can’t because they’ll spend it appealing this stupid thing.
Sign the petition! Not sure if it is going to make any difference, but it just takes a couple of minutes. https://www.change.org/p/let-readers-read-an-open-letter-to-the-publishers-in-hachette-v-internet-archive
Yeah, kinda funny how it’s OK when there’s a bunch of neoliberal gangsters like larry summers behind it, right?
I’m no computer scientist, but I have a suggestion:
Also change the folder name to “Homework”
My Homework is over 100GB
100gb is about 20 dvds give or take.
You could fit thousands of books in that space however
GB? Amateur.
You know, this thread really needs a list of of the publishers responsible for this travesty.
“Publishers Hachette Book Group Inc, HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc and Penguin Random House LLC” - According to Reuters
Of course those Penguin fucks are involved.
Don’t worry. It’s all on the way back machine 👀
That’s good. The internet is for advertiser’s and businesses. Its not for archives of information
I wish the cost of internet access decreased to match decreased available content. Internet shrinkinflation?
What you need is the innernette
A sad day
If anyone wants my ebook library just let me know.
Ditto. I have everything from Apache web server guides to Apache helicopter service manuals.
We live in a system that actively prevents humans to get more knowledge, go figure.
No one is preventing you from visiting a library, which would be a fesible alternative.
However, not a simple solution for everyone in every country. Knowlegde should be a free and shared common good.
That depends on where you live. The Internet Archive is far more accessible than a good library, for much of the global populace.
He’s also a corrupt cop, but I repeat myself.Meant to reply to the comment above yours.
That depends on where you live.
Yes, I know. That’s why I said:
However, not a simple solution for everyone in every country.
No one is preventing you from visiting a library, which would be a fesible alternative.
actually blatantly wrong, public libraries are slowly dying and losing funding.
Well, except scumbags like eric adams, NYC’s bought-owned-and-operated-by-real-estate-interests mayor.
He’s also a corrupt cop, but I repeat myself.
Libraries where good for before the XXI century. Nowadays the amount of content they had is pretty small. Most libraries don’t really has anything but the more famous books.
They became community hubs that offer more than just books. Even ebooks albeit that being weirdly capped by publishers as well.
They do much more than public opinion would make you believe.
I was looking for resources for a custom LLM and noticed they had a ton of copyrighted books and wondered to myself how the heck that was legal
I guess this answers that
Just like regular libraries have copyrighted books: they lend them to one person at a time.
Which IA failed to do, which is why they got sued, and why they can’t lend those publishers’ books at all anymore.
I have no sympathy.
They claimed to use the same protections as others. Is there a more accurate article about how their lending was faulty?
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That’s literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
Legality has never and (sadly) will never have anything to do with justice and fairness.
That said, if you’re right, then the AI company should be out a few billion as punishment. Instead our library privileges have been curtailed, as though we are the ones to blame for shithole AI companies. Luckily, books are very easy to torrent (and everybody should do so), but still.
(citation needed)
McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access.
—https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-internet-archive-hurt-sales/, lnked in a link in the article
FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?
If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.
Unfortunately, that’s like saying everyone has the right to read any book that IA usually archives for free at any time. Do I agree with that? Yes. Does it hurt intellectual property? Yes. There’s obviously evidence that readers used the service a lot. I agree with the principle, but they should’ve just temporarily “merged” with public libraries and increased borrowing limits for books in stock, not allow everyone in the United States to just get a book as long as they have less than 9 other books as well.
Just want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
You should strive to improve as a person rather than be content being a stagnant asshole
I know who I am.
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.
It’s an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don’t poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn’t matter if you’re “in the right”. The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it’s what they’re best at.
“No one should stand up for new rights. Don’t rock the boat bro.”
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
How you like them strawmen?
It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
So in short.
Having laws at all is a dictatorship.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.
One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I’m open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.
Omg this can’t be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he’s not an asshole for being right. He’s an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
“With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!” ~ERB’s depiction of Walt Disney.
They should have known better…
“Because what is legal is always right.
And what is right is always legal.”No?
In a fascist state, your mindset is welcome, “Well they broke the rule, they must pay,” but do you never abstract one more level? Is the rule itself breaking something?
Those who downvote you say yes. Nuance is important. The rule has two main affects that I see.
- Direct effect (the goal) :Publishers maintain a monopoly on bookselling low value books, the structure of their business preventing any competition.
Okay lets think about #1. Is that good or bad?
- Indirect effect : the members of that society now have a restricted access to knowledge.
Okay lets think about #2. Is that good or bad?
Being critical in thought enough to recognize the flaws of the first quote is key.
This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.
It would be more accurate if you said, “This is not about right and wrong (for me).”
If you say it’s not about right and wrong, dead stop, then you are pledging full faith to the institutions, the very ones we are critiquing.
Basically, you are dismissing my opinion as misguided, dismissing me as missing the point and I am telling you it was expressed exactly as intended.
In short, you are arguing on the wrong conceptual meta-level for me to respond without dismissing my own claim. If I take as True that “this isn’t about right and wrong” (it is), then I am setting aside the power I have in a democratic society to say, “Fuck this I’m changing it.” Maybe we’ve just been stuck in gridlock politics, with a ruling class that strips and monetizes every aspect of humanity that the society today doesn’t realize the power citizens wield.
Not sure. Been fun to think and share thoughts with you though. Thanks for your time and have a nice night.
An impasse is a perfectly acceptable outcome on a sane platform like Lemmy.
That is what happens though, it’s clear about that.
They should have poked the bear with a separate legal entity so the obvious resulting legal loss wouldn’t effect their core operations.
I support the idea as long as it’s for dead authors/out of print books, but from what I understand they were just letting people ‘borrow’ anything? That’s just stupid (if idealistic)
They definitely weren’t monitoring the one at a time rule… I downloaded the file and now have it forever
So OpenAI is next to stop using those too?
Wouldn’t the attacks on openai be the same as these ones. Like if I was large media company wouldn’t I want my media to be vilifying AI because its the same principal and mechanism as training AI. They can kill two birds
No. That would involve the general public maintaining a consistent position.
I want knowledge to be free. That means free. That means governments, businesses, NGOs, your local church sewing circle, AIs/LLMs, refugees living in tents, convicts, children, and any other humans or human organizations or anything humans built.
I am willing to accept a LIMITED duration copyright and patent and private science publication system if it could be reformed such that it the brains behind it were paid and couldn’t legally sign away their compensation. Given that we as a society aren’t willing to build this the best course of action is to actively work to break copyright
I hope they remove them like how Apple removed deleted texts.
😂
Also the “deleted images” years back from icloud
