My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.
And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.
The time for arguing with people like you is over. If you want to mewl about “wrong” when these corpos and states are trying to restrict our access to culture, fine. Keep crying. You aren’t a contributor, you aren’t in charge, go cry.
Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.
That’s how it works in the rest of the world.
What part of the rest of the world are you in?
Some university library probably.
They disabled drm during lockdown so people had something to do
Which was nice of them, but that doesn’t mean they should’ve done that, especially in the eyes of the law. (Also, if you’re after free ebooks, why are you pirating them on archive.org instead of libgen?)
“especially in the eyes of the law” bootlicking loser, get lost
Where did I say that find it good that they got sued or lost their appeal? I just said that the reason why they lost the appeal is because according to the law they’re bound to, what they did was wrong. And maybe they should’ve left that to a platform that enjoys a little more immunity from said law, because there are plenty of those. It was stupid of them. They painted an unnecessary target on their back that doesn’t help their cause and I‘d prefer them not to have to shut down at some point because I’m all for the Internet archive archiving anything and everything. They should’ve stayed a legitimate library and everything would have been fine and would have served their cause sufficiently well.
Thank you for fully documenting your bootlicking loser logic so that others can shudder at your fate
Ah, so you‘re one of those people that would be well at home at lemmygrad. And what fate are you talking about? Not getting sued?
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.
The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.
Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.
In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.
edited: page numbers on linked court document.
The decision is that even lending out ebooks against owned copies is illegal
What the IA may be illegal but is certainly not wrong.
Wrong? No.
Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
Actions also protected by laws exempting nonprofits and archives from copyright restrictions? Also supposed to be yes.
Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.
Easy solution. Update the web-scraper they use to include an LLM. Then its for “training”
As long as they have a tech billionaire in charge they should be fine.
They could also rename the project to: “The AI Archive” and add lots of buttons with multicolor gradients.
Need to give it a quirky name.
The AIkive
Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.
“We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”
Unpopular opinion: They stepped out of their fucking lane. There are already laws that protect actual libraries, in fact most nations have laws to ensure libraries have access to all locally published works.
One good thing to come of this is I’ve now joined my national and local libraries.
Agreed. While a noble cause, it was honestly predictable.
I don’t understand why they did that. Their status was already quite shaky. They really shot themselves and their users in the foot
Direct link to the court document: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.306.1.pdf
Really unfortunate. I wonder why nobody foresaw this when they started the stupid NEL thing.
Yeah they flew too close to the sun
I wonder who’ll end up buying the archive.org domain and what they’ll use it for
Hope somebody buys it and starts using it as an LLM with investors since that’s apparently the only way to avoid a lawsuit
The archive isn’t completely dead with that yet. There is still a lot of free domain stuff and private uploads on there. A lot of public records too.
And I think you can’t just randomly buy a .org domain, can you? You have to be officially a nonprofit.
I remember for example couchsurfing had to change from a .org to .com when their tax exempt status was rejected by the irs and they went for profit.
The archive isn’t completely dead with that yet.
They’ve just been sued into almost certain bankruptcy.
And I think you can’t just randomly buy a .org domain, can you? You have to be officially a nonprofit.
lol, no.
.org just means “organization”. There are literally no rules on who can own one.
4chan is a .org domain…
You definitely can just buy a .org, I own multiple.
what does warrior do? The git readme seems to just be setup instructitons
click wiki link in readme: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Yeah I’m wondering as well. It seems to save webpages, whereas the issue is with scanned books which may be removed from IA…
I had the same question. Here’s the answer:
The Archive Team Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the Archive Team archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive—and it’s really easy to do!
The warrior is a container running inside a virtual machine, so there is almost no security risk to your computer. (“Almost”, because in practice nothing is 100% secure.) The warrior will only use your bandwidth and some of your disk space, as well as some of your CPU and memory. It will get tasks from and report progress to the Tracker.
o7
Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates
A sad day for intellects
In the future, armed with burning pencil writing fingers, books will be scanned and photographed, page by page. Before they are read.
Ah, I see we’re burning the Library of Alexandria again… Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.
They need to rename themselves “Intelligent Archive” then claim they’re an AI service that can just happen to regenerate whole books.
sharing is theft
Hoo, boy. You’re not gonna have a good time on Lemmy if you really believe that.
It’s ok. They don’t.
I wasn’t gonna go digging on a less than a day old account.
No really. I mean it. sharing is actually theft.
Quite the take
Artificial scarcity at its finest. Imagine recording a song digitally, then pretending there are a limited amount of copies of that song in existence. Then you sell an agreement to another person that says they have to pretend there is only a certain made up number of copies that they bought, and if they allow more than that number of people to listen to those copies at rhe same time, they will get sued for “stealing” additional pretend copies?
I hope everybody can see how this is the insane and pathetic result of Capitalism’s unrelenting drive to commodify everything it possibly can in the pursuit of profit.
As always, the solution is sailing the high seas. Throughout history, those who created or saved illegal copies/translations of literature and art were important to preserving and furthering human knowledge.
Many incredibly powerful people, empires, and countries have tried very hard to suppress that, but they keep failing. You cannot suppress the human drive for curiosity and knowledge.
True, and the fleet is big and strong. There are many people seeding hundreds of terabytes of books/research papers/etc. The knowledge will not be lost. Yarr, can’t catch me in the high seas…
