Internet Archive: We Will Not Appeal 'Hachette v. Internet Archive' Ruling (archive.org) 62
In March, 2023 the Internet Archive lost in court, with a judge ruling they couldn't scan entire books and then lend them as ebooks. The Internet Archive appealed to a higher court, which also ruled against them in September of 2024.
Today, the Internet Archive made an announcement: that "While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit's opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review." We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers' requests.
We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.
Today, the Internet Archive made an announcement: that "While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit's opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review." We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers' requests.
We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.
SCOTUS calculus (Score:5, Insightful)
Asking The Supreme Court to rule is risking they will create a binding nationwide precedent against others who are in the same situation you are in now.
If you are an advocacy organization, sometimes it's better to take a lower-court loss now then wait for the legal climate to change then support "the next guy" who is in your situation.
Re: SCOTUS calculus (Score:2)
Moving jurisdiction - Re: SCOTUS calculus (Score:2)
There needs to be an internet archive type service in a jurisdiction with more friendly copyright laws to allow digital archiving of material out of copyright in that jurisdiction.
Some former British Commonwealth countries have much shorter copyright terms or when the death + 90 year treaty came out, only allowed in copyright works to be extended. Earlier works did not have their copyright extended.
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There needs to be an internet archive type service in a jurisdiction with more friendly copyright laws to allow digital archiving of material out of copyright in that jurisdiction.
Does not matter which country it's located in. The US Copyright laws would prevent an Internet archive service in ANY jurisdiction from lending materials to US residents. The more favorable copyright laws would only allow the service to disseminate materials to People residing in that country.
The issue is with the online lendi
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I believe the Internet Archive is still allowed to archive any books they want, so long as they keep their archives private
Wouldn't even that violate copyright? They're very unlikely to actually be sued for it, but I don't think there are provisions that make it legal to make copies of works for archival purposes, or that making wholesale replicas for archival purposes would count as Fair Use.
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Wouldn't even that violate copyright?
Archivists have an exception to copyright for making one copy for archival purposes of a published work (Or 3 copies for an unpublished work) under Title 17 US 108 [cornell.edu].
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Re: Legal chess (Score:2)
However, we're honestly never going to get there even with legislation. Our agreement to the Berne Convention requires us to grant copyright to any work once it's in fixed form, without registration or renewal, and a minimum term of life plus 50 years. While the
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lol. You got modded troll because you thought of something positive that could come out of Musk's involvement with DOGE. The power wielded by the modders shall not be dismissed. I'm probably in the same camp as you. Don't know if anything good will come out of Musk's appointment, but I'm hoping.
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Don't know if anything good will come out of Musk's appointment, but I'm hoping.
lol. How do you not know? Have you listened to the moron in the past years?
He wants to destroy anything he doesn't like. He wants to quash workers rights. He wants to use his power to have his companies gain advantages over others.
He's a dirty rotten scoundrel that is overtly corrupt.
Re:Legal chess (Score:5, Interesting)
We're about to have a new administration with a panel looking into efficiency
No, we're not. It has nothing to do with "efficiency". Everyone has seen the shitshow Twitter has become when Leon wholesale fired people without any thought. The fomer head of security was fired [cnn.com] when he raised serious concerns about safety and compliance due to the firings. Imagine what will happen to all the services you rely on when the same thing happens in the name of "efficiency". Everyone on here knows what happens when any organization cuts headcount to become "efficient". It never ends well.
On top of which, Twitter has last approximately 76% of its value [cnn.com] since Leon took over. This was after he fired 80% of the staff. So much for "efficiency". If that's the example we're supposed to go by, we're in even deeper trouble than people realize. If any other company loses that much in value it's time to pull out the shovels.
And finally, there is the huge conflict of interest with anything EV [cnn.com] he should have to deal with but which the convicted felon will give him a free pass on. So when you say "efficiency" you really mean grifting. He'll be leeching off the taxpayers even more than he has in the past.
I think Twitter has lost more than 76% (Score:2)
I'm guessing it's closer to 85 to 90%. It's a modern miracle of engineering that Twitter didn't just collapse already. It was incredibly overbuilt and that's the only reason why the whole site isn't down. That said pretty much every other feature on the site that isn't the ability to post tweets, read tweets and get
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We're about to have a new administration with a panel looking into efficiency
No, we're not. It has nothing to do with "efficiency".
When I think efficiency, meme-in-real-life Ramaswamy and wanna be space Jesus aren't exactly the first folks to come to mind.
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A wise decision. Going to the crazy SCOTUS may even put normal libraries in danger, should they go full ret@rd.
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How are libraries legal?
In today's climate, they are not.
See Zediva [wikipedia.org]
See Aereo [wikipedia.org]
See Locast [wikipedia.org]
All it's going to take is one library screwing up it's digital library lending program, [wikipedia.org] go to court, lose, and Programs like Overdrive will be gone faster than you can say Copyright Infringement and that ruling will be so broad that even physical lending for anything still under copyright protection could be targeted next once publishers realize that they are losing money when more than one person can read a physical book in a library and will wa
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it's better to take a lower-court loss now then wait for the legal climate to change then support "the next guy" who is in your situation.
I'm afraid that's going to be a very long wait.
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the real problem is the corruption of copyright laws and the unethical commercialization of our cultures, this is just another aspect of classism and economic enslavement
slaves aren't allowed to own real things
No surprise, they were ultimately doomed to lose (Score:4, Informative)
The basic idea of copyright law is that the human creator of a work has a basic human right to be the only one having the right to make and distribute copies of that work. Because that human lacks the physical ability to actually enforce the right, society makes a bargain with him: for some limited time, the government will enforce his rights, thereby allowing him to justly profit from his creativity, but then after that time is up and in exchange for the protection, the work will become public domain and anybody will be able to have and make copies.
The public library was always an odd exception that society tacked-on to the deal after the original base of copyright law was established. The public library would properly BUY a copy (thus benefiting the creator of the work) and then lend it to people. This hurt the creator of the work by depriving him of a sale, but it was deemed to be sufficiently in the public interest AND the damage was very limited: only one person could borrow the book at a time, and there would be a natural limit to the number of people who would go to the trouble of going to a physical library, getting on a waiting list (if needed) and then only having access to the work for a limited time (libraries typically time-limit the borrowing).
An online electronic archive of scanned copies is a complete subversion of the very idea of copyright. Being scanned digital documents, these works may not have been initially bought by the archive, but in any event they are making an unlimited number of copies while having no legal right to do so (only a copyright owner may legally make copies (that's what "copyright" MEANS)) and then the only limit on how many copies they distribute is internet bandwidth. Remember: a physical library DOES NOT make an unlimited number of physical duplicates of the physical book and lend those duplicates out with no intention of ever getting any of them back. There is simply no equality here between a physical library and an online electronic archive. Additionally, every person who gets a digital copy from an online archive can potentially further violate the copyright rights of the creator of the work by making and distributing an unlimited number of copies of the copy. Then others might make copies of the copies of the copy... and all are of equal quality; there's no degradation like one would get with generations of photocopying. There's simply no way that such a digital lending library of copyrighted works (works which have not fallen into public domain status) can possibly be compatible with basic copyright law or any actual copyright protection for the creator of any works.
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Except The Internet Archive scanned physical books they actually owned, and continue to own while the digitally lend them.
They also used DRM to limit the copies being lent at one time, giving the same limitation as a physical library.
Re:No surprise, they were ultimately doomed to los (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but then they started lending more than 1:1 (during Covid). That's why they got up publishers and authors' nosesâ"not the 1:1 lending they'd been doing.
The moment they decided to do that they made themselves a target.
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They haven't been following that practice for years now.
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Oh, so if you commit a crime, as long as it happened in the past you are fine.
Got it.
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No, you still don't get it (Score:2)
After a certain number of years, a copyrighted work will slip out from legal protection and become public domain, at which time it can be freely duplicated and distributed in an unlimited manner and others will be free to make derivative works etc.
It's only during the period of time that the work is under active copyright protection that it cannot be duplicated in an unlimited manner as the internet archive was doing. Any "orphaned" book, will fall into the category of public domain in only a few years - if
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Oh, so if you commit a crime, as long as it happened in the past you are fine.
It's called Statute of Limitations [wikipedia.org]. Or maybe you were thinking Ex Post Facto [wikipedia.org].
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They do have large numbers of books scanned by users that are not in the lending system, so anyone can download them DRM-free, making unlimited copies.
I did email them about it with a view to contributing, but their answer was that either I send them the books and a few years later they might scan them and put them in the system, and keep them forever, or I an scan them myself and to hell with copyright I guess.
The truth is that the Internet Archive has become a piracy hub. If you want a full, checked romse
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The whole situation has left me scratching my head; I just don't get what they were thinking. Lending more copies than they owned was guaranteed to lead to this exact legal battle.
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> The whole situation has left me scratching my head; I just don't get what they were thinking. Lending more copies than they owned was guaranteed to lead to this exact legal battle.
Exactly. I mean, how the hell didnt anyone there think that?
Answer: They thought that they were somehow immune.
Thing is, if they simply asked the publishers to help in their attempt to help lockedowned students it's quite possible some agreement would have been possible in many case. But instead they just flipped the bird
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> Except The Internet Archive scanned physical books they actually owned
1. They dont OWN them. Many of the books would have explicitly stated that storing the text in an electronic system was prohibited. If they continued to just make ONE copy, for preservation sake, and worked out and agreement like with any other library on how to lend that digital copy, none of this would have been an issue.
2. They also used DRM to limit the copies being lent at one time
No, they did not do that. They initially did
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You're hand-waving away the most critical part of copyright: the "copy" part.
A physical library purchases a physical copy of a book. Thanks to the First Sale Doctrine, they can do whatever they like with that physical copy. They can temporarily transfer possession of it to someone else ("lending"). In doing so, they take the risk that they won't get that physical copy back. If someone doesn't return a book, the library has to purchase another copy to replace it.
Internet Archive made a digital copy of the p
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Even though I understand the "unlimited copy" argument against it, I love the accessibility of having books searchable and instantly available when I need them. For instance the other day someone asked me a question about The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and when I googled it a link to the Internet Archive copy of the book came up and I was able to page through it and quickly get the info I needed. It wasn't a lost sale and it provided value for me at the same time.
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> love the accessibility of having books searchable and instantly available when I need them
Thats why we need copyright reform to allow such systems to exist.
But the I.A just killed any chance of that.
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The IA is acting just like a normal, physical library, with few exceptions. They own a number of books, and what they own, they lend for a limited time, with no more simultaneous lending than their ownership. If they own 5 copies of a book, and 5 users are "borrowing" it digitally, then the 6th user has to wait. This closely mimics a physical library's operation.
The only significant difference is that the IA is instantly accessible in the whole world, while to get to a real library, you have to actually tra
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Where have you been?
> They own a number of books, and what they own, they lend for a limited time
You might want to look up what this is all about as they DIDNT DO THAT.
They owned 5 books like you say, but leant out 100,000 of them without a second thought.
Go and read up on the case.
Re:No surprise, they were ultimately doomed to los (Score:5, Interesting)
> The basic idea of copyright law is that the human creator of a work has a basic human right to be the only one having the right to make
This is in no way a Basic Human Right, such as access to food and water.
Unlike a basic human right, a court can take away the right given by copyright.
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Agreed. It's a social contract that grants (what is supposed to be a limited) exclusivity to creators for a period of time to (financially) motivate them to produce "works". The problem with it now is that it has been extended beyond anything at all reasonable and is in desperate need of reform (likely something many others have brought up).
Well, your mileage may vary, depending on country (Score:2)
but the founders of the USA considered copyright to be a basic human right, which is why they wrote the copyright and the patent into the Constitution. The concept is that the creative output of a person naturally and presumptively belongs to that person. Just as his thoughts belong to him, the product of his thoughts belongs to him. The founders of the USA originally intended to write "life, liberty and property" but they changed it to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness", which they presumed included
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The basic idea of copyright law is that the human creator of a work has a basic human right to be the only one having the right to make and distribute copies of that work.
I'd call this phrasing misleading. The basic/core/foundational idea of copyright is to enrich the public with more creative works. The short-term incentivization to do so -- the exclusive ability to reproduce/distribute -- is only in furtherance of that goal. For example, if copyright didn't result in the works becoming public, copyright's intent would be thwarted.
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The public library was always an odd exception that society tacked-on to the deal after the original base of copyright law was established.
Well, that's not quite right. Libraries predate copyright law by almost two thousand years. The earliest known libraries date to about the 7th century BC, whereas copyright law only came about after (and perhaps because of?) the invention and adoption of the printing press, so in or around the 1700s. Prior to the printing press, books were very expensive and had to be hand written. After the printing press, publishing companies wanted a way to ensure that OTHER publishing companies weren't just going to rip
Learnt nothing (Score:2)
> libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books
I see they have learnt nothing of how this all works.
Even when they didnt fit into that statement themselves, as they were MAKING digital books.
Copyright reform is desparatley needed but the IA's actions and stubborness in this case has greatly hurt that. Now anyone wanting reform has to fight against this history as well!
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It was always clear that they wouldn't win - precisely because of the way they went about this which was to just assume they had the right to do it, knowing that wasn't true, but hoping for a change in the law.
At no point has any "library" ever been able to just wholesale scan any works they liked and offer them under unlimited terms to the world for free. It doesn't even work like that for the oldest libraries in the world in the most permissive societies.
IA were always in the wrong. That they've finally