Hacker News Reader

Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Within that context, the Archive has made careful efforts to ensure its uses are lawful.

Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin the future of CDL by declaring a free-for-all during the pandemic. I still want to know who it was that made a decision so mind-bendingly idiotic it put the very existence of the Internet Archive itself at risk. Of course our current copyright laws are stupid! That doesn't mean you as an organization with twenty million dollars in yearly revenue get to just ignore them and trust that having the moral high ground will protect you from the lawyers of an entire industry.

View on HN

I'm an author who supports CDL, and I couldn't agree more.

What surprised me the most was how many people strongly defended the IA's actions. In their heads, the IA could do no wrong. Or they failed to grasp the illogic of "public libraries are closed, so we're going to pretend we own their books and lend them out."

Even here on HN, there were some people who refused to acknowledge that what the IA did was both unfair to copyright holders and a poor strategy for trying to uphold CDL over the long term.

> there were some people who refused to acknowledge that what the IA did was both unfair to copyright holder

There are people here who refuse to acknowledge that what copyright holders do is unfair to everyone.

I, and a lot of other authors I know, am in favor of reducing the United States' extremely long copyright term, which largely benefits large corporations and the estates of the few creatives who make gazillions of dollars. For instance, I'd be comfortable with going back to the term that was in place 100 years ago, which was 28 years, with the option to be renewed for another 28 years.

But you can both be in favor of reducing the maximum copyright term AND believe that it is unfair to authors to just steal their works outright, which is what the IA effectively did through its "Emergency Lending" scheme.

Copyright will always be an absurd notion, but I agree that it would be a lot more tolerable if the terms were reduced. 28 years is still way too much, it should be 5-10 years. That's more than enough time to be properly rewarded for one's labor. People should not spend an entire lifetime without seeing the works they grew up with enter the public domain.

> it is unfair to authors to just steal their works outright

It would have been stealing if those were physical books. This is data. There is no stealing, there is only copying.

They're not guilty of copying. There's nothing morally wrong about copying. They're guilty of not compensating authors. Creators deserve to be compensated but copyright is not the way it should be done in the 21st century. There needs to be a new way.

Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.

Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's trivially copied. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly absurd notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires that we give up our computing freedom.

Copyright is what makes it possible for you to sue someone if they copy your startup's code. Without it you have no other recourse if an employee wants to sell your whole codebase to a competitor, short of catching them in the act, which is not practical compared to enforcing copyright.

Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's hard to produce. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly helpful notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom.

> data that's hard to produce

Yes. All human intellectual work comes down to discovering a really big number. This labor has immense value. The data itself can be trivially copied and distributed worldwide at essentially zero cost.

Society needs to find new ways to value this human intellectual labor. New ways that don't depend on forcing artificial scarcity on the result.

> Not only is it an utterly helpful notion

Helpful to whom? To the monopolists, sure. Meanwhile everybody else has been robbed of their fair use and public domain rights.

> enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom

Absolutely not. The number one reason why computers are no longer under our control is copyright. It is impossible to stop copyright infringement if we can create and run whatever software we want. They must have mechanisms that stop us from running unapproved software in order to have any hope of enforcing anything. Otherwise it's trivial for computers to share data with each other, it's as natural as a river flowing.

You can convince copyright holders to assign the copyright to you, e.g. by paying them money, and then release their work using a permissive license, like Mozilla Foundation or Apache foundation are doing.

If you unlike their software or hardware, then just stop buying it and buy or support free software and hardware. Freedom is not free.

> You can convince copyright holders to assign the copyright to you, e.g. by paying them money, and then release their work using a permissive license

That's a half-measure with limited impact. Why spend considerable resources freeing up a small number of works? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright straight up. At the very least, fix copyright by significantly reducing duration so that copyright ownership is reassigned to the public automatically at zero cost regardless of what monopolists want.

> just stop buying it

People won't have a choice. They'll either buy locked down hardware or they won't be able to consume anything. Streaming services have already started enforcing DRM rules that prevent owners of free software and hardware from consuming their content and it's illegal to circumvent this even if you pay for it.

I'm rabidly pro-piracy but what the Archive did was the very definition of shitting where you eat. What fool thought they could get away with that? This is like if Cloudflare believed revenge porn shouldn't be illegal and decided in light of that to create and host a revenge porn site. You can't do that shit as an organization. You flaunt the law when you're a ten-person underground operation, not the founder of a thirty year old nonprofit with 168 employees.

Like, I get your point, but isn't it a bit hyperbolic to equate the IA making books freely available, to Cloudflare hosting revenge porn?

Ok, it's comparable to CD Projekt deciding that because DRM is bad, they're going to crack a bunch of games and host them on GoG.

> Except for that bit where somebody in power at the IA decided to ruin the future of CDL by declaring a free-for-all during the pandemic.

You beat me to this comment. No wonder they are now being sued. That decision may send them the way of Google Books. I hope it doesn't. Maybe in twenty or forty years we will see an accepted library like Spotify's arrival 15 years after Napster.

Archive didn't even have the moral high ground. Authors and publishers deserve to be remunerated for their effort and controlled lending supports that. When that's off the table you're just like libgen.

Agreed, I often agree with EFF and I love what IA does typically but this was a terrible terrible decision. IMO even in a world with improved copyright laws the extent of what they did shouldnt even be allowed.

CDL = ~~California Digital Library, for anyone else who's wondering~~ apparently not, see below.

It's actually Controlled Digital Lending: https://controlleddigitallending.org

Thanks. I searched 'CDL Internet archive', saw the first link was https://archive.org/details/cdl titled the California Digital Library, and assumed that was it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com