Publishers proceed not to buffalo buffalo buffalo sell half the books taken down anyway and eventually erase their own backups.
Crap I knew there was something I was supposed to do!
Understandable, but a huge bummer nevertheless
Take a step back. Is it really understandable? A digital resource, that costs nothing to reproduce, is being artificially restricted.
The economy is based on goods and services being exchanged for money. A book is a good that took time and resources to create. A publisher invested into that good with the intent to make a profit, and having it available online for free without their consent circumvents that.
I’m not saying it’s ethical or that I agree with it, I’m just saying it makes sense.
having it available online for free without their consent circumvents that.
In this particular case the publishers are trying to double dip
Controlled Digital Lending is the library practice whereby a library owns a book, digitizes it, and loans either the physical book or the digital copy to one user at a time.
“Library of Alexandria had to be set on fire after publishers’ court win”
The good news is, as far as I know, they don’t have to actually delete the data.
So at least these books have still been digitized if something changes and they are allowed to be accessed in the future. Some of them may not exist in physical form at this point, or only as one or two copies in an academic library.
That is not what has happened here.
“The library of Alexandria has had to remove some books from public lending due to court order”
The IA played a very risky game during covid, lost, and now needs to face concequences.
It could be soo much worse.
It would be useful to have a list of the missing books for reasons.
I’ll see if i can find it.
I agree, that would be useful
But LLM’s can copy anything.
rules for thee but not for me!
What I’m hearing you say is that the Internet Archive needs to figure out some underhanded way of making themselves ridiculously profitable and then stop being a non-profit. It worked out quite well for OpenAI after all.
But they make stonk lines go up so wall street can buy caviar for their kids.
So is there some kind of backup? Something that can be put back online after the apocalypse or something?
“To the contrary, the decision barely mentions copyright’s ultimate purpose of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts,” it said.
It feels like the thoughts of the past came straight out of fiction. Today, nothing seems worth anything if you can’t directly make money from it.
As much as this sucks, it could have been so much worse. The Internet Archive stays up. It’s important archives of things like industrial and educational films stay up. The Wayback Machine stays up.
So as disappointing as this is, I do have some relief because I thought it could mean the end.
So much of that stuff is public domain material, at least the older stuff like those films and some of the books
Right, but my worry was that if the IA went down, no one would be archiving it that didn’t have a commercial interest.
A large amount of the Prelinger Archives have been uploaded to YouTube. Which is great as a backup, but the IA is a noncommercial entity. I do not want for-profits controlling such archives. I’m glad that’s not a worry, at least not for now.
A sad and dark day.
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
Thoughts and Prayers 🙏
I know it’s a dumb idea but imagine how fun it would be if there was no copyright
Lamentable but copyright is a critical mechanism for protecting the rights of creators.
