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https://torrentfreak.com/there-is-more-to-copyright-than-financial-incentives-internet-archive-argues-in-court-240423/

The Internet Archive is doubling down on its position that its digital lending library service operates under the bounds of fair use. Major publishers assert that digitizing books without appropriate licensing amounts to infringement but IA counters that the practice is in the public interest. It also fits copyright’s ultimate purpose; to promote the broad public availability of literature and other arts.

  • BreakDecks@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    6 months ago

    I think you might be confused, albeit by a poorly written Wikipedia article.

    First of all, it isn’t clear what it is meant by “removing the waitlists and expanding access to all readers”. It doesn’t seem to mean uncapping loans without backing them with physical books. In fact, the part of the wiki you quoted is the first of two mentions of the word “waitlist”, a word that doesn’t appear in either of the sources cited for those sections.

    In fact, the first cited source says this:

    IA’s attorney argued that the publishers had not offered empirical evidence of market harm in this case, focusing on the fact that when a library lends out a CDL scan, it does so in lieu of a physical book, “simulating the limitations of physical books.” This is due to CDL’s “owned to loaned” ratio requirement: a library can only loan out the number of CDL scans as it has physical books in its collection, and can only loan these scans out to one patron at a time.

    And this:

    Plaintiffs discussed what they see as massive financial harm stemming from IA’s CDL program, which they estimated to amount to “millions of dollars in licensing revenues.” Plaintiffs also emphasized that, were CDL “given the green light,” or upheld as a fair use, the plaintiffs would suffer even greater losses.

    And this:

    CDL is a longstanding and established practice, which has seen adoption and growth in libraries across the country while the ebook licensing market has continued to thrive.

    So it seems easy for me to conclude, having checked Wikipedia’s sources, that the plaintiffs are challenging the Open Library CDL system itself, as a threat to their profits, even though IA was playing by the same rules as every other library system, and that IA losing this fight will be a major blow to libraries across the country:

    The judge also questioned whether CDL actually could represent such a loss: the publishers’ argument rests on the premise that libraries loan out CDL scans in lieu of paying to license ebooks, and were CDL not permitted under the law, IA and other libraries would instead choose to pay licensing fees to lend out ebooks. The judge pointed out that the result might in fact be that libraries would choose not to lend digital copies of works out at all, or would instead lend out physical books, undercutting the lost licensing revenue argument.

    Tl;Dr: Everything I said was correct, and the publishers want to establish precedent that definites physical books and ebooks and separately licensed so that libraries lend out fewer books, and/or have to pay more to loan out the same number of books that they currently do. They just chose IA as the first target hoping that smaller libraries will be forced into compliance should they win.

    Also, someone who knows how to effectively edit Wikipedia articles needs to overhaul that page, because it seems intentionally written to make IA look like they did something much worse than they actually did.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      2·
      6 months ago

      As I said, the “traditional” CDLs were also in a legal grey area. But once the publishers are suing IA for going full Library Genesis anyway, why not also include those?

      I went back to one of the older articles I could find on this subject, from before the lawsuit was filed. Some particularly-relevant excerpts:

      Until this week, the Open Library only allowed people to “check out” as many copies as the library owned. If you wanted to read a book but all copies were already checked out by other patrons, you had to join a waiting list for that book—just like you would at a physical library.

      Of course, such restrictions are artificial when you’re distributing digital files. Earlier this week, with libraries closing around the world, the Internet Archive announced a major change: it is temporarily getting rid of these waiting lists.

      …

      James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at Cornell University, told Ars that the legal status of this kind of lending is far from clear—even if a library limits its lending to the number of books it has in stock. He wasn’t able to name any legal cases involving people “lending” digital copies of books the way the Internet Archive was doing.

      …

      The legal basis for the Open Library’s lending program may be even shakier now that the Internet Archive has removed limits on the number of books people can borrow. The benefits of this expanded lending during a pandemic are obvious. But it’s not clear if that makes a difference under copyright law. “There is no specific pandemic exception” in copyright law, Grimmelmann told Ars.

      Ironically the FAQ that Internet Archive put online has been taken down, but I found it in their Wayback Machine. It says:

      The library will have suspended waitlists through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. After that, waitlists will be dramatically reduced to their normal capacity, which is based on the number of physical copies in Open Libraries.

      So it seems pretty clear to me that by “suspending waitlists” it means that they’re going to “lend” more copies simultaneously than they actually have.

      The Internet Archive had been poking a bear with a stick for years and the bear had been grumbling but not otherwise responding. So they decided to try giving it a whack across the nose with the stick instead. Normally I’d just sigh and shake my head at their stupidity, but they’re carrying a precious cargo on their back while they’re needlessly provoking that bear, and now they’re screaming “oh no my precious cargo! Help me!” While the bear has a firm grip on their leg. That makes me extra frustrated and angry at them for doing this.

      I’m not siding with the bear here, I should be very clear. The publishers are awful, the whole concept of copyright has become corrupt and broken, and so on and so forth. But the Internet Archive isn’t supposed to be fighting this fight. They were supposed to be protecting that precious cargo, and provoking the bear is the opposite of doing that.