Quote:
Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash
The main Archive's collections include public collections, to which anyone can contribute. These are the collections which are troublesome in terms of potential copyright violations.
Problematic items do sometimes end up in the tightly curated collections, but that is generally the result of incomplete records and limited access to original source material.
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Thinking about Harry's use of the word legitimate:
I think that archive.org as a whole is not legitimate, assuming I properly understand the "anyone can contribute" concept you describe. And that's different from what I wrote before.
But openlibrary.org, by itself, is, at least in the United States, legitimate, because it is both curated and
endorsed by large numbers of American governmental units.
There are gradations of legitimacy. If the Library of Congress endorsed openlibrary.org, which is does not, it would be more legitimate. But if your state library endorses it, as does mine, that seems to me a pretty darn strong mark of legitimacy. I'm not saying that the states of the US are ideal governmental units, but they are non-terrible enough to have reasonable power to confer legitimacy.
In theory, US public libraries certainly could abuse their legitimacy. But as I've posted before, what openlibrary.org does is arguably consistent with the expansive US fair use doctrine. If they really were abusive, I think the big publishers, or Overdrive, or Amazon would have sued them before now. After all, unlike illegitimate web sites, openlibrary.org has a firm address at which they will easily accept legal service.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Civil Disobedience, by its very definition, is the breaking of law.
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What makes it civil disobedience is a moral judgement about the legality.
Suppose someone in Russia illegally downloads the full text of one of the books mentioned here as being bowdlerized, due to censorship, in the editions sold there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/wo...sent.html?_r=0
I'd call that download civil disobedience, even if the downloader didn't pay. This is especially true because the downloader couldn't pay, at least not without risk of a knock on the door.
Now, if an American, in the US, downloaded the same book, without paying, and not from a legitimized library, I'd call it stealing.
What about downloading, from openlibrary.org, a low-quality misscanned EPUB of
Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1908 - 1964), a book which is public domain in China, Japan, and Canada, but not in the US? I don't see it as rising, or declining, to the moral level of stealing from the rights holder (Amazon) if I did it. But it's not a morally superior act for Americans to do it, and thus couldn't be, to me, civil disobedience.
P.S. Apologies for the many double-negatives in this post!