Judge rules online archive's book service violated copyright

[SteveEisenberg]

https://apnews.com/article/books-and...f87490e8d2027b

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge has sided with four publishers who sued an online archive over its unauthorized scanning of millions of copyrighted works and offering them for free to the public. Judge John G. Koeltl of U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the Internet Archive was producing “derivative” works that required permission of the copyright holder.

The Archive was not transforming the books in question into something new, but simply scanning them and lending them as ebooks from its web site. . . .

The Archive, which announced it would appeal Friday’s decision, has said its actions were protected by fair use laws and has long had a broader mission of making information widely available, a common factor in legal cases involving online copyright.

The judge's full ruling can be read here:

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gf...netarchive.pdf

I haven't read Internet Archive books lately, but, in the past, they were a lot different from Overdrive because of having so many misscans and missing pages. Tables of contents were messed up, giving a poor reader experience right at the start. Because of that, I doubt they cost the publishers a lot of business. But as character recognition improves, the Internet Archive model -- essentially, to let a library buy the eBook for the paper book price -- would hurt authors and publishers more.

[Sarmat89]

Serves them right. The entire enterprise was set for book pirates.

[Quoth]

Proper libraries pay a licence fee per simultaneous loan and in some countries a per loan royalty for ebooks. The IA claimed they were also fighting for libraries. They weren't.

Copyright needs reformed but simply ignoring it and cheating living authors and the estates of recently dead ones isn't the way to do it. It was a deliberate attack on copyright.
They also have copyright violating works in their general downloads as well as the so called "Open Library".

Fair use doesn't include scanning entire books and loaning them. Google's case needs revisited, they won because they claimed they were not sharing the books but using them to aid search, also a stretch of fair use.

Exactly who funds IA and their mirror site in Eqypt?

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Proper libraries pay a licence fee per Intaneous loan and in some countries a per loan royalty for ebooks. The IA claimed they were also fighting for libraries. They weren't.

Copyright needs reformed but simply ignoring it and cheating living authors and the estates of recently dead ones isn't the way to do it. It was a deliberate attack on copyright.
They also have copyright violating works in their general downloads as well as the so called "Open Library".

Fair use doesn't include scanning entire books and loaning them. Google's case needs revisited, they won because they claimed they were not sharing the books but using them to aid search, also a stretch of fair use.

Exactly who funds IA and their mirror site in Eqypt?

Internet Archive is funded by donations,grants etc. Fair use is a pretty vague, undefined concept. That's why this has to be settled by court cases. When home recording devices jumped on the scene it wasn't clear if it was legal to record TV or the radio either.

To me it's not really clear why you can lend out a physical book or DVD you don't own the copyright on vs. a scan limited to one copy loaned out at a time. Would it be OK if a robot plucks a book off a shelf and shoves it in front of a webcam and live streams it to a patron?

[Sarmat89]

You can loan a book or a DVD. IA does not loan books however, it creates unauthorized copies and allows users to obtain them due to the lack of the screen protection or fake DRM.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

You can loan a book or a DVD. IA does not loan books however, it creates unauthorized copies and allows users to obtain them due to the lack of the screen protection or fake DRM.

They loan books with the same Adobe DRM that Overdrive and eBook stores use. If a patron takes a photo of every page of a book in the library, is the library responsible?

[issybird]

I'm not -- I can't -- argue the merits of the case, but for me IA is invaluable for books that are OOP. I think it also serves a real function in terms of preserving texts that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

Purely anecdotally, it seems to me that IA has been moving away from books you can download to books that can be accessed online only, for an hour at a time.

[Sarmat89]

They use unsecure method of DRM, which has been broken years ago and is just a sham.

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

If a patron takes a photo of every page of a book in the library, is the library responsible?

Yes, the libraries prohibit unauthorized photographs of their collections.

[John F]

... misquote, wait for it ...

[John F]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

They loan books with the same Adobe DRM that Overdrive and eBook stores use. If a patron takes a photo of every page of a book in the library, is the library responsible?

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

They use unsecure method of DRM, which has been broken years ago and is just a sham.
Yes, the libraries prohibit unauthorized photographs of their collections.

I would hope a judge/jury would want a little more detail/give this a little more thought.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

They use unsecure method of DRM, which has been broken years ago and is just a sham.
Yes, the libraries prohibit unauthorized photographs of their collections.

So does IA. That's why they block you from downloading without some form of DRM...

Does your local library require you to give up your phone upon entry? Have a librarian escort you every step of the way? No photocopiers on site? Or is it just as much of a "sham" when they say don't photograph things?

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Proper libraries pay a licence fee per simultaneous loan and in some countries a per loan royalty for ebooks.

My local county library mostly pays a fee to Overdrive for each copy they want to lend out -- could be roughly $120.

Libraries cooperating with Internet Archive libraries purchased a paper copy for each simumtaneous eBook loan, and did not loan the held paper book. The payment to the bookseller for each copy thus could have been roughly $30.

They both are arguably proper, or at least would be without a final ruling on a disputed legal point.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Exactly who funds IA and their mirror site in Eqypt?

My Pennsylvania State Library has helped fund them in the past. Now my national library, the Library of Congress, does:

https://archive.org/about/credits.php

For legal reasons, the judge did not look at it the way I did. But the way I see it, the Internet Archive pays a lot less to the publisher, indirectly, than the local libraries do with Overdrive or a smaller competitor. And the Internet Archive in return provides a lower-quality eBook. This is fair for now, but might not in the future as improvements are made in scanning.

Note that the Internet Archive has a queuing system, and uses DRM to limit days for each borrow, just like Overdrive does.

I've defended Overdrive, in the past, for charging libraries much higher prices for eBooks than paper copies. However, the Internet Archive is a legitimate nonprofit organizaton and I cannot support attacking it.

The judge did not rule on monetary damages, but it sounds to me that he is open to the damages being zero due to the Internet Achive being nonprofit. If upheld on appeal, and if the Internet Archive kept on operating the same way, I think that then there would be some sort of punishment for them, such as contempt of court.

However honorable a place Egypt is, the Internet Archive is located in the United States, and will follow clear American court orders.

[Quoth]

Non-profit is irrelevant to contravening copyright.
Also the source of many books scanned and also some of their scans is opaque.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Non-profit is irrelevant to contravening copyright.

In the U.S. at least, I believe you are correct. But it does impact damages that could be collected, per our federal law:

The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives . . .

Originally Posted by Quoth

Also the source of many books scanned and also some of their scans is opaque.

They have library stamps visible in the PDF. Someone resident in that area could go to the library and confirm whether a copy of the book with the stamps in just the same spot are still in the lending collection. Why not try asking someone here, who lives nearby, to check, before insinuating nefarious conduct?

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

The entire enterprise was set for book pirates.

The beginning of the books are messed up. You can't click in the table of contents to re-start a chapter. So book pirates would be much more likely to use the Overdrive copy than the Internet Archive copy. Also, at least in the past, and AFAIK now, they didn't have current books the pirates would presumably be more interested in.

I never would have bought a new book in lieu of borrowing the Internet Archive copy. I might have bought a used copy of that out of print title. This is not the piracy world.

The real damage to the big publisher is that if I wasn't reading some old out of print book, I might have instead used the time to read something they were currently selling. So -- same damage to living authors, and publishers, as when I read public domain. And the real damage to libraries, if the Internet Archive case is upheld on appeal, is that I might ask for more interlibrary loans of obscure old titles, costing my local library money for postage, and staff time.

[Sarmat89]

The IA definitely contains books that were discarded from the libraries. Instead of being burned as they regulations require, they ended up scanned somehow.