Judge rules online archive's book service violated copyright

[Quoth]

The court wasn't considering morality, or fairness of existing copyright law, or unavailability of OOP books. It was the quite narrow test of copyright violation. Was a copy made and distributed without the permission (needs to be in writing) of the copyright holder? The IA could never win on fair use on that and an appeal will fail.

Personally I think copyright has been extended too much and there needs to be action about OOP. We need reform and shortening of terms, not unilateral violation.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Yes, the libraries prohibit unauthorized photographs of their collections.

Yet if the book is loaned out and taken out of the library, there's no way to actually enforce this...

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Yet if the book is loaned out and taken out of the library, there's no way to actually enforce this...

Historically photocopying or photographing an entire book was more expensive than buying a copy. You could only photocopy a few pages in the library and otherwise copiers were corporate items before the 1970s. I spent a lot of my pocket money in the Belfast Central Library in the 1960s on photocopies. They had the popular reference books shelved beside the copier

Now it costs only time to photograph an entire book and Google won a court case on the basis that they would never share the copy. Hmm.

[ownedbycats]

I did once scan a few pages of a library book because I liked the illustrations.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by 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.

Even that is useful ... like when you realized a vintage book you purchased a decade ago off eBay *is missing a page* when reading. And yes, IA had a scan to save the read.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[issybird]

Originally Posted by graycyn

Even that is useful ... like when you realized a vintage book you purchased a decade ago off eBay *is missing a page* when reading. And yes, IA had a scan to save the read.

Hah! It's happened to me, exactly that. And it wasn't cheap, either.

In any case, while I'd prefer being able to download a book and read it on eink at my leisure, I have no objection to reading the hour borrows online, if that's the only option.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The court wasn't considering morality, or fairness of existing copyright law, or unavailability of OOP books. It was the quite narrow test of copyright violation. Was a copy made and distributed without the permission (needs to be in writing) of the copyright holder? The IA could never win on fair use on that and an appeal will fail.

Personally I think copyright has been extended too much and there needs to be action about OOP. We need reform and shortening of terms, not unilateral violation.

Considering ripping a CD or recording TV with a VCR is also making copy without the permission of the rights holder yet are both considered fine today after court cases I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be. Obviously IA lost this one but maybe with a more polished argument they could still win on appeal. Sometimes violation is necessary to prove its even acceptable. Otherwise we'd never know.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Considering ripping a CD or recording TV with a VCR is also making copy without the permission of the rights holder yet are both considered fine today after court cases I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be. Obviously IA lost this one but maybe with a more polished argument they could still win on appeal. Sometimes violation is necessary to prove its even acceptable. Otherwise we'd never know.

But IA were sharing the copy to the world.
I wrote:

Was a copy made and distributed without the permission (needs to be in writing) of the copyright holder?

Highlight of original text.

Considering ripping a CD or recording TV with a VCR is also making copy without the permission of the rights holder yet are both considered fine today after court cases

Not if you uploaded it or sold copies in the local market. Still not OK.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Considering ripping a CD or recording TV with a VCR is also making copy without the permission of the rights holder yet are both considered fine today after court cases I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be.

Commenting just on a part of this, in the real world, books, including eBooks, do not behave the same as music or film, but the legal rules are, AFAIK, mostly the same.

A CD copy is an exact copy. Any books I have read from Internet Archive are far from that. Footnotes and indexes and tables of contents are hopeless.

The first book I remember reading from IA was Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. There were so many missing and out of order pages that I eventually switched to reading a paper copy. But if there had been a missing page in the paper copy, as several here have pointed out, I probably could have, with difficulty, found it in that bad IA copy.

The judge wrote that:

What fair use does not allow, however, is the mass reproduction and
distribution of complete copyrighted works in a way that does not
transform those works and that creates directly competing substitutes for the originals.

As noted above, in my experience, the books were usually transformed. It sounds crazy to think that IA would, on appeal, argue that their library is almost all bad copies transformed by thousands of misscans, but they are.

The judge did ask, as I read it, for the parties to try to negotiate a settlement. I guess he is hoping for IA to give up lending in return for not having to pay anything to the publishers. To me, the ideal compromise would be to allow IA continue as is with clearer restrictions on how recent the book can be and on forgoing use of artificial intelligence to improve the scans.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

But IA were sharing the copy to the world.
I wrote:

Highlight of original text.


Not if you uploaded it or sold copies in the local market. Still not OK.

Yeah I can read thanks.

Before Sony vs. Universal City Studios it wasn't clear that making a copy of a TV show on a tape was fair use even for private use. That's why Sony was sued in the first place.

This is a case mainly about controlled digital lending. Internet Archive scans a book, stores that book somewhere and lends out only the number of copies they own. They are not selling copies, they are not widely distributing them and they are acting as a library. Maybe this isn't fair use, maybe it is but I don't think it's nearly as clear cut as you suggest.

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Internet Archive scans a book, stores that book somewhere and lends out only the number of copies they own.

That is incorrect. They create an arbitrary number of copies of the book for every anonymous user that accesses it.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

That is incorrect. They create an arbitrary number of copies of the book for every anonymous user that accesses it.

No. You can easily see this by just visiting the Internet Archive's Open Library and their controlled digital lending program which is what this case is about. Books get checked out, if they're checked out you can't check them out.

I get that this may be confusing for someone from where libraries are locked down and the air is choked by the smoke of discarded library books.

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Books get checked out, if they're checked out you can't check them out.

If they are checked out, even for an hour, an unlicensed copy is made and distributed to a user. When the loan ends, that copy is not deleted, therefore it is a book distribution, not lending a book out.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

If they are checked out, even for an hour, an unlicensed copy is made and distributed to a user. When the loan ends, that copy is not deleted, therefore it is a book distribution, not lending a book out.

I can tell you've never used IA's Open Library. Books you can only check out for an hour you can't download. You can only read them in the browser. For books with longer loans you can download them but once the loan period is active they can't be read because of DRM. Sure, a user could remove the DRM and make a copy but they could also pretty easily scan or photograph every page of a physical book from a physical library while the book is at home during the loan period.

[Quoth]

Also IA is putting copyright texts (available on paper and as ebooks currently, so not even the OOP spurious excuse) in their general download offerings and ignore notifications & comments.