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- cross-posted to:
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What a Hachette job. They should be ashamed but they won’t be.
All things considered it seems they got a pretty good deal out of it
Well, the exact monetary terms are not known yet, but way back when this first broke I was hoping for an outcome like this. “Admit guilt and beg for mercy” was really the best approach here.
I hope they’ve learned a valuable lesson from this. Modern copyright is a minefield laid by sociopaths, tread carefully or be prepared for when you step on one.
Regarding the monetary payment, we can say that “AAP’s significant attorney’s fees and costs incurred in the Action since 2020 have been substantially compensated by the Monetary Judgement Payment.”
What is the oddly capitalized “Monetary Judgement Payment?”
Our library is still strong, growing, and serving millions of patrons. But the publishers’ attack on basic library practices continues.
You mean the “basic library practice” of printing infinite copies of a book and handing them out for free to any patron who wants them?
I despise modern publishers and what copyright has become. But you did this to yourselves, Internet Archive. The publishers were willing to look the other way when you were acting in a similar manner to actual libraries with your digital lending practices, but you went and poked a bear and are now all shocked pikachu that it bit your leg off.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to Internet Archive here if they weren’t putting a huge trove of actual internet archives at risk by pulling this stunt. They should have known exactly what was going to happen. Let groups like Library Genesis handle the pirate activism, IA, they’re built around dealing with this kind of legal peril and surviving in the shadows. You’re not.
I don’t know why you’ve been downvoted because you’re absolutely right.
The Wayback Machine is too important for them to jeopardize it on a stunt with a 0% chance of success. They should have spun off a separate legal entity if they wanted to try something like that.
That’s not how their book lending works. There are a limited number of copies and they can only be checked out in a DRM-protected format. Unless you strip the DRM from them you cannot print them out.
That’s now their book lending is supposed to work. But they didn’t do that. This lawsuit was launched when the Internet Archive started up the “National Emergency Library”, which instead operated as I described above. There were no limits on how many people could “borrow” the book at the same time, which kind of breaks the whole “borrowing” analogy at a fundamental level.
Again, I think modern copyright law is berserk and modern publishing houses are scum. But when you are carrying a precious archive of information and you go up to some berserk scum and poke them with a stick I think I’m just as angry at the poker as I am at the scum.
But those are only during the pandemic, right? Not indefinitely?
Why does that make a difference? They were making copies, that’s copyright violation. The pandemic didn’t suspend copyright law.
The internet archive were probably counting on publishers goodwill to temporarily allowing relaxed lending rule. It’s not like they were distributing unlocked copies anyway (each copy expire in a few days IIRC thanks to DRM). Turns out the publishers don’t have any empathy even during pandemic and blow it out of proportion, as if the internet archive was turning into libgen and distributing unlocked pdf to everyone on the internet.
My own personal theory is the internet archive is not afraid of getting shut down and testing the water to see how far they can get away with poking the copyright law. They must have a contingency plan in case their non-profit organization got shut down to ensure its archive preservation in order to be this brazen.
The internet archive were probably counting on publishers goodwill
I hope they learned a valuable lesson. A valuable, expensive, obvious lesson.
It’s not like those copies self destructed after the pandemic.
But it is. The ebook contains drm and can only be opened with adobe software. It can’t be opened anymore once the lending time expired. The internet archive simply allowed more people to borrow them, but not letting them borrow the books indefinitely so the lent books will still expire (though they can still re-borrow again by logging in to the internet archive library).
