[nottrobin]

I am completely on the IA's side here, and I hope they win the case. Down with copyright.

However, "on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one researcher per month" seems to me like a dishonest way to present the data. Surely surely there are one or a few recordings in the project that are vastly more popular than others. That's always how it goes. So "on average" completely obscures how popular the most popular ones might be.

[soco]

Shouldn't the plaintiffs then single out that particular popular record, and not try to take down the entire catalogue? It goes both ways - if you ask for all you get data about all and that data shows one access/month.

[jfengel]

The plaintiff doesn't want to open a loophole. Suppose that one of these records gets used in a major film soundtrack, and now everybody is downloading it. They will have a harder time asserting their ownership if they don't defend it now.

Their approach stands on applying the law as written: "This is mine and you can't have it, even if I don't really much care about it."

[IIsi50MHz]

As I understand it: in USA law copyright, unlike a trademark, is not invalidated by failure to defend it. You are free to ignore unauthorised copying of, or usage, of your work until such time as you find it sufficiently objectionable.

[mlyle]

I disagree. A median value might be really misleading (you could have very high usage for 49% of the collection, and nothing for the rest). But assuming average means "mean..."

You might have a few hotspots, but there's a very tight upper bound on how many downloads of each item. Further, it argues that the overall collection has a very high research and preservation value compared to the total number of downloads.

[nottrobin]

I don't agree. The size of the set is of paramount importance to that point. They can always bring the mean down by just adding more recordings to the set, to further obscure how popular the most popular recordings are. In a set of 10 billion, of course people aren't listening to most of them.

Quite clearly what the plaintiffs are afraid of is that there are a few very popular works in there that they could be making real money from. There's no way to know this from the mean alone.

[6510]

That is far from the truth.

The companies have very successful legal departments. They go after the next lowest hanging fruit. They are just working, it's their job description to do this. This is why they will never stop, it never gets too absurd or overly unreasonable.

edit: Deleted fake example

[scotteh]

This appears to be a hoax.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/metallica/

[6510]

haha, that I was unable to tell the difference says a lot.

[tga_d]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

[mlyle]

Even if all the traffic were from 100 pieces, that's a few thousand downloads per month. Let's talk about those specific pieces, then, instead of trying to obliterate an archive.

[dmbche]

They got 400 000 records in the collection, I don't think they're being dishonest here