The existence of the Internet does make existing copyright law much more destructive and limiting than ever intended.
The creators of copyright law never imagined a world where everyone could have a free library of a lifetime of books in their pocket, and where copyright would eventually be extended to make this impossible.
This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms), challenge the law in the courts as archive.org has been doing, or disobey it on principle, as the operators of Anna's archive, Z-library, and Scihub are doing, heroically and at great personal risk.
>This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms)
What was the reasoning for lengthening the terms in the first place? It's not clear to me why works from 1780 would be relatively trivial to modern and thus only merit potentially up to 20-something years of protection while they now may need ... 80ish? I'd assume production of essentially any work would be more of a PITA and riskier in 1780.
The law is a mutable, ever changing thing. New technology invariably leads to updates to the legal framework of society. Legal is not the same thing as ethical, moral, or right.
Of course it is. The work should therefore be on changing the law, not rug-pulling authors who are the real people who get hurt by this. They don't like the big publishers either.
Unfortunately, the reality is our legal system is largely subject to regulatory capture at this point. Moneyed interests(corporations and oligarchs) have much louder voices(deeper pockets) than the body politic as a whole, and thus the People are subject to rules made for the benefit of those interests.
I don't think most authors are upset with IA or libraries, but rather a vocal minority of the same. Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run.
It was a publisher who filed this lawsuit, not an author.
"Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run."
This is a huge, HUGE false belief amongst the technocrats who think they are on the side of the creators. I put this in the same bucket as the 'it democratizes creativity' fallacy.
It might have been true right up until every techbro decided it was totally fine to scrape every bit of creativity off the web – legally and illegally – and repackage it into an AI model.
The publishers are bad, agreed, but at least there's a framework for artists to make a penny for every buck. Today it's open season on every author, illustrator, photographer, and writer.
Yes, exactly. Imagine spending your life developing something so brilliant and wonderful, so well-loved that even your descendants can benefit, and then have some technocrat decide he was going to destroy that with a single keystroke.
The creators of copyright law never imagined a world where everyone could have a free library of a lifetime of books in their pocket, and where copyright would eventually be extended to make this impossible.
This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms), challenge the law in the courts as archive.org has been doing, or disobey it on principle, as the operators of Anna's archive, Z-library, and Scihub are doing, heroically and at great personal risk.