[cmiles74]

How was the CDL hurting working authors? A library bought the book, paying the publisher and the author. The IA scanned the book for digital lending, this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out.

I understand the court decided this wasn't okay. That aside, how was it hurting working authors?

[mumblemumble]

The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers.

It also discusses that there is a very good reason why digital libraries don't typically get to have perpetual rights to a work at the retail (or used) price for a print book. Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks. The ruling points out that publishers originally sold ebooks to libraries at the same pricing as print books, but abandoned the practice because they discovered that it was not financially sustainable.

And that's ultimately where the harm comes in. The IA is trying to create a loophole that subverts the income stream of all the people who work on a book by offering derivative works - which are never fair use; fair use is for transformative works - without paying the market's customary price for acquiring rights to create and distribute derivative works.

(As an aside, when I see authors speaking for themselves on these sorts of issues they will typically point out that editors and typesetters and cover artists and all the other folks who work on a book also deserve to get paid. It seems to only be people who are tokenizing authors for rhetorical purposes who want fixate on authors specifically and erase the value-adding contributions of "the publishers".)

[kmeisthax]

> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks.

As someone who understands the ruling and why IA lost completely, I still hate this argument, because it gets the history backwards. When first sale was put into (case)law, ebooks didn't exist. First sale doesn't exist because "oh, well, the book wears out eventually". It exists because you have an ownership interest in that copy of the book and copyright law has to respect your physical ownership of that property. Once you have sold a copy, your rights as a copyright owner are exhausted.

With digital distribution, the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever. And this is mainly because the technology was made after the law was horrifically unbalanced (or re-balanced) in favor of large publishers. CDL absolutely has no leg to stand on in the courts, but it is the sort of thing that would make sense as the legal basis for a new rights exhaustion regime that was properly legislated in Congress.

> As an aside, when I see authors speaking for themselves on these sorts of issues they will typically point out that editors and typesetters and cover artists and all the other folks who work on a book also deserve to get paid. It seems to only be people who are tokenizing authors for rhetorical purposes who want fixate on authors specifically and erase the value-adding contributions of "the publishers".

I've talked about the habit of copyright reformists / abolitionists ignoring the "creative working class" in the past. The headline artist on a work is most likely to be able to survive off non-royalty income because they have social capital that the creative working class does not. On the other hand, publishing firms don't give a shit about the creative working class either! A lot of media companies are run by people who think generative AI is going to let them eliminate entire classes of creative labor and replace it with ChatGPT prompts.

I'm not entirely sure referencing the opinions of headline artists helps either. In contrast to (but not negating) what you've said, I've heard authors complain endlessly about publishers, too. Things like, oh, we don't want to fund the third book in your trilogy, but we also aren't going to let you trip the rights reversion clause in your contract, so you just can't finish the story. Shit like that. Publishers' valuations are based at least in part on their total IP catalog, so a work they don't want to touch anymore is worth more to them dead than alive.

[hilbert42]

"the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever"

Ultimately, the law will either have to change to be fairer and recognize the buyer's investment or digital copying (piracy) will overwhelm it. It's not if but when (technology almost makes that axiomatic).

This will not happen immediately but as US influence in the world declines other fairer paradigms will emerge. As we've seen already, probably about one third of the planet's population pays little heed of copyright law, or it does so in name only—and that number will only increase with time (and as copying tech improves even further).

The US and Western countries have a choice, be fairer and less greedy or suffer the consequences.

[MetaWhirledPeas]

This whole thing is backwards. Selling books began in a time when there was inherent value in distributing books, meaning there was no other way to read a book than to purchase or borrow a physical copy.

The money followed the value.

The value of distribution is no longer there. We are trying to push yarn up a chimney.

I like living in a world where authors make a living by writing books, but if the inherent value isn't there then it's all fake, fake fake.

This is the same predicament we've been in for years with other forms of media, but those with big corp backing have managed to synthesize value through various forms of sabotage like DRM or linking their software to a remote server somehow. We've come to accept it because there's value in dodging all of the nonsense.

Consumers will always be the barometer for fairness; if they perceive value, they will pay for it. But all the controversy is about fairness for the authors and publishers. If authors can figure out some money-making scheme then great, but let's not concern ourselves with "fairness" for the author because that went out the window a long time ago. This is all just a big money grabbing game at this point. (And what they really mean is fairness for popular authors anyway.)

Maybe the future will look different. We need authors, we need editors, but do we need publishers? Probably not. Maybe a trend will form where groups or individuals commission a work from an author, taking the place of the publisher on a more ad hoc basis. Or maybe concepts like Patreon will evolve to better compensate authors. I don't know exactly what it will look like, but I do know that targeting groups like the Internet Archive is nothing more than a delay tactic.

[hilbert42]

Thank you for your comment, I agree with everything you've said. I come to the matter as a consumer so my emphases come from that perspective but I'd suggest there's very little difference in our views.

You may be able to gauge this from my earlier post where I've advocated that creators should receive fair recompense for their work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41455357. (I've written on this topic many times over the years and I've always advocated creators should receive fair and reasonable dues.)

I agree with you about it all being backwards. Unfortunately, it's a fact that wasn't helped by opportunistic creators such as Hugo in the 1880s as I pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456596. That said, times were different back then and despite my criticism of Hugo et al they had a valid case. Same can be said of Gilbert & Sullivan and the pirating of their operettas (see 'background'): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance.

What happened in 1886 at Berne was overshoot albeit an understandable one. The trouble is that once in place international law is essentially entrenched forever, revising it is is nigh on impossible. Unfortunately—but understandably—rights holders aren't going to give ground without a struggle. This I reckon is the crux of the problem and it's primarily the publishers who refuse to give ground—not so much content creators.

The issues are many and they range across a vast field—from how much does a creator owe back to society from it having nurtured and educated him/her through to publishers being bloody-minded over protecting orphaned works, through to DRM, through to equity/arguments over access to information which has educational implications—thus ultimately it's of strategic importance at a national level (China's lax IP laws have helped it enormously, the US and Western nations ought to take note).

As I see it, content creators and consumers need to join forces to arrive at a mutually satisfactory agreement and I see little room for both Big Tech and existing authoritarian publishers in such an arrangement. (And I agree with you, 'consumers will always be the barometer for fairness; if they perceive value, they will pay for it'.)

I'd add that both parties ought to encourage and foster this symbiotic relationship ASAP, as at best both will benefit, at worst it'll be the least destructive option.

What I fear most is that copying tech will become so easy that any sense a human can experience will be able to be copied. Very soon one will be able to capture just about everything one sees, reads or does with great ease, copying by default will become the norm. This could easily become very destructive and not benefit anyone, creators, users and society will all be worse off.

Copyright, IP and patents are very complex matters that just can't be left to hip pocket arguments and or gut reactions over property rights and it's time the debate matured to reflect this. That won't be easy given that money is involved.

Like you I don't know how it will end up but it's clear that things could go horribly wrong if sense doesn't prevail. Let's hope it does.

[MetaWhirledPeas]

This is my first time hearing of the 1886 Berne Convention, very interesting. And the United States did not join until 1989.

> What I fear most is that copying tech will become so easy that any sense a human can experience will be able to be copied.

For many people and mediums this is already the case. What bothers me most is that this normalizes outlaw behavior. That is usually an indication that the law is wrong, but in the meantime it erodes our collective morals.

[vel0city]

> It exists because you have an ownership interest in that copy of the book and copyright law has to respect your physical ownership of that property.

Right, copyright law needs to respect your ownership of that physical property. That bound collection of paper. That stamped piece of vinyl. That reel of magnetic tape. That plastic disc. The copyright protects the ideas and creative stuff on that medium, but not the actual medium itself. You don't actually own any of the ideas that medium contains, but you do own the actual medium.

But what property do you actually own when you "buy" a digitally distributed work? What is the "that" in this case? A collection of bits that are indistinguishable from every other copy of the file? Isn't that what is actually copyrighted, and not the "that"?

[kmeisthax]

Speaking purely in the realm of Law, and what arguments will get past a court, "buying" a digitally distributed work does not confer any ownership. At the bare minimum, what is actually being purchased when you buy a digitally distributed work is a combination of a license and a service. They transmit the work to you, and you have a license to copy that transmission and store it indefinitely, for your own use. There is no "that" being sold, you are making all the copies yourself, so you need permission to make those copies. And permission cannot be resold.

In the law, a "license" is just permission from a copyright holder to do something. There are no standard terms like there is with a "sale", because licenses are usually tied to a contract[0]. And contracts can have really arbitrary provisions[3]. For example, fair use says you don't need permission from a copyright holder in order to review a game. But if that game is only available digitally, the copyright owner solely dictates the terms upon which the game is sold, through contracts and licensing. And that contract could absolutely just say "you agree not to review the game in exchange for permission to copy the game to your hard drive and RAM[4]", in which case there is no fair use anymore. In fact, Oracle already did this[1].

The law has no counter to this because, for the vast majority of copyright case law history, nobody needed permission to purchase a physical copy of a creative work[5]. Physical media has very well established consumer rights that were codified back when copyright law wasn't nearly as blatant a power grab. Digital is very recent, and copyright law has gotten significantly stricter. It's often said that "the law needs to catch up to technology", but that usually gets said in the context of "I thought of this cool little excuse to not get permission[2] but the court won't agree". Where technology really outflanks the law is in inventing new ways to strip consumers of their rights, by turning things that didn't need permission into things that now do.

[0] US law only. In other countries licenses are treated as separate from contracts, but this is mainly something plaintiff lawyers have to remember when drafting complaints, since "doing something without permission" is copyright infringement but "getting permission, but not fulfilling your end of the bargain" is breach of contract here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause

[2] Which will never be granted, mind

[3] The only real restriction on contracts being that you can't literally sell yourself into chattel slavery. BTW, in unrelated news, never upload your brain into a computer if you happen to like the 13th Amendment.

[4] DON'T GET ME STARTED ON MAI SYSTEMS CORP VS PEAK COMPUTER INC

[5] Thomas Edison tried.

[vel0city]

I agree with pretty much everything you said here. However, I'm kind of hoping my comment would draw out more on this idea.

> Speaking purely in the realm of Law

Let's argue this from the basis of expanding the ideas of copyright to something newer and better for this digital age. As mentioned, these days we're really just buying licenses. How do we better define property rights with this new(ish) concept of ownership to help individuals continue to have useful rights while not just suggesting copyright overall is now meaningless and creators no longer have any protections? Do we codify some basic rights of ownership around what a license is, what it means, and how one transfers ownership of it?

[BlueTemplar]

Speaking of property-adjacent rights, there's this tricky ongoing legal battle :

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

[kmeisthax]

Good question. While I personally would not consider "suggesting copyright overall is now meaningless" to be a failure[0], there's no way in hell anything that might even remotely harm industry revenue would ever make it through Congress, European Parliament, and/or the Japanese Diet; much less survive challenges in the court or WTO. So the only reforms I can actually suggest are marginal things like this.

Anyway.

First you need to legally define the kinds of licenses we care about. There's a bunch of very good reasons why permission can't be sold, so we want to make it clear that we're only talking about things that function like a sale. That is, one-time purchases of works that are downloaded to a device and whose license grants fall within normal use of that work. This is the sort of thing that needs to be drafted water-tight because the industry absolutely will search for excuses to not comply with the law.

Second, we need to define how a transfer can be done and who needs to honor it. This has per-work and per-service considerations, especially in games[1], which have anticheat and toxic player removal. There are times where a copyright owner has a legitimate interest in taking away the thing you bought because you are ruining the experience for everyone else. So we need carveouts for our carveouts, both of which need to be carefully drafted to not interfere with anticheat.

And this is only considering digital-to-digital first sale. That's easy to do because the systems already exist to revoke and delete your ownership over digital copies of works; you just aren't allowed to use them for first sale purposes. We're ultimately just dictating that certain kinds of DRM license files have a legal mechanism to transfer between owners.

Physical-to-digital schemes like the IA's Controlled Digital Lending pose an additional problem: there's nothing to physically enforce the destruction or disabling of the physical copy when you convert it to a digital one and lend it. The book doesn't refuse to open because someone has it open in Adobe Editions. Everything is done on the honor system and there's massive incentives to cheat CDL. The discovery on the IA lawsuit showed that they basically had never complied with their own legal theory. They had partner libraries who were counting copies of books as digitally loanable without actually taking them out of circulation, and when IA had discovered this on their own, they never did anything to take that library out of the system.

An actually legal CDL regime would need infrastructure to support itself. I'm talking legally qualified DRM banks that could lock up or burn books in exchange for DRM limited files that accurately represented the time in which the physical side of the book was inaccessible. That's... still extremely complicated. Actually, screw CDL. If we're talking about amending the law, there is a far easier way to go about fixing the problem with ebook lending: Book Communism!

Compulsory licensing is a scheme in which the government sets the price of a specific kind of copyright license. If you pay that amount of money to the copyright owner, you automatically have that permission, they can't say no. Naturally, copyright owners would liken this to theft, but they thought your dad's VCR was a home-invading rapist[2], so I don't consider their opinions on the subject to be meaningful. The idea is actually pretty straightforward: having a government-set license price makes licensing a lot more straightforward. Creative work owners can't make silly demands of users or withhold shit because their """strategy""" that quarter was to keep something off the market or sell exclusivity[3].

The specific imbalance that IA tried to fix with CDL is that libraries, being public services run by local governments, do not have negotiating leverage for favorable ebook lending terms with major publishers. "Just lend out physical books digitally" fixes the problem for libraries but the infrastructure needed to make this not unfair to authors or publishers is silly. Why can't we just have the federal government say, OK, we'll sell licenses in which any library can pay $X to the owner of a given book and then digitally lend it out Y times or for Z days? The Copyright Office or some administrative judge can determine fair values for X, Y, and Z.

[0] For one thing, if you are a small artist, you effectively do not have copyright protection because the enforcement costs for a single infringer greatly exceed your total revenues. Copyright is already a failed system.

[1] For example, if reselling whole accounts is legal, then I can buy hundreds of accounts, play the game I want to cheat in on each one, and switch accounts whenever I get banned.

If reselling individual licenses is legal, then after I get banned, I can resell the license - which continues to remain valid - and get my money back so I can repurchase the game on a new account with a fake identity.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...

[3] A related wrinkle in the CDL story is that publishers really, really hate libraries. Not because they let people read books for free - in fact, library circulation is actually really good advertising for sequels that won't hit libraries right away. The problem is that libraries are run by book fans, so they're going to recommend books they like, not what the publisher needs to sell that month.

[iggldiggl]

> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks.

While physical books might indeed wear out, I think they wear out way slower than what current library e-book licenses might suggest (apparently two years or 26 lends seems to be popular in the US? – my library has tons of books older than two years, and back from when they used to stamp the return date in the back, quite a few books had hit 26 lends without falling apart yet).

[mezzie2]

Also, physical books can be rebound/repaired. The binding is usually the point of failure, and even smaller libraries often have rebinding equipment. I worked in libraries for over a decade and I could probably count on one hand how many books (as opposed to CDs/DVDs/other materials) that were weeded due to condition versus because they simply weren't used or contained out of date/wrong information.

[wbl]

IANAL but I don't think the work is legally a derivative any more than a JPEG of the Mona Lisa is. In US law those are the same for copyright. MS Word vs PDF shouldn't matter so neither should this.

[mumblemumble]

The ruling's section on transformativeness explains the distinction. Note that "derivative works" under US copyright law works differently from how it gets defined in typical open source licenses.

My understanding is that, for the purposes of determining fair use, a derivative work is substantially the same thing but in a different format. Transformative work must involve significant additional creative contribution "Changing the medium of a work is a derivative use rather than a transformative one." They cite previous case law that holds repackaging a print book as an e-book as a "paradigmatic example of a derivative work." The law also offers some paradigmatic examples of transformative work, such as criticism, commentary and scholarship.

Based on all of that, I would guess that, for the purposes of copyright law, a JPEG of a painting is absolutely a derivative work and not a transformative one.

[tptacek]

Just to be clear: works that are transformative are a subset of derivative works. They're all derivative works.

[bryanrasmussen]

The only way an ebook of a novel is not derivative in the same way a JPEG is not derivative of the Mona Lisa is if we are talking about the author's original handwritten version that just came up for auction

on edit: actually I also think that a JPEG of the Mona Lisa is derivative, but just noting that the value we ascribe to the Mona Lisa is something like the concept of Mana for art https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

[asadotzler]

>The ruling discusses this starting on page 33. The gist is that they set up a non-transformative service that is substantially equivalent to competing ebook services and CDLs, but unlike those it is not paying the customary price to publishers.

The question was "how is this hurting authors" and your reply is to carry water for publishers?

[bryanrasmussen]

as lousy and inefficient a system as the one we mainly have is, as a theoretical rule in this system authors get some share of the money that goes to publishers.

[Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0]

From TFA:

> However, the Internet Archive expanded its library project during the covid-19 pandemic. It launched the National Emergency Library, allowing an unlimited number of people to access the same copies of ebooks. That’s when the publishers banded together to file the lawsuit, targeting both online libraries.

The digital copy could be checked out by many people at the same time.

[s-video]

NEL was a brief deviation from the usual CDL one-borrower-at-a-time system. Parent asked how CDL, not NEL, hurt authors.

[cmiles74]

The pandemic lending is a different thing, it's not "CDL".

[matwood]

If you read the original ruling, IA lost control of the physical book so they weren't actually doing CDL.

This is why this case was so frustrating. In order to challenge long standing thought, you need to build an airtight case. Lapses like the above and then steering users to buying used copies from BWB shows IA was not ready for a case.

[colejohnson66]

Maybe not the CDL, but the "national emergency library" that ignored the one-book-per-person limit definitely went too far.

[cmiles74]

This particular ruling deals with the CDL.

[tptacek]

It deals with both, right? Publishers sued over the NEL.

[cmiles74]

Copying text out of the PDF from my phone is not fun! The gist is that since the CDL isn't okay then they don't really need to deal with NEL as it's predicated on the legality of the CDL (pages 15-16).

The NEL gets a couple of sentences, the bulk of the ruling is about the CDL

[tptacek]

Wasn't NEL the basis of the original suit?

[Teknomancer]

Yes! The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the prior 2023 ruling against IA, the case stemming from the IA's National Emergency Library (NEL) initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed users to access digitized books without the usual lending caps. This prompted the lawsuit from several major publishers, who argued that this violated copyright law. The appeals court rejected the IA's argument that its activities fell under the "fair use" doctrine, specifically noting that the IA digital library acted as a substitute for original books, depriving publishers and authors of revenue. While the court acknowledged that the Internet Archive's activities were non-commercial in nature, it still concluded that the wide availability of digitized books due to unregulated replication harmed the market for the original works. This decision has significant implications for the IA’s future operations, potentially limiting its ability to continue its broad digitization efforts without publisher consent. The ruling reinforces the legal rights of publishers and authors to control the reproduction and distribution of their works, even in digital formats. The Internet Archive has few remaining legal options, with the Supreme Court being one of its last possible avenues for appeal. Meanwhile, the organization faces additional lawsuits related to its music digitization efforts, those litigations are ongoing. The ruling today highlights a broader conflict between the rights of creators and the push for wider public access to information, with the court siding firmly with the former. The case sets a strong precedent for how copyright law is applied to digital libraries in the U.S. moving forward.

[boomboomsubban]

No. The lawsuit was over the CDL, the NEL was barely mentioned in the judgment or really the arguments.

If it was over the NEL, the case would have been over ~4 years ago when they shut down the NEL.

[healsdata]

Because other libraries have licensing agreements that benefit authors on a different basis than "you sold one book to one library".

You may argue that that shouldn't be the paradigm, but one library unilaterally changing it denies the authors their say on the change, either through licensing or legislation.

[codedokode]

With physical books the library doesn't need to pay anything to lend it; with digital books it has to pay for every view. Why is it so? Shouldn't the buyers of digital books have the same rights, i.e. the right to re-sell or lend it?

As for authors, nothing changes here: libraries lent their physical books without paying before.

[Mindwipe]

It is worth noting this is a US only oddity.

In almost every other country in the world libraries do pay a royalty to lend books.

It's notable that the IA service was not geofiltered to the US only.

[account42]

AFAIK the IA does not operate outside the US. The notion that every entity needs to either follow foreign laws or make sure people from other jurisdictions cannot acces their services is absurd.

[Mindwipe]

You don't like it, but that doesn't make it absurd. It is how every country in the world operates with sites coming into their borders.

The IA doesn't geofilter it's availability, and therefore it is subject to the laws of the country it does any substantive distribution to, same as every other website in the entire world.

[riffraff]

The difference between physical books and digital books is apparently wear

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452031

[iggldiggl]

Although at least in the local library that I'm familiar with, wear is nowhere near as severe as what e-book lending licenses might suggest. From a quick search in the US those often seem restricted to two years or twenty-six lends. The former condition seems totally ridiculous (my library has tons of books older than two years) and even the latter seems questionable – from back when they used to stamp the return dates into the books [1], quite a few books had managed 26 lendings without falling apart yet.

[1] My favourite library branch in my town is, while associated with the city library system, partly volunteer-run and was consequently the last to computerise its lending system, and therefore kept on using the classic system until I think somewhere around 2010 or so, whereas the rest of the city library had already switched in the 90s.

[RobotToaster]

> from back when they used to stamp the return dates into the books [1], quite a few books had managed 26 lendings without falling apart yet.

I remember seeing books that had been lent easily over 100 times.

Not to mention a book can be rebound by a library if it's purchase price is high.

[jonhohle]

Spouse of a former librarian here. Books are circulated on average 25-30 times before they need to be replaced or removed due to wear.

While I understand the plight of publishers, I also think digital rights favor them too much, atm.

[RobotToaster]

> that benefit authors on a different basis

It benefits the publishing megacorps on a different basis, authors make very little on book sales or loans.

[asadotzler]

Which benefits? Support your claims.

[Kamq]

> one library unilaterally changing it denies the authors their say on the change

I mean, sure, but ~270 congressmen declaring it would also change it, and it would be viewed as legitimate. Quite probably against the same level of protest.

The amount of say the authors have doesn't actually seem to impact legitimacy much. That only seems to vary with the amount of power the person declaring the change has.

[rodgerd]

I was looking for a clip from a trailer for a film that is available on physical media, streaming, and was in cinemas two years ago.

IA had the whole film online as bluray quality rip.

What's the difference between the IA and Kim Dotcom at that point?

[pbhjpbhj]

You'll also have to ask what's the difference between Google Drive (or any other online file store) and IA here though. I've found plenty of complete copyright works on Google Drive.

Do IA respond to removal requests? Did IA staff upload that film?

For that, Google Books took works still in copyright and made copies for commercial purposes, they somehow were allowed.

The difference with Kim Dotcom is possibly that he sold (!) more movies through his activities.

[klez]

I'd say the profit motive.

You could argue that donations amount to profit, but that's a line I'd be afraid to cross.

[71bw]

>What's the difference between the IA and Kim Dotcom at that point?

None. They have, for a long time now, become a good place for outright piracy - both for downloaders and uploaders. It's nice to have such easy access to perfect DVDrips of GTA: SA v1.0 US, but... definitely NOT legal.

[pbhjpbhj]

It's legal to download if you own a copy isn't it? In USA, I mean?

[forrestthewoods]

> this digital copy could only be checked out by one person and only when the physical book was not also checked out

Even if that were the case I don’t think it’s acceptable.

Physical used goods have limitations on transfer rate. If you want a used book you have to go to the store. Or have it shipped across the country.

I adamantly oppose a global digital pool with instantaneous transfers. In that world you never need to sell more than peak concurrent users. If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.

The same argument applies to “used” digital movies and games. It’s nonsense.

[cmiles74]

This is kind of a stretch, the Internet Archives book lending program under the CDL was not like a free Amazon. Reading software is limited and not great. Check out their website for details.

https://help.archive.org/help/borrowing-from-the-lending-lib...

IMHO, people who could afford the book are unlikely to have the patience to work through this process. Indeed, downloading from a pirate site would offer a lot more flexibility for the reader.

[mixologic]

> If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.

That is precisely the agreement that existing libraries have with publishers now. The digital copy that they buy to lend out comes with restrictions on how many copies can be lent at a time, and also costs a lot more than just buying one copy of the book.

[forrestthewoods]

That's certainly not the license that Internet Archive paid for!

If we want media licenses to cost thousands of dollars so they can be loaned out digitally fine. That's something that can be fairly negotiated.

What I oppose is a regular off the shelf purchase being used for unlimited, instantaneous digital rentals. That's disastrously terrible idea.

[Dylan16807]

Then find a lawsuit that specifically goes against the instantaneous part, because a ruling that says "no lending at all" is just awful.

[forrestthewoods]

The word “lending” doesn’t even make sense with digital goods. Nothing tangible is being lent or borrowed. Another perfect copy is being allowed to be made. Ironically it might not even be the same copy! Someone “borrowing” a digital good might download a copy of a new version or in a different language.

[rockskon]

The idea is to impose the restrictions of physical goods onto the digital one.

Your idea is to eliminate the very concept of a library where ebooks are concerned.

You may want to rethink your argument.

[Amezarak]

> If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.

We have an enormous surplus of content creators and most of the content is not very good. I don't see why we need to structure our economic system such that people must be able to making a living churning out mediocre scifi/romance/mystery novels. If they can, great, but I don't think that's the goal we should be aiming for with copyright. There would still be plenty of novels turned out every year even if copyright did not exist.

> In that world you never need to sell more than peak concurrent users.

That sounds good to me, and I doubt it's really much more than the number of sales now. Many/most people would still buy their own copy anyway, just as they do today when a new book comes out.

Copyright law as structured today is destroying more art than saving it; the number of out-of-print but copyrighted works that are vanishing from human knowledge is astronomical.

[forrestthewoods]

> I doubt it's really much more than the number of sales now

Yikes. I can not possibly disrespectfully disagree more with everything you said.

Baldur's Gate 3 has sold about 15 million copies. It's peak concurrent user count on Steam is 875,343. A difference of about 20x that will continue to grow as BG3 will sell meaningful copies over the next 10 years.

Limiting sales to peak CCU is categorically insane. And deeply illogical.

And yes I am talking about a video game because the copyright laws for books and games are the same. I would expect the CCU/sales ratio for most successful books to be even larger than that of games which have a much more hyped launch day.

[Amezarak]

The people that would borrow the game from the library to play it might at best pirate it if they couldn’t get it from the library. Maybe they’d pay a few bucks tops rather than $60-80. Library game borrowers are not big game buyers in the first place.

Games can and do already get around this anyway via software, if you want to argue the laws should work differently for them then I’m open to that, but I also don’t think games matter enough on a societal scale that we should tolerate current copyright laws in order to protect video game studios over the long tail of disappearing orphaned works.

[forrestthewoods]

If your goal is to prevent orphaned works there's much better and more targeted changes that could be made to the law! Don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

> Library game borrowers are not big game buyers in the first place.

That's because today there is effectively no such thing as digital game borrowing. If there were then there would be a platform that seamlessly grants and revokes licenses on application startup/shutdown.

People just want things cheaply. Why pay $60 for a game when AmezarakGamesStore lets you play for just $5? People used to buy used discs from GameStop for $55 instead of buying a new copy for $60. Consumers don't care. They justifiably just want to spend the minimum amount of money necessary!

[pastage]

IA did not charge nor did they get revenue from their users in other ways. They did have a system to handle borrowing and make it cumbersome to read stuff. That is an important distinction.

[rockskon]

Steam effectively implemented digital game borrowing years ago. Works just fine.

[mdp2021]

Access to copies cannot be taken as negatively impacting sales. (On the contrary: access can reveal opportunities.)

[tomxor]

You're arguing against a principle that applies to physical libraries (Who also have films btw)...so are physical libraries also nonsense?

Libraries do not serve the interest of publishers (and let's just focus on publishers because if we're being real here, publishers are the ones who stand to lose money - "think of the authors" is just a distraction)... i digress, Libraries exist as a benefit to society, they aren't supposed to neatly fit into absolutist capitalist ideals.

[pineaux]

Also you are allowed to lend your book out to anybody in earth at any time you want. You have bought the book, its yours you can do with it what you want. Burn it, read it, use it as toiletpaper. You arent allowed to republish the book however and earn money on it. Or give it away for free. So the real question here is: what is the definition of publishing. Is the IA publishing?

[Ray20]

>Libraries exist as a benefit to society, they aren't supposed to neatly fit into absolutist capitalist ideals. Libraries fit perfectly fine in the absolutist capitalist ideals (because they exist as a benefit to society), it is itellectual property that are not.

[forrestthewoods]

> let's just focus on publishers

No. I'm focusing on all media - books, tv, movies, games, etc. It's one set of copyright laws.

> so are physical libraries also nonsense?

Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers. Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfer of non-degradable goods does not strike a reasonable balance.

[tomxor]

> Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfer of non-degradable goods does not strike a reasonable balance.

That's a more interesting argument. I think it's valid, abstractly at least.

> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers

Originally sought to, perhaps. However copyright has devolved into almost entirely serving the interests of the transferred owner who are overwhelmingly huge publishers.

It makes sense to me that a digital library poses an existential threat to the business model of those large publishers who have gradually moved away from obtaining or encouraging the creation of new original works (the original intention of copyright) to reselling and repackaging existing content over and over again. This is why things like DRM exist, not to prevent piracy, but one one many mechanisms serving this strategy by controlling how ordinary consumers can consume what they "bought", when, where, on what, for how long... so many types of restrictions all serving to extract the maximum economic return for each original piece of work they own - A library completely undermines that strategy, because it necessarily removes most of those mechanisms to function.

[thfuran]

The constitution explicitly states that copyright exists "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". It's not meant to be about serving the financial interests of content owners except insofar as that also benefits society.

[immibis]

That's where the brainwashing comes in: good for society === makes rich people richer

[8note]

What's missing is a requirement that any digitally published works must also be made available as physical media. Content owners can't keep their media out of public libraries by only publishing digitally. Otherwise, libraries need to be able to lend digital works

[account42]

> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers.

Not at all. Creators have no ihnerent rights that need to be balanced. Copyright is only granted with the argument that encouraging creation benefits society. That is the only argument for its existence.

[BlueTemplar]

Or we could set up an alternative system making sure that authors can make a living from their works (and not just the most popular ones either) :

https://stallman.org/mecenat/global-patronage.html