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internetarchive

More than 500,000 books have been removed from the Internet Archive's lending library due to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged titles. πŸ“š Our patrons have shared powerful stories about how this loss has impacted them, and we need your help to make a change.

Sign our open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to these books. πŸ“–βœοΈ #LetReadersRead

πŸ‘‰ blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/le

81 comments
:baba_a::baba_n::baba_o::baba_n::wide_i::baba_c::baba_u::baba_s:
@internetarchive IA, I love you and I use your site. But you done goofed up and I hope you don't do what you did again going forward.
翠星石
@internetarchive To be honest, it's not necessarily a bad thing that less people are being induced to run proprietary malware that implements digital handcuffs for the "loan" anti-feature.

If you choose to share a book, it should be shared without handcuffs.
Hi I'm Sean

@internetarchive is there a way to see the list of 500,000 books?

pinkdrunkenelephants

@internetarchive Is there a complete list of every book affected by the ruling?

[DATA EXPUNGED]
Arcturax πŸ¦‡

@internetarchive the problem with open letters is they are open to just throw them away and not care. We need fundamental change. Corps can embargo works for a century or more under current copyright law. We need a change. Anything more than 50 years should become public domain no matter what it is. To ask for longer is just pure greed.

Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares πŸ¦πŸ™ πŸ‡±πŸ‡§πŸ§― πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦
@internetarchive normally i refuse to sign change.org petitions, due to their being hosted on cloudflare
but i'll make an exception this one time , because I support you *that much*

#letReadersRead
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Vibia Valentine

@internetarchive It fucking sucks.

Imagine if the civilization that comes after us can't access a lot of our information and arts because the companies copystriked them before the meteor hit.

DELETED

@vibia
After the wars, and the blame, and the anguish, and also a few meteors, those few left realised something: they had forgotten how to make margaritas. In fact, to stay warm, they'd burned all the books about cocktails. They looked online, but all that was not copyrighted was old memes about cats and cheeseburgers, yet more things they missed dearly. So they cried, and these tears reminded them of margaritas, so they cried into their own glasses, said cheers!, and drank deeply.

[DATA EXPUNGED]
karen coyle

@internetarchive There is so much variety in the thing we call "book" and what is covered (uniformly) by (c). In the Google Books project, many academic authors stated they wanted their books to be available, even for free. And in some instances, factual books have been shown to warrant less protection than fiction. We need a revision of (c) that is more realistic and also that actually promotes science and the useful arts.

P J Evans

@kcoyle @internetarchive
Google Books does a poor job of digitizing. They never get fold-out pages.

karen coyle

@PJ_Evans @internetarchive I also want to point out that scanned books are a much poorer reading experience than e-books - it's just a photograph of book pages, with maybe some un-reviewed OCR text behind it. Fine perhaps for some searching, discovery of a proper noun in a large amount of text, but we can't promote careful reading with this technology. I hope that someone is working on a way to turn these images into actual book text.

P J Evans

@kcoyle @internetarchive
That's why I prefer the scanned image to OCR'd test. (I had a job, for a while, fixing OCR'd text in insurance laws. Some of the output was actually funny, like "legal obligation" becoming "lethal obligation" and "District" getting scrambled in to "Omelet".)

karen coyle

@PJ_Evans @internetarchive The text can be really garbled. Note that it is offered to the visually impaired and I would like to hear how well it is working for them. When I look at it, it's a mess for things like tables of contents; plain text renders better, but there are still errors. Could something be set up where the text could be corrected by humans?

🀯Matera the Mad🀯

@internetarchive Server's having a bad hair day - takes a couple tries, but I got'er. 😜

Tovarich EmmyNoether

@internetarchive Ah, that may be why I couldn't manage to source a pdf of Dworkin's Intercourse which I was trying to track down today.

PKPs Powerfromspace1

@internetarchive peeps ☝️ first they came for .... unno the rest

Greg Johnson

@internetarchive I’m sorry, but the Lending Library itself goes against the best spirit of IA. These are hundreds-year-old books in the PD.

Timothy Green

@internetarchive What should publishers do next? Ban libraries?

I think the real issue is that they're afraid of digital works being stolen by unscrupulous individuals who would try to "hack the system", as it were, like keeping an overdue book from the library. Thing is, they don't know how this works - if a book is overdue at a library, you can't get more books until you return the overdue book. Same as with the Archive's own library, and even though I don't "check out" works from the Archive (I usually try to find the free-to-keep-forever stuff for my purposes), I can't imagine Archive not implementing a similar system to prevent digital theft.

Even so, just to be blunt, copyright sucks. Companies have been abusing their copyright privileges for decades, and it's waaay past time it was stopped for good.

@internetarchive What should publishers do next? Ban libraries?

I think the real issue is that they're afraid of digital works being stolen by unscrupulous individuals who would try to "hack the system", as it were, like keeping an overdue book from the library. Thing is, they don't know how this works - if a book is overdue at a library, you can't get more books until you return the overdue book. Same as with the Archive's own library, and even though I don't "check out" works from the Archive (I...

Jordan Mechner

@internetarchive I've signed and donated. As an author, I'm VERY concerned about preserving access to the vast body of work (including out-of-print and public-domain books) that is in danger of becoming unfindable.

I'm MUCH LESS concerned that having my own works be available in a nonprofit online library like the Internet Archive could somehow cost me sales or hurt my bottom line. With all respect, I believe the publishers' lawsuit is wrong, and contrary to the values we share.

Jennifer

@internetarchive if you want to read one of those book, check it out from a library that actually paid the author for the book, or buy it. Authors don't write books as a charity project and deserve to be paid for their work unless they give it away for free.

Max Almonte

@internetarchive give us the list and let's start pirating the hell outta those books!

Greg Johnson

@internetarchive I’ll say again that the LL goes against the best spirit of IA. A library holding on to PD works and titrating access to them serves the same function as museums who make Wikipedia afraid to use 200-yo portraits in bios of famous people.

rrb

@internetarchive @joncamfield But if people start reading books they could start thinking. If current events show us anything, it is that no one wants people to think.

DJF/Sage/Tunnel_Rat

@internetarchive
I support this cause/your lawsuit. However, I will not intentionally, willingly give my name, email address, and or any other info to Change.org again/any more.

Paul Bond

@internetarchive I appreciate the effort to appeal to publishers, but wouldn't it be better to lobby Congress to amend copyright law to give libraries permission to engage in CDL?

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