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Claudius Link

@PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey
No they weren't
"each loan corresponds to a physically purchased book held in a library "

5 September at 7:56 | Wall-to-wall | Open on infosec.exchange
9 comments
eishiya

@realn2s Was this still the case when the National Emergency Library programme was running, which started this whole thing? My impression was they they removed the loan caps entirely for that period?

5 September at 11:15 | Open on mastodon.art
Claudius Link

@eishiya
🙏🏻
True. I stay corrected. I'm not sure if the court case was restricted to that

5 September at 11:32 | Open on infosec.exchange
Peter Bronez

@realn2s @eishiya yeahhh my understanding is it went like this:

1) Internet Archive has rights to X ebooks and operates a digital library to lend them out, limited to X copies lended at a time.

2) COVID hits, IA decides to lend out infinite copies at a time, arbitrarily ignoring the X limit

3) Publishers sue

4) Court agrees with Publishers

5 September at 12:08 | Open on hachyderm.io
Peter Bronez

@realn2s @eishiya Honestly I’m pretty annoyed with the Internet Archive about this.

The Internet Archive is too important to expose it to avoidable problems like this. Lending books is outside their core value, and these legal problems drag down the whole organization.

5 September at 12:08 | Open on hachyderm.io
Peter Bronez

@realn2s @eishiya there’s a robust discussion on HN, which includes the perspective that what I consider the existing value of the Internet Archive came from fighting similar battles years ago:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4

I don’t have enough evidence to reject that.

5 September at 12:34 | Open on hachyderm.io
Peter Bronez

@realn2s @eishiya

All I know is this:

1) the marginal cost of reproducing digital information products (books, movies software) is practically zero

2) the fixed costs of producing them, with quality, remains high.

3) we don’t have good systems for rewarding high-quality production in this regime.

For more on this, read Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier.

5 September at 12:34 | Open on hachyderm.io
mkj

@PeterBronez As I recall it, your summary is broadly correct *except* for (1) which should be more like "for each book, Internet Archive legally possesses X copies, and operates a digital library to lend them out as ebooks, limited to the corresponding X copies lended at a time".

In other words, very close to loaning an item under first sale doctrine, except the intermediate step of digitizing the work and being able to loan it out at a distance.

@realn2s @eishiya

5 September at 18:04 | Open on social.mkj.earth
#

@realn2s @eishiya One of the few "old" internet projects of an internet, which I did not find fully disgusting.

And shitheads with a lot of money, power and an army of lawyers are doing their best to shut it down.

The older I get, the more of things I found important die. What's next? Wikipedia? Libreoffice? Gnome? KDE? Mozilla already made a nosedive into stupid.

5 September at 20:12 | Open on esperanto.masto.host
P J Evans

@realn2s @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey
They lent more than they held. Actual libraries don't lend books they don't hold (and that includes ILL).

5 September at 14:59 | Open on mas.to
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