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Hailey

The Internet Archive losing its appeal means one thing: pirate stuff. Pirate brazenly. There’s no point trying to do it the nice way - you’ll get shut down anyway. Copy, share, and archive to your heart’s content. It’s the only way we’re keeping digital media and our cultural memory intact.

106 comments
veetee

@hailey if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing

Simx72 :gaming_kirby5:

@vt52 @hailey in a lot of years, when information is free for real, they will put that post as a quote on a temple, with books and computers inside 😄

The Turtle

@hailey gigantic hard disks are remarkably cheap.

hobbsc

@hailey what interest are they losing? was there recent news about them? i use the shit out of the IA and i guess i'm kind of myopic.

P J Evans

@pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey
They were lending more copies than they owned. Copyright violation, AKA theft.

Michael T. Richter

@PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey Copyright violation is not theft. It is infringement. These are different words (and governed by different laws) for a reason.

Stop falling for billionaire lies.

P J Evans

@qqmrichter @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey
They didn't pay for all the books they lent. That's theft.

Michael T. Richter

@PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey No, you misunderstoon me. I said "stop falling for billionaire lies", not "continue perpetuating billionaire lies".

I know the difference is subtle, but see if you can tell them apart.

hobbsc

@qqmrichter @PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hailey there's no need for argument here, y'all. be excellent to each other.

Michael T. Richter

@hobbsc @PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hailey An argument would imply two people who know what they're talking about speaking.

One person in this exchange cannot distinguish between "infringement" and "theft" and is unequipped to have an actual argument.

Shell :fedora: :kde:

@hobbsc @qqmrichter @PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hailey It's really funny and sad at the same time how they're constantly trying to appear nonchalant and one-up each other with phrases such as "sweetcheeks" lol

hp

@shellheim

Is it then also funny and sad how you're one-upping both of them by condescending with descriptions like "funny and sad" and laughing about them?

Shell :fedora: :kde:

@hp If I say no then that would be one-upping you, so I am trapped in this loop!

You seem to have bested me stranger! AAAAAHHHHH

hp replied to Shell :fedora: :kde:

@shellheim The trick is to only imply the one-upping by asking passive-aggressive questions!

Michael T. Richter

@PJ_Evans @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey Sweetcheeks, see if you can tell me the difference between "infringement" and "theft" and why they are entirely different terms in the legal sphere.

(Hint: no you can't, apparently, since you're still babbling nonsense.)

P J Evans

@qqmrichter@mastodon.world @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey
READ MY COMMENT. It wasn't about infringement (which I understand just fine, tyvm). IT was about them LENDING OUT BOOKS THEY DIDN'T EVEN OWN.

Nick Astley

@PJ_Evans @qqmrichter @hobbsc @hailey

"the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”"

The Court is accurately describing the legal situation. These word choices are specific, limited, and literal. "Theft" is not among them on purpose, because it's not applicable.

You're welcome to try telling the Court they're wrong

maya

@PJ_Evans @qqmrichter @pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey rentseeking parasites do not improve anyone’s lives, so I don’t understand why anyone would repeat their nonsensical talking points

Claudius Link

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

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?

Claudius Link

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

#

@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.

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).

stefan
@pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey

Time for a little rant on the topic.

So in general libraries only really lend out as many digital copies as they have physical books. Which the pubs tolerated that I suppose. I you wanted to lend more e-books any given time you need a subscription from the publishers (because thats the world we live in...) They come with a time-limited DRM so that the reader only has a certain amount of days to read the book. Afterwards (if you did not extend it) access to the book was blocked. Adobe with their system taken care of that.

The archive was or still is digitizing books they have physical copies to lend them out one-to-one. That certainly already stretched copyright but I guess the publishers had no real legal ground to fight this. So they might just let it slide damage is minimal anyway.

In germany I am allowed to make copies of stuff I bought for personal archival, though with stipulation that no DRM has to be broken in order to do so. So I am a pirate as well lol. Most of library was obtained by removing DRM from books I bought. Some interesting side-fact. Makers of everything that can store data in any form have to pay a small fee to some authors assocition for every device they make to accomodate this right

So someone at the internet archive seemed to have the bright idea to lend out e-books in unlimited numbers. Which lead to the publishers suing them. I mean I get the archive wanted to do good by still allowing people to access knowledge while locked in home. It just comes to bite them so hard rn.

Generally their idea of digitizing and lending out older books which might have never seen digital releases and are out of print is great. Good for preservation of stuff. They just overdone it...

Oh also I want to rant about the publishers as well. They just cannot get their pockets lined enough it seems. They really like hiding behind "the poor authors that don't get paid by pirating". Its such an easy excuse.

Thing is they might have a point but likely not for the majority of authors they house.

See generally when licensing your work you basically get to two options of getting paid. Either they offer you a fixed upfront and tell you everything is said and done with this one payment. Even if they sell millions. Or they go down the royalty model where you get a certain amount per book sold.

I think most publishers will offer you a mix at these times. So they will offer a fixed payment plus some small amount per book sold. Thats atleast for physicals.

I don't know how exactly authors are paid in these digital lending arrangements. Although I dunno how it works for physical lending as well. If someone know let me know.

I just have an inkling the authors don't get much from this...
@pleaseclap @hobbsc @hailey

Time for a little rant on the topic.

So in general libraries only really lend out as many digital copies as they have physical books. Which the pubs tolerated that I suppose. I you wanted to lend more e-books any given time you need a subscription from the publishers (because...
ryan

@hobbsc@sdf.org Lost a *legal* appeal.

Kabit (/^ₓ^\) θΔ ~ 🔜ish ANE

@hailey willing to bet the internet archive losing that battle is followed up with Open AI winning theirs

They only care about copyright when it's big owners not small creators

Bo Elder

@hailey

NAS + Plex + ???? = Archived, for life.

João S. O. Bueno

@boelder @hailey yes - ut yiu have to get hold of a digital copy of whatever book, before that.

Woozle Hypertwin

@ErosBlog @hailey I could expound on that, as someone with a pretty large digital media collection (much/most of it paid for).

5klp471🌊

@hailey
Funny how I just downloaded surfshark two days ago, I started torrenting, and now this.

Funny.

5klp471🌊

@hailey
Also, I am going to have to buy some more external hard drives soon.

j_angliss

@hailey that, along with large media orgs gobbling each other up and just turning off the "paid for life" digital access with no recourse, I think we'll find a lot of this kind of activity going on.

Jessie

@hailey github.com/MiniGlome/Archive.o has been hugely beneficial to me. You get FAR higher quality output than the encrypted Adobe PDFs you can decrypt with Calibre tools.

I fear what may now be truly lost due to Archive being forced to hide things. At least a lot of books are 1hr rental so they can be downloaded, but who knows what'll disappear now

And archive has a looooot of books missing from libgen, z-library, and anna's archive.

#piracy

Bob 🇺🇲♒🐧🪖

@hailey

I need to get OJRock's torrent system working.. almost all 6,617 songs from archive...

jessica l. parsons

@hailey

Nothing has changed, except that IA's attempt to move fast and break things ended up breaking IA.

If you're going to do piracy to keep media intact, you've gotta do a decentralised system because otherwise you're painting a big target on your back.

Dr. Sbaitso

@hailey Piracy already has a definition, and I don't have a boat.

Now it's just independent archiving.

(and fuck yes I would download a boat)

Cy
Buying ideas is not nice, never has been nice. It's as nasty as can be. You're a bad person for giving anyone a single dime over it, especially if you felt like it made you safer, not in danger.

If only there was a way to share files where random goons couldn't pin down your IP address...
MARIOiVARGAS

@hailey "You can pirate to your hearts content with a VPN IP and its cheaper than any streaming service. Until we meet again!"

-Skeletor

João S. O. Bueno

@hailey "copyright" thing is only worth for bigcorps.

Remember a time before google IPO, when "do no evil" was at least spelled out by them, they had the "google books" initiative - that was also shutdown, becoming just an useless index, DESPITE having all the books digitized.

The Peter Pan of Nerdery™ 🇦🇺

@hailey Oh NOW we can do that? Awesome. (slowly and laboriously plugs in and turns on eighty terabytes of storage that has been gathering dust on a shelf prior to this event)

João S. O. Bueno

@hailey
Also, for all your kindle ebooks - there is one "gray" way to remove DRM of them for personal use.
One'd rather _DO_ it will all their purchased books, before one day amazon just flag you account for, say, _one_ improper word in a review comment, and you get locked out of ALL books you may have purchased from them, during a lifetime.

Hackulaura Fang

@hailey It's 's not piracy if it belongs in a museum! Then you're just a digital archaeologist!

JoD

@hailey PDFDrive and all its iterations gonna be soooo busy.

Michael T. Richter

@hailey@hails.org I came to the conclusion that the only ethical consumption was pirated consumption over a decade ago.

Shinjuku Nightdrive

@hailey "Justice" systems always go against the people, freedom and knowledge sharing. They're a seminal part of the problem Itself.
That being said, let sail the digital seas. 🏴‍☠️

Mystery Babylon

@hailey I hope people follow your advice and rip off as much stuff as they can. SO much of the culture of the past twenty years is in two or three ephemeral places, and no one officially being allowed to archive it means that a bunch of us need to UN-officially archive it.

Keith 🇦🇺

@hailey I have been considering keeping ebooks & PDF of all my books / graphic novels. I have this weird feeling it's going to be necessary... Is it wrong to say Anna's Archive ftw?

Zac

@hailey people have been paying for stuff all this time?

Drop Bear

@hailey
A physical book can be copied with little more than the camera in a mobile 'phone. Is copyright past its 'best before' date?

wired.com/story/internet-archi

#copyright
#TotalitarianCapitalism

meepअर 🪔
@hailey

corpos make plagerism machines and then have a fit when you copy a few words
mkj

@ForiamCJ One of the reasons why I don't pay for ebooks that are DRM-encumbered.

Same with music.

I'm fine with paying a fair price for things that I enjoy. But if I pay for it, the seller had better give me something I can keep and use *without* relying on the seller, the seller's service, specific software that might not even run a decade from now, etc etc.

Non-DRM'd files in standardized formats generally meet that bar. DRM-encumbered files virtually never do.

@hailey

Pope Bob

@hailey "pirate" everything and redistribute.

Niavy :bearn: :verified:

@hailey
Hachette belongs to a French billionaire who owns a media group and uses it as a far right loudspeaker. He's even manoeuvring to propagate these ideas through Hachette school books and through a "news" channel that he transformed into an opinion channel. We 🇫🇷 now use to compare CNews to Fox News.

Pēteris Krišjānis

@hailey I have pretty much resigned to:
* buy more indie stuff in PDF/FLAC format and store it offline;
* get some classics which I have owned over the years ripped, or gained from unsavoury arrrrrr sea shippin arrrr sites;
* give zero fucks about "copyright is sacred" in any shape or form. Authorship is sacred, copyright is pretty much dead to me;

Tagaziel

@hailey
In other words, keep circulating the tapes!
@rysiek

Σɛʔɑ
@hailey if you dont want disney to kill your wife, piracy is recommended too!
Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️ 🏳️‍🌈 🔞

@hailey This was always the only way. Playing nice has never worked anywhere ever under capitalism.

If and when we organise ourselves together politically and economically in a better way then we can all be nice together.

rakoo
@hailey

To add to your pouint: societies change when the equilibrium about an idea changes. If sharing becomes so common that everyone does it and it is seen as a normal activity, the equilibrium changes.

Share your obscure bootlegs, but also your torrenting tutorials.
araly

@hailey i hear a whisper in the winds of an archive, one from someone named anna, you could even say it was anna's archive, even maybe dot org.

i'm not saying you can't find any books you want on it easily, newspapers, comics..., and i'm especially not inviting anyone who has some hard drive space to help hoard it all. by total coincidence there might even be a neat little tool on the website to generate files in need of a torrential new home

if only such a project existed

L'optimist

@hailey Yup, pirating is caring 🏴‍☠️ ❤️

Voynich B3 Iteration

@hailey@hails.org why, how and when did The Internet Archive lose its appeal?

Also, YES. Culture shouldn't be only for the ones who can afford it. just like Hakita said.

gocu54

@hailey Oh great. At least there's justification now.

Riley S. Faelan

@gocu54 This is not the first time that a megapublisher took a copyright hatchet to an important public service.

@hailey

gocu54

@riley @hailey If I could pirate safely without ending up in handcuffs, I 100% would.

xaph but smaller 🐁

@hailey me, seeding torrents for all four seasons of infinity train with no share limit

Pxl Phile

@hailey that also means we need to have directions not only to pirate warez/artefacts/etc but also services that connect there. We need that too but the landscape is so effing broad

Marc Thomas

@hailey I need to read through what happened more thoroughly. I don’t fully understand what service IA was offering that is being shut down. But from what I have read it looks like it was essentially an ebook rental program.

To your statement though. I buy all my ebooks through the kobo store or similar and then remove the DRM on them so that I properly own them. Same with movies and tv. I buy through iTunes then strip the DRM.

I avoid pirating, but I definitely don’t oppose the act. I’m in a financial position where I can afford to pay the cost of the media. Not everyone is. But I also refuse to “rent/lease” anything I’ve purchased on the whims of the seller.

@hailey I need to read through what happened more thoroughly. I don’t fully understand what service IA was offering that is being shut down. But from what I have read it looks like it was essentially an ebook rental program.

To your statement though. I buy all my ebooks through the kobo store or similar and then remove the DRM on them so that I properly own them. Same with movies and tv. I buy through iTunes then strip the DRM.

CuriosityCat

@hailey

NO. Backup of websites, books & other media out of copyright & in the public domain, yes - but NOT artists’ / authors’ copyrighted material. That is THEFT. That is taking the food from their mouths & tearing down the roof over their head.

There are so many LEGAL ways to get so much, incl the despicably low prices A will sell for; if you can’t find a legal way, MAKE one, such as campaigning for PLR (public lending rights) in your country.

NEVER SUPPORT STEALING SOMEONE’S LIVELIHOOD.

Sven Slootweg

@hailey In situations like these, I always think about how many people like to talk of the "social contract", and how that mysteriously only ever gets invoked to place obligations on individuals, and never on states or corporations (as evidenced here once again).

Like, people aren't outright pirating because cultural interests are supposed to be balanced by legal exceptions. And leaving aside whether that has ever actually been balanced, if publishers now decide to object to that balance... well.

The Great Ape :transFlag: arc

@hailey@hails.org Book publishers are the scum of the earth. I wish all authors just let me send them money directly for their work. Their hostility towards actual preservation via DRM and "purchasing" (actually lending) ebooks online is fucking ridiculous. I haven't bought a book in years now because of shit like this, this is just icing on the cake.

eris
@hailey it would be a shame if people looked at the r/zlib megathread for ways to pirate books
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