Here we go again, more hair-trigger bitching and whining from The Authors Guild and its ilk.
No matter how noble or justified the cause for copying may be, the poor little darlings just can't help themselves. They've been screaming and whinging over being supposedly hard done by with respect to copyright royalties even before that arch villain, bully and saint to copyright owners, Victor Hugo, bulldozed unfair changes to copyright through the 1886 Berne Copyright Convention.
…And 'bulldozed' is the right word; for in the early days of the 1880s consumers and end-users of copyright material essentially had no representation at the Berne Convention (as obviously one would expect), thus the power imbalance between authors/copyright holders and consumers/users of copyright material was so one-sided in favor of the former group that if the Berne Convention had been convened today with the same terms of reference as those in 1886 then its deliberations and decisions would likely be deemed to have arrived from corrupt processes.
For starters, Berne essentially never touched on matters such as the fact that authors get their ideas, life experience and knowledge mostly from the public domain and that many were even educated or gained their knowledge at public expense, and thus they should have some reciprocal if not moral obligation to the return at least some of their output back into the public domain. Instead, the Berne Convention so favored authors that they had nothing to do to justify or prove their right over the copyright of a work other than the existence of the work itself. That means that the onus always falls on consumers/users of copyrighted works to determine their status (Berne essentially encourages authors to 'double-dip' or take from both sides, it absolves them of having any obligation to anyone but tothemselves).
In effect, Hugo and his cronies used shrewdness and cunning to get every damn thing they wished for out of the Berne Convention—they had carte blanche, as there was no effective opposition to their proposals. 'Unfairness' was the order of the day.
Trouble is, this mob was so successful at Berne that ever since they've assumed that they've a god-given right to take umbrage and raise utter hell whenever anyone takes the slightest liberties with copyright—even if those actions are lawful.
You'll note there's always one theme that perennially underpins their complaints and that's how little the mean income that authors receive from royalties actually is. Well my response to that is if writing etc. brings in so little income then why do they have it as their occupation? Of course, we all know that being an author (with some exceptions) is often more a case of self-aggrandizement and wanting to be immortalized in print forever than it is to inform the world of new ideas through new works.
As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, one of the major problems in trying to achieve equitable copyright reform for everyone is—with the exception of authors and rights holders—that so few people are actually interested in the subject. Despite the fact that copyright is an important issue, the lack of widespread expertise in the subject together with the fact that little serious public debate on the matter is taking place are both significant impediments to copyright reform.
In the meantime, the whiners will continue to bitch and whinge. I reckon it's best just to ignore them.
> Trouble is, this mob was so successful at Berne that ever since they've assumed that they've a god-given right to take umbrage and raise utter hell whenever anyone takes the slightest liberties with copyright—even if those actions are lawful.
It's true, they do do that even when the actions are lawful. However, in this particular case, the Internet Archive's actions are almost certainly not lawful, although the whole "public service during coronavirus crisis" angle means that they probably won't be sued for it.
Even with controlled (one-at-a-time) digital lending, although the blog post does cite multiple arguments that it counts as fair use, it has never been tested in court and I'm not particularly optimistic. But what they're currently doing is not one-at-a-time and thus not controlled digital lending. The blog post takes care to distinguish the two things – saying CDL is their legal basis "during normal times", emphasizing the "careful controls" used with CDL to ensure books are lent to "one reader at a time" – yet conspicuously omits any explanation of why their current practice would be legal.
What's preventing a library whose physical premises are closed from saying, "Okay, there are 10 copies of this book that literally nobody can get to, we'll lend out 10 e-books," using the old Controlled Digital Lending model?
That is, what about the lockdown requires moving away from the established (even if not court-tested) one-to-one basis and making a new fair use argument about uncontrolled digital lending?
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. It's a huge waste of taxpayer money for a library, which is already closed and which is already in possession of lots of books, to share those books electronically? How is taxpayer money being used here, let alone wasted?
You know exactly how much an SRE makes. That's not what a library should be spending money on. Simply making a copy is thousands of man hours simpler than making a consumer facing online asset tracking system. You wildly misrepresent my obvious intent.
Oh, that wasn't obvious to me at all - I thought you knew that plenty of libraries already have a consumer-facing online asset tracking system already, powered by the Internet Archive, which is why these books got scanned in the first place.
"Internet Archive's actions are almost certainly not lawful<...>"
This raises an even more important point: what do citizens do when laws are enacted that do not have acceptance or are not considered as legitimate by a majority of citizens?
This is why enacting treaties such as the Berne Conventions (WIPO etc) are so damned dangerous. By their intrinsic nature, it's quite possible for small non-representative groups to have an international treaty enacted/agreed to by all 'member' states without all states even knowing the full ramifications of the said treaty are—they're forced to sign for some other 'quid pro quo' or special trade-off deal etc. Let's face it, this is how Victor Hugo and his cronies 'won' the copyright war (one must concede they played a masterful game and won outright).
As their champions know full well, once a treaty such as the Berne Convention is up and running then it is almost impossible to change it let alone have it abolished. Savvy operators such as Victor Hugo knew this from the very beginning before even entering the campaign (as that's how international politics works). This is especially the case when treaties are about matters that are not considered truly high stakes such as nuclear disarmament.
It depends on one's political stance how one views treaties that have little or no legitimacy among a majority of citizens. Some would argue that they are technically lawful and should be obeyed, others would say they're morally corrupt and thus should be disobeyed or ignored.
It's this dichotomy that's at the center of Copyright Law/Treaties today. The very fact that the 'Big Boys' consider this treaty little more than a nuisance—just noise in the grand scheme of things—is why disputes over Copyright won't end anytime soon.
The fact that such flaky and unrepresentative international treaties can exist says more about the unhealthy state of the laws in each member state. In recent decades we've all witnessed citizens' growing disrespect for institutions such as democracy and its democratic processes. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that all these problems are interrelated.
When systems of law break down or lose their legitimacy what does one do? Again, this depends on one's politics and worldview. At one end there's disorder and anarchy, at the other one becomes subservient to a corrupt state.
Take your choice. What I know is that I certainly don't want anarchy or revolution as many people die and in the long run they end up benefiting no one. Nor do I want to be subservient to law that's been 'legitimized' by corrupt non-repetitiveness processes.
The Berne Convention only took effect in the US in 1989, well after Victor Hugo was dead and quite thoroughly decomposed. (I mention the US because the Internet Archive is in the US and subject to US law, as is the Author's Guild. The National Emergency Library is tied to the duration of the US national emergency.)
The idea that the majority of people in the US are dissatisfied with the 1989 changes to US copyright law is a pretty strong one, and is at least nominally at odds with the fact that it finally got passed after a century - how did it finally become time to pass it if people were against it?
(Take care to distinguish opposing the law from being indifferent to it - certainly there are many laws that do not affect me that I'm indifferent to, such as the Railroad Retirement Act of 1974, and even if the majority of the country feels as I do, it would not really follow that that law is illegitimate.)
Yes, it's a serious problem when there are laws that the majority of citizens find illegitimate - but the contrapositive of that is that most of the time the default assumption is that for any given law, it probably is legitimate.
"The Berne Convention only took effect in the US in 1989, well after Victor Hugo was dead and quite thoroughly decomposed. <...>"
But I'm not within the US jurisdiction nor are many millions of others who use the Internet Archive. (Incidentally, I have been using the IA almost since its inception).
The fact that the IA is US-based and serves the world is a copyright minefield that I won't go into here. Suffice to say (as I'd imagine many in the US would do) one plays off the differences in copyright law across different jurisdictions to one's own advantage. The fallout from this incident, whatever it may be, will likely influence rules and laws in other jurisdictions but it won't be all of them. The somewhat peculiar history of US copyright law and of the US being 'out' of international affairs then aggressively back 'in' them again perplexes and annoys many outside the US (it's been essentially US corporations who have caused most of the nasty disputes over the past two or three decades).
My reference to Victor Hugo is important because he was the principle center point and figurehead at the start of modern copyright law. Whilst copyright law essentially goes back to the British Statute of Anne of 1710, it was Victor Hugo and his French colleagues that got the ball rolling which ended up with the First Berne Convention.
Hugo wasn't alone, around that time there were many others including the English duo Gilbert & Sullivan who were struggling rampant copyright piracy in the US and they went to considerable lengths to overcome the problem, the most notable of which was in 1879 when they took the Savoy Opera Company holus bolus to New York and premiered The Pirates of Penzance. This strategy was only partially successful in that US opera companies continue to pirate their works for years after that.
What makes Hugo stand out was his arrogant and aggressive dog-in-the-manger attitude. He had a superior notions of self as well as a highly tuned Francophone sense of indignity when it came to copyright breaches of his works. Berne became a crusade for Hugo, he set the aggressive embittered tone that's plagued copyright law and negotiations ever since.
This isn't really about Neil Gaiman, this is about the vast majority of small-time authors who work incredibly hard for every sale and who rely on paying readers to be able to continue with their careers.
No matter how noble or justified the cause for copying may be, the poor little darlings just can't help themselves. They've been screaming and whinging over being supposedly hard done by with respect to copyright royalties even before that arch villain, bully and saint to copyright owners, Victor Hugo, bulldozed unfair changes to copyright through the 1886 Berne Copyright Convention.
…And 'bulldozed' is the right word; for in the early days of the 1880s consumers and end-users of copyright material essentially had no representation at the Berne Convention (as obviously one would expect), thus the power imbalance between authors/copyright holders and consumers/users of copyright material was so one-sided in favor of the former group that if the Berne Convention had been convened today with the same terms of reference as those in 1886 then its deliberations and decisions would likely be deemed to have arrived from corrupt processes.
For starters, Berne essentially never touched on matters such as the fact that authors get their ideas, life experience and knowledge mostly from the public domain and that many were even educated or gained their knowledge at public expense, and thus they should have some reciprocal if not moral obligation to the return at least some of their output back into the public domain. Instead, the Berne Convention so favored authors that they had nothing to do to justify or prove their right over the copyright of a work other than the existence of the work itself. That means that the onus always falls on consumers/users of copyrighted works to determine their status (Berne essentially encourages authors to 'double-dip' or take from both sides, it absolves them of having any obligation to anyone but tothemselves).
In effect, Hugo and his cronies used shrewdness and cunning to get every damn thing they wished for out of the Berne Convention—they had carte blanche, as there was no effective opposition to their proposals. 'Unfairness' was the order of the day.
Trouble is, this mob was so successful at Berne that ever since they've assumed that they've a god-given right to take umbrage and raise utter hell whenever anyone takes the slightest liberties with copyright—even if those actions are lawful.
You'll note there's always one theme that perennially underpins their complaints and that's how little the mean income that authors receive from royalties actually is. Well my response to that is if writing etc. brings in so little income then why do they have it as their occupation? Of course, we all know that being an author (with some exceptions) is often more a case of self-aggrandizement and wanting to be immortalized in print forever than it is to inform the world of new ideas through new works.
As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, one of the major problems in trying to achieve equitable copyright reform for everyone is—with the exception of authors and rights holders—that so few people are actually interested in the subject. Despite the fact that copyright is an important issue, the lack of widespread expertise in the subject together with the fact that little serious public debate on the matter is taking place are both significant impediments to copyright reform.
In the meantime, the whiners will continue to bitch and whinge. I reckon it's best just to ignore them.