Very much not a surprise. I think the Internet Archive is providing an invaluable service to humanity in preserving works that would otherwise be lost to time. it is one of the crown jewels of the Internet, doing a job that nobody else is willing to do. But at the same time I know the courts side with publishers pretty much every time and copyright law being such as it is they're totally screwed. The only real question is how many trillions dollars will the judgment be. Preserving history is at odds with the profit motive, and lawmakers care a lot more about the latter than the former.
But, beyond this ruling, could Internet Archive just scan the books, store the data and release it to the public at a later time? I am just thinking about the preservation part in your comment.
"A later time" being the after the year 2100 for most of these works. I am not exaggerating. If the author is still alive today their works won't enter the public domain until after you are dead.
One can argue that the Internet Archive would be effectively useless if they strictly followed copyright law.
We've also got to think about the actual value of preserving all of these works in a completely indiscriminate manner. Curation is important. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that we could keep everything forever, actually doing so would ultimately harm the value of the archive, due to Sturgeon's Law. The truth is that the vast majority of cultural output is of only ephemeral value. It's relevant to a place and a time, but not necessarily great enough to also be interesting to people from a different place and a future time.
And I've only got a little bit of time in this life; I'd much rather read a trashy romance novel that was written this year and meant to entertain me than the trashy romance with politics that make me cringe that my mom was reading 50 years ago.
This is why, for example, the Library of Congress doesn't just keep a copy of everything. It's not just a space constraints or storage costs issue; it's a signal-to-noise ratio issue. As Mark Crislip is fond of saying, when you mix apple pie and cow pie it doesn't make the cow pie better, it just makes the apple pie worse.
In the space it takes to store one movie, you can store ten thousand books.
For any published book, the answer of whether it's worth preserving that text is a very solid yes. There's not that much of it, no benefit to filtering.
And do you think future historians won't be very interested in those politics?
>The truth is that the vast majority of cultural output is of only ephemeral value. It's relevant to a place and a time, but not necessarily great enough to also be interesting to people from a different place and a future time.
On a long enough timescale, the value starts increasing again. C.f. graffiti from Pompeii, Akkadian bookkeping tablets, etc.
In the meantime, the copyright duration could be shortened.
Or, from another POV, cultural artifacts we dig out from earth millennia after they were buried still preserve something valuable. An entity like IA should think past one lifetime.
you don't know nearly as much about future human history as you claim to
in the last century, birth control became first legal and then almost universal, automobiles became common, britain quit india, colonialism ended in most of the world, totalitarianism was invented, an antisemitic dictator conquered a continent and wiped out many of the world's biggest jewish communities, nuclear weapons were invented, the new york times published an editorial claiming rockets wouldn't work in space, men walked on the moon, communism enveloped a third of the planet, rock stars were invented, the majority of the human population moved to cities, global warming was discovered, the ozone hole was discovered and then solved, most of europe was unified under a single government, computers were invented, turing was bullied to death by the uk government for being gay, gay marriage became legal, women got the vote in most countries, liberal democracy enveloped half the planet, alcohol was legalized in the us, most other recreational drugs were prohibited in most countries, and some other things happened too
the next century will probably be less predictable than the last one
The last 300 years have seen copyright laws being ratcheted up and up and up. I think it's a fairly safe bet to say that trend will continue for the next 75 years, even if it's not inevitable.
I only separated the logic based on your point about preservation. I completely agree that copyright rules are often abused and modified 'a piacere.' The topic of preservation resonated with me because I do amateur research in genealogy, and, for example, if you don’t interview great-grandparents or grandparents, much of that information could become irrecoverable later.
My overall point was "are works actually preserved if they are locked away and inaccessible?" A work that technically exists, but is inaccessible until after your death is effectively lost to you.
I agree, it can take a while for the limits on something like this are found. I would love for all books to be available there but I see the concerns (overblown) of authors and publishers however, they’re in a tough industry and it’s getting tougher. I think IA should take the L and save us from AI being the only source of information in 10 years or so. Soon most people will choose instant coffee over roasting, grinding, and brewing their own from beans. Hopefully the judge(s) will take their value and uniqueness into account and give them a small judgement with a much bigger one waiting in the wings if they ignore the decision. Maybe they can move some place safer like Russia or China and serve from there.
> But at the same time I know the courts side with publishers pretty much every time and copyright law being such as it is they're totally screwed.
I mean... they did just scan a load of in-copyright books and then let anyone download them with no restrictions. What did they think was going to happen?
I think you have to be particularly extreme and naive to think that would have been ok, legally or morally.
Sharing information is always morally OK. It's copyright itself that is a severe infringement to our right of free speech without a good enough reason to justify that.
