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Share Your Story: The Impact of Losing Access to 500,000 Books

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQ8glAH78noNtLBvHxVFS-qSUxzhcg5pyqhP3qg9FnYpFoMg/viewform

The publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive (Hachette v. Internet Archive) has resulted in the removal of more than 500,000 books from our lending library, including over 1,300 banned and challenged titles. We are actively appealing this decision to restore access for all our patrons. We want to hear from you! How has losing access to these books affected your reading or research? What does it mean to you that these 500,000+ books are no longer available? Please share your story below. Your feedback may be featured in our blog posts and other communications to highlight the impact of this significant loss on our library community.

Share Your Story: The Impact of Losing Access to 500,000 Books

54 comments

dominiquec

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It would help if we knew even just a smidgin of what these titles are.

anon6789

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Internet Archive post about it

Google Doc List of the books from the IA

Rozz

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How many are republishings? Just curious

anon6789

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There's absolutely a good number of duplicates among the list they shared.

The bigger implication is of the 4 publishers in this lawsuit, 3 of them are in The Big Five publishers, who hold rights to the vast majority of books (60-80-ish % of English language books) from this century and probably a good chunk of the last one. If they win, this is the tip of the iceberg.

Xantharian_ocelot

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More like IP of the iceberg unfortunately.older books should be made available and not hidden behind licenses and unavailability because of greed

anon6789

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I largely agree. I don't know the best solution for copyright. On one hand, I don't think that necessarily the creators' kids deserve rights forever. They didn't make the stuff. But on the other hand, who does get the money after the creators are gone? The publisher in this case should get something for publishing physical materials or for marketing their wares that sell, but again, they didn't create it so someone should get something.

I do think that if nobody does anything with a work for x amount of time (maybe 10 years) then it should be fair game for anyone that does.

Even things like old games, if I download a Contra NES ROM, how am I hurting Nintendo or Konami?

If I download LotR, how am I ripping off Tolkien? I'm not stealing a hard copy. I could borrow it from a physical library. Why can't I borrow it from an electronic library? The person that deserves the rights to the literal story is dead. He doesn't care.

thirteene

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As time goes on, we should be simplifying laws, not creating more. The reductionist view is that content should be freely available as long as the IP isn't being developed/marketed still. And in order to prevent practices like Disney's vaulting we need a developed IP rotation of every X years to prevent IP hoarding. At it's root copyright law is rooted in greed, after you are done with the initial release, it just becomes part of everyone's culture.

anon6789

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I'd like to see a world more like that, but it feels like something that would require a society much different than the one we currently have.

Even your simplified mention of freeing IP not being marketed, in the Internet age, does having an item listed as for sale but out of stock or for an unreasonable price counted as being marketed? It's technically advertised for sale at no real cost, and can be done so in perpetuity. Or they could sell themselves product to show legal sales.

Simple rules and judgement operating under the intentof the law makes sense to rational individuals like us, but with scammy business and individuals, that's why we end up with a complex legal system. If we hate when legal loopholes are taken advantage of, we can't outright hate when laws get more complex.

JCreazy

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Why does that matter?

FaceDeer

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To determine the impact of losing access to them.

helpImTrappedOnline

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Would a compromise be to simply archive them but not make them freely availible until they enter public domain.

For more current book; if they are out of print then they can be made availbe for limited loan, like any other digital library. If a digital copy is avalible for purchase from the original publisher/author, than its not fair game. Unless they come to an agreement, perhaps add supported for freely accessing a book otherwise available for purchase.

If they got rid of the download option, it would make it much more difficult to just use a DRM stripping tool (a friend told me about these terrible pirating tools, I certently don't know how to use then). A lot of digital libraies have a dedicated app that you can only view content from. Utilize whatever anti-screen capture systems banks and Netflix use to protect from simply taking screen shots. Make is easier to access the books legitimatly than it is to pirate them.

Lastly, don't just make everything freely availible next time there's a world crisis.

ToxicWaste

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Please inform yourself. In these comments and on their website, it is covered that they do not provide books freely. Just like any other library books can be borrowed exactly as many times as they own a copy.

Just like any other library they sometimes provide a download for Adobe Digital Edition, which manages your lends on books. But as your friend with DRM stripping tools for sure can confirm: DRM is just an annoyance for legitimate customers, it forces legitimate users to use specific applications, while pirates get the freedom to choose how they interact with the not any more protected media. But this is a discussion for another thread as archive.org treats copyrighted books just like any other library.

conciselyverbose

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No, they don't.

Other libraries don't make unauthorized copies. The "fair use" argument is laughably weak and was rejected by the court because the law is pretty clear that it's not legal.

geophysicist

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Pretty hostile reply

ToxicWaste

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Yes, I told someone to inform themselves before making assumptions. Which, I think, is a reasonable expectation.

The rest of the comment was pointing out how archive.org acts like any other public library and therefore should not be treated differently. This does not carry hostility against the person I am replying to.

FaceDeer

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When I want to pirate books I go to Library Genesis for that so this doesn't impact me.

What would impact me is if IA loses enough of these lawsuits that the Wayback Machine goes offline. So maybe stop poking the bear, IA?

TheGrandNagus

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Perhaps you only care about the wayback machine, but there's more to the Internet Archive than that, and they shouldn't be expected to roll over and take it whenever some awful company decides to do a bit of digital book burning.

FaceDeer

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The linked article is specifically asking what impacts me. I am responding by explaining what impacts me.

Yes, IA has more than just the Wayback Machine. I'm not sure what your point is though. All of that is threatened by these lawsuits. Maybe if preserving that data is important IA should focus on preserving that data. Giving out unlimited copies to everyone is an unrelated secondary goal to preserving archives, so if a big company with a strong legal case comes along and says "stop giving out unlimited copies or we'll destroy you" then maybe stop giving out unlimited copies.

That's not "digital book burning." The opposite, in fact. It's acting to preserve digital books.

FlyingSquid

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They don't care about your story of how losing their library of books doesn't impact you. I'm not sure why that wasn't obvious to you.

FaceDeer

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They asked:

We want to hear from you! How has losing access to these books affected your reading or research? What does it mean to you that these 500,000+ books are no longer available? Please share your story below.

There's no asterisk on that specifying "only answers that favor our lawsuit are desired."

FlyingSquid

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Yes, thank you Captain Literal. I think it's very obvious to most people that they don't want stories that won't help them.

Zoot

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I think its an incredibly fair view point. If IA loses, and the way back machine goes down, because they keep losing these lawsuits, then it has absolutely affected this person.

To be quite honest, I even agree. The IA should be for preservation, not for piracy. Right now they're boarding that line of piracy, and tbh, I disagree with that as well. Id rather go to a pirate website to pirate my books, and go to the IA to see what has been preserved.

ToxicWaste

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That means that if the Internet Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like other library lending.

Lending and renting stuff is not piracy! Many corporate suits want people to start believing this. but i remember going to the library and renting books, movies and games. it was not piracy back then, and it wont be now.

Promethiel

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There actually is an asterisk and most of us can see. Does this happen in your life often?

FlyingSquid

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They are trying to say that people aren't using it for piracy, that they're using it for legitimate things like academic study. That's what they want stories from.

They also aren't poking the bear, they're appealing a lawsuit.

FaceDeer

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The lawsuit was the result of bear-poking. It's a result of their "National Emergency Library" that they briefly rolled out in 2020 where they took all the limits off of their "lending" and let people download as many copies as they wanted. Was "legitimate academic study" not possible before, with the old limits that weren't provoking lawsuits?

FlyingSquid

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That is simply a lie.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), with co-counsel Morrison Foerster LLP, is defending the Internet Archive against a lawsuit that threatens its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library, preserving and providing access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form. CDL allows people to check out digital copies of books for two weeks or less, and only permits patrons to check out as many copies as the Internet Archive and its partner libraries physically own. That means that if the Internet Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like other library lending. Through CDL, the Internet Archive is helping to foster research and learning by helping patrons access books and by keeping books in circulation when their publishers have lost interest in them.

Four publishers sued the Archive, alleging that CDL violates their copyrights. In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House claim CDL has cost their companies millions of dollars and is a threat to their businesses.

https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive

Why you told a lie that was so obviously false I don't know.

FaceDeer

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Here's the Wikipedia article on the lawsuit. From the opening paragraph:

Stemming from the creation of the National Emergency Library (NEL) during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing companies Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley alleged that the Internet Archive's Open Library and National Emergency Library facilitated copyright infringement.

IA was using the CDL without any problems or complaints before the National Emergency Library incident, with the one-copy-at-a-time restriction in place. It was only after they took those limiters off that the lawsuit was launched.

What I said was true.

FlyingSquid

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Basically what you're saying is big corporations found an opportunity and took it.

But the lawsuit was about CDL as a whole, not what happened in 2020.

Also, why you're trusting Wikipedia over the EFF is beyond me.

FaceDeer

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Yes, the lawsuit is about CDL as a whole. They could have sued IA years earlier. They could be suing libraries all over the place for using CDL. But they didn't, because the people using CDL were doing so in order to placate the publishers. It was an unspoken truce.

You can see a similar dynamic going on with fanfiction. A site like fanfiction.net is a gigantic pile of copyright violations, and yet you don't see it beset with lawsuits. That's because fanfiction.net isn't doing anything that would harm the income of the copyright holders or otherwise "poke the bear." You occasionally hear about fan projects getting shut down when they go "too far", however. Like what IA did in the case of the National Emergency Library.

Wikipedia has neutral point of view and verifiability policies. Everything written in their articles should be backed by external sources and if there are multiple sides to a story they should all be fairly represented. The EFF, on the other hand, is taking the IA's side in this and is motivated to make them sound better and the publishers to sound worse.

The Wikipedia article has 32 external sources cited for its contents. The EFF article has only two internal links, one of them leading to their lawyers' homepage and one linking to the motion that the EFF filed.

FlyingSquid

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They sued the Internet Archive for doing the exact same thing libraries do, and only with books that are not in print. Much like why you trust Wikipedia over the EFF, why you think that's something worth defending I don't know.