I think we need to start caring about how laws affect the preservation of data, this is ridiculous.

Copyright only exists so rich people can own yet another thing they didnt make.

If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity.

Ah yes, because it's the fault of (internet) libraries and not greedy publishers who try to keep the royalties for their authors as low as possible. /s

How about looking where this problem starts instead of where it ends?

Most important paragraph in the whole article:

The Southern District of New York court issued its final order in Hachette v. Internet Archive on March 24, 2023. It found that Internet Archive was liable for copyright infringement. The consent judgement of August 11 has banned the Open Library from scanning or distributing commercially available books in digital formats.

The premise of the Internet Archive is perfectly legal, but we have dimwits who think anything and everything can be uploaded for "archival purposes". This won't be the last time we see this because people are actively abusing the site.

Don't believe me? Go to the archive and search "anime". Are the first results you see forgotten 1960s shows whose only source materials are moldy VHS tapes because the studio went under and the copyright is in limbo? No. The entirety of fucking Naruto, iconic movies like Ghost in the Shell, the whole remastered Dragon Ball Blu-ray set, and who knows how much more.

No, just because it's not available where you are does not justify uploading. If geo-blocking doesn't work for a monolith like YouTube it certainly won't work for the Archive. One visit from copyright owners lawyers in their territory and it's another black eye for the Archive.

The archive is in the right for works that are out of print AND, AND, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, have no commercial equivalent or rightful copyright owner. Those old cookbooks by authors and publishers long gone, great! Vintage DOS games, do some reseach, make sure it's not commercially available on sites like GOG before uploading. A fan subbed show, upload the subtitles only. Your favorite show that is streamable but you won't pay for, put it on a tracker and seed it elsewhere.

four major publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House – to file a lawsuit against Internet Archive in June 2020.

Well now you know which publishers to steal from 100% of the time

This last bit kills me

It’s beyond time that readers and consumers of all cultural output recognise the cost of creating cultural material. If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity. In the broader context of current generative AI discussions, I think our whole community is fed up with short-sighted arguments that aim to justify the ripping off of authors – whose earnings sit at an average of $18,200 per year.

For the record, the national minimum wage in Australia is $45,905 per year.

It's so disingenuous. Authors are not making so little because of library sharing or internet sharing. They're making that little because publishers take the largest cut and have a stranglehold on publishing. 🙄

Internet Archive’s distribution of copyrighted works is problematic.

Since when? That's literally what a library is supposed to do..

The ramifications of this ruling are astoundingly dire.

The notion of controlled digital lending was a good counter to "ebook packages" that come with a yearly sub. At the moment, that yearly sub eats a large chunk of university budgets because academic texts are harder to get for free (we are a captive audience, though we do have scihub to help somewhat). In terms of books outside academia, I'm not looking at prices but I can tell you which direction they'll now go.

I'm sure you can guess which direction library budgets are not going to go.

In essence, it's forcing digital from a "purchase to lend" to a "subscribe to lend" model, which is going to really hurt libraries. This doesn't even begin to explore the full horror of censorship - "I'm sorry, LGBTQ+ texts are not available to bundle for your library due to local laws prohibiting them". That's a topic that deserves its own book!

Oh FFS!

Well, shit.

This is why I sail the high seas. Copyright is an affront to liberty.

“Right of the authors”, sounds like a propaganda piece. It’s quite objectively in the favor of the copyright holders.

Wow, the author really seems to take the publisher's side here. I'm surprised they're listed as just an academic, I was expecting it to be an industry spokesperson.

This is an affront on preservation of human knowledge and keeping it accessible. This is a perfect example of what utter cancer copyright is.

Does the author work for a publishing company? It’s hard to understand their perspective otherwise.