Share Your Story: The Impact of Losing Access to 500,000 Books
Share Your Story: The Impact of Losing Access to 500,000 Books
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 wa...
It would help if we knew even just a smidgin of what these titles are.
Why does that matter?
To determine the impact of losing access to them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?