<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/23/reclaiming-control-the-internet-archive-empowers-people-so-gatekeepers-keep-suing/>
"As a child, nothing warmed me more than my mother’s “Three C’s Soup”: Cabbage,
Carrot, Carraway from Jane Brody’s
Good Food Book: Living the High
Carbohydrate Way (published in 1980 and still in print, no ebook version has
yet been licensed). And when my mother died in late fall 2018, there was
nothing I wanted to cook more, but her copy had gone missing.
I could have called the library and asked them to read me the recipe, or to
scan it and to send it to me, but my library had a later print edition of the
book. I could have bought a used copy of the 1980 edition, which I eventually
did, but I wanted to cook it that day. So instead, I went to Open Library, the
Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending program, and borrowed the book
for an hour, returning it when the soup was finished. In the words of my
mother’s favorite literary character, the Mock Turtle: It was beautiful soup.
About a year and a half later, the Internet Archive was sued for providing
books in this manner to the public. The suit was triggered by a short-lived,
well meaning program that made books available to students during a dark part
of the pandemic by lifting certain restrictions on how many people at a time
could borrow a given library title. That lawsuit just came to a judgment,
ordering the Archive to take down a part of their collection and striking a
blow to Controlled Digital Lending more generally, though the Archive will
appeal.
To be clear: what the Internet Archive is doing is traditional library lending
in a digital form, and frankly not radical – I can just get access to the
materials I want much more quickly through the Archive, but I must also return
them much more quickly. There is no situation in which acquiring a recipe from
an obsolete edition of Brody’s first cookbook with no ebook equivalent would
hurt her royalties. Libraries have traditionally bought one copy of a book and
then lent it, much like they do with CDL, which maintains an “owned to loaned”
ratio through sequestering materials.
While big publishers would have you believe that people are flocking to the
Internet Archive to borrow and read these scans for free rather than relying on
the “thriving ebook licensing market for libraries,” they ignore a few crucial
facts to advance a bad faith argument about market harm: the average time
readers spend with an Internet Archive scan is under 30 minutes. People seem to
be using these materials as intended: as reference, grabbing just the bit of
information they need.
If someone wants to download and read an ebook outside of a streaming service
or licensed copy, they are not going to use a scanned, DRM-protected epub that
they can borrow from the Internet Archive for an hour. Authors, publishers, and
musicians know this, and yet content rightsholders continue to litigate a
nonprofit library at great expense to themselves and their authors. As the
New
York Times reports, even authors who were once critical of the Archive’s
efforts have removed their initial statements. Author Malcolm Harris recently
tweeted, “The Internet Archive was an invaluable resource when I was writing
PALO ALTO and it pisses me off that Hachette sued in the name of their
authors.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
