This is a bizarre post. It says nothing about what the papers filed actually mean.
The papers are a proposed permanent injunction that both the publishers and IA have (mostly) agreed on, although the IA wants the injunction to only apply to books that are in print and licensed by the publishers as ebooks. The publishers want it to apply to all books.
I don't know why IA decided to post about it in such a cryptic way, unless maybe it was a condition of the ruling, and they're doing the absolute minimum to satisfy that condition.
I assume they made this small post for those already familiar with the case, and they'll have new larger write-ups on it as the appeal draws nearer. It reads like an update for those already subscribed to their newsletter on the issue.
The specific development this post references is a proposed injunction [1] that Internet Archive and the publishers agreed on and sent to the judge. With certain exceptions (such as accessibility and fair use), IA would have to remove from its lending program any books that are commercially available from the publishers. IA wants "commercially available in electronic text format" and the publishers want "commercially available in any format", they've asked the judge to settle that point. IA reserves the right to appeal the judgement.
Either way is a win I think. It becomes effectively legal to distribute digital copies of out of print books, which up to now you had to go find a physical copy of if you wanted to read it.
I agree. While the injunction has no binding force outside the parties to the suit, I think any other defendants in the future can point to this as persuasive.
I'm building an online magazine archive for orphaned media and this is a great ruling for me to use in case I find my entity in legal hot water.
> We submitted a letter to the court today in the ongoing lawsuit against our library. We’re fighting for the rights of libraries to use their print collections in the digital age
This is about the "National Emergency Library" they launched during the peak of the COVID pandemic? I think they had good intentions, but the legality around it was definitely questionable from the start.
No, this is about controlled digital lending as a whole. The ruling issued struck down all CDL, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say that it was also illegal as CDL was illegal.
The worst part of this is the CDL scheme used DRM, making it strictly inferior to piracy and therefore essentially useless to me and many others. IA has stuck their neck on the chopping block for the dumbest reason. They should have stuck to legally hosting whatever they can legally host without DRM and left the rest to other organizations that can thumb their noses at American courts.
They had print books that were not otherwise available as ebooks. This has been immensely useful for my research. I have a feeling that I have a whole lot more interlibrary loans in my future.
> They had print books that were not otherwise available as ebooks.
Including pirate sources? I know they had a lot of ebooks that had no official and legitimate ebook, I encountered many of those, but in every case I was able to find the same scanned book somewhere else without the DRM. Probably the same scan I'm guessing, stripped of DRM or maybe uploaded elsewhere by the same person who scanned it for IA.
Yes, including pirate sources. There's a lot of academic work from circa 1970-1990 that publishers don't care to make available as ebooks and are too obscure for pirates to have any interest in digitizing.
I was utterly flabbergasted by this move. If some unrelated entity had done some bold move in the digital lending space, that would be one thing, but IA is a single point of failure for large amounts of internet history. Frankly, it was completely idiotic to risk all that on an untested lending experiment.
If I’m being honest, none of you would have made the archive happen. Presumably, you would have been troubled by the copyright implications. The kind of person who does that would probably also do this. There is no perfect stopping point. Everyone fantasizes that they would have sold GME at the top, run a business to the point it was at its best and no farther, and pushed a law to bend only as far as it can.
The evidence is in the action. The archives are available yet none of you even host a mirror of this supposed treasure. Of course you are flabbergasted: you would have been flabbergasted anyway. What use is the surprise of the peanut gallery?
I agree. I don't understand why the IA seem to be continuously poking the limits of what's acceptable or not, when their core mission is already complicated enough copyright-law-wise.
They are one big lawsuit away from being possibly forced to shut the _entire_ archiving operation down, and yet they continuously prod all the entities that are likely to serve them such a lawsuit. I cannot but have this picture of a small dog barking at a pack of huge dogs. And then they'll cry and make a fuss and claim they are the victims when they are inevitably sued.
Personally I find it more naive to think that tiptoeing around book publishers in fear hoping that they can slowly make small progress is the smarter move. They're not going to make serious progress in the fight against unfair online lending terms by appeasing publishers.
Not only do they still have an appeal, but the problem goes beyond the Internet Archive itself. Lobbying politicians, coordinating with other libraries, inspiring more civil disobedience, all of which can more productively happen now that we've seen what publisher's limits are as well as how we've seen that publisher profits _grew_ over the period that the National Emergency Library was available.
The appeal would be for the implementation of the restriction both parties have already agreed to. It’s a clear regression from pre Covid. They’ve lost either way.
Agree, but the real naivety is that they did it (afaict) under the same corporate entity as the critical online Internet Archive. This means a loss on this lending issue may jeopardize the entire IA, which would be a much greater loss.
They should absolutely be pushing the edges, but cleave it off so as not to put the whole enterprise at risk.
If they spun it off separately they'd be handing a pretty big target for publishers to lean on during trial: "They *knew* what they were doing was wrong, they even tried to separate it from their non-profit to protect themselves from the consequences!"
Probably it's more that we just disagree on the relative importance of digital lending; I think that digital lending is one core part of the overall ability to access archived works, and thus is core to the Internet Archive's mission and function rather than a simple extension of it. That makes it worthy of putting their full weight behind it.
>> they'd be handing a pretty big target for publishers to lean on during trial: "They knew what they were doing was wrong, they even tried to separate it from their non-profit to protect themselves from the consequences!"
Maybe, if they did it foolishly and obviously. But it could easily be done so as to undermine the same argument, and even if not, the counter-argument is that "we did it that way because "we knew we would be swimming with a bunch of excessively litigious asshat corporations." Not hard to convince a jury of that.
Moreover, as important as digital lending is, losing BOTH digital lending AND The Internet Archive will be a serious disaster with very long-lasting consequences. This latest decision just made ti more likely, and the current SCOTUS, which may well be where this ends up, is likely to produce that result.
We need an archive copy of The Internet Archive (both the data set and the organization).
>initial ruling cited emergency lending to justify banning all digital lending and the case was only brought up due to it as well.
The ruling's only mention of the emergency lending was that it was illegal as CDL was illegal.
There's also a fair amount of reason to suspect the publishers were preparing for the lawsuit far before the emergency lending. They were publishing stories about it and forming a petition against it in 2019, following years of criticizing it.
Worst case is they’re ordered to shut the entire archive down. It will be like the burning of the Library of Alexandria only the arsonists are the IP lobby and the reason it happened is ego.
I'm pretty distant from this, but I'm fairly sure Chris Freeland just wrote this blog post: and my spider sense suggests he probably actually just posted it after it had been collectively written by many many many lawyers.
I like what the internet archive is doing, but I'm saddened that many just use it as a hack to get around paywalls. I don't think that's in alignment with the internet archive's mission.
I think it's important for society in the long-term to keep journalism a rewarding profession.
Maybe as a compromise the internet archive could only allow access to archived journalism content after, say, a year's time. We'd be sure things got archived, and journalists would still get paid.
The archive's mission is "Universal Access to All Knowledge", how do you figure that keeping a copy of news articles is not in line with that mission?
Do you know you can walk into any library and read the daily paper?
If a news outfit doesn't like what the archive is doing they can issue takedown requests and the archive will comply. Could be that journalists appreciate having the archive available to them more than viewing it as a threat to their livelihood.
This drifting away for the original topic... or maybe it isn't that much if the pessimists are right in the end that IA will shut down after this lawsuit and we need other ressources when searching for something that has disappeared from the net.
Is it publicly known who is behind archive.is? Last time I checked about a year ago I could not find a name. But between the lines I could read they are affected by sanctions against Russia. Not individually but by the lack of international banking. So I concluded they are operating from Russia in one way or another.
> but I'm saddened that many just use it as a hack to get around paywalls.
I have yet to run into a single piece from any mainstream news outlet that deserves my money. I have happily paid for the Financial Times, for example, because they have significantly higher bars set for journalistic integrity. Reuters is another one.
Pardon me if I don't cry that NYT, WaPo, Marketwatch, WSJ, Bloomberg, and all other OpEd-disguised-as-journalism vendors don't get my $0.001 worth of clicks.
> Between January 1 and August 31, 2022, ALA documented 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources, and 1,651 unique titles were targeted. In 2021, ALA reported 729 attempts to censor library resources, targeting 1,597 books, which represented the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling these lists more than 20 years ago.
Thanks. I would love to see a list to see if it’s like “this book is really bad” or “my feelings are hurt so I don’t want this book”
Because it’s mind boggling that adults can get so upset to react in such a way they need to ruin things for everyone else just cos there’s something they don’t like.
Eh, I get what he means. When I hear 'book ban' I have mental imagery of trying to smuggle books across the Iron Curtain, risking fines or prison time for buying, possessing or distributing the book. But these book bans don't make any of that illegal, they're fights over the way public libraries are managed. Anything that receives public funding will be subject to such politicking, this seems like the fundamental nature of democracy. But books are special; they're ostensibly entitled to public funding but are simultaneously beyond the purview of the same governments which are funding them.
To be clear, I think libraries should carry whichever books are in demand by even a fringe few, regardless of how many other people those books offend. If even just one person in town is interested in a book, the local library should try to get that book (if practical, of course.) But I worry that we're devaluing the term "book ban"; what will we call it when they actually do pass laws making the possession or sale of some books illegal?
No. There hasn’t been book banning at schools. So far all that has been removed is non age appropriate books. I.e not allowing super explicit borderline porno books in schools. Books that are totally fine for an adult but not for a child.
I disagree with religious indoctrination just as much as I disagree with having books aimed at very young children saying:
> "From six and up, I used to kiss other guys in my neighborhood, make out with them, and perform oral sex on them. I liked it. I used to love oral. And I touched their you-know-whats... Guys used to hit on me - perverts - pedophiles."
This I don’t care about if an adult is reading an autobiography or something. But telling a child that this is acceptable? If you think this is acceptable then you’re a sick sick person.
Libraries and schools have been adopting books that depict graphic sexual acts. These books are targeted at minors and parents are demanding their removal. Rightly so
I saw graphic sexual acts in schoolbooks and children books at the age of ten 50 years ago. In Europe, not US.
I doubt that it has impacted my mental health, my development or anything else.
It's a fact that the US has more teenage pregnancies and more porn production than most European countries. It appears to me that the "Me too" problem is bigger in the US.
So parents asking for removal of such books don't do anything good for their children or the society they grow up in.
> I saw graphic sexual acts in schoolbooks and children books at the age of ten 50 years ago. In Europe, not US.
How would you feel if American values were imposed on your European community? And how do you think Americans would feel if your European values were imposed on their community?
These libraries and schools are funded at a local level, so it is locals who get a say in how that funding is used or the conditions under which it may be withdrawn. Incidentally, a public library is not necessarily publicly funded (a public library is a library that is open to the public, not necessarily funded by the public); they are free to seek private sources of funding and thereby free themselves from local democratic influence. You could organize Europeans and likeminded Americans to pool your money and fund these libraries against the wishes of the local community, but would that really be a good idea?
I'd argue that freedom of speech and freedom of access to that speech is -in fact- a role that is essential to democracy. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic.
If the opposing party(ies) have the power tell librarians to only show people materials in favor of their political position(s), then they can use that power to distort the truth and corrupt the vote, as happens in totalitarian countries.
This is one reason why it's important for libraries to be able to give a person access to all the materials they want access to, and not to distort or censor that access.
I think the meaning and implications of the ostensibly shared principle to which you appeal are not quite as universal as you suggest, but leaving that aside for the moment (unless you choose to press this point), as codified in US law it does not entitle libraries to receive funding from local governments.
I agree that libraries should have the right by law to lend any book they please, and in fact they do have that right. But they aren't entitled to public funding; on the contrary, such an entitlement would strip the community of their right to democratically determine where their tax dollars are allocated. The simple fact of the matter is that nobody's legal rights are actually being violated when a local government votes to discontinue their funding of a local library because they don't like books. They aren't banning the possession, sale or distribution of these books, they're only taking away public funding for it, doing so with normal legal democratic means. If this is something you feel strongly about, you and others can organize to provide private funding for these libraries, and then there would be nothing locals could legally do to stop it. They could try passing laws banning the possession, distribution, etc of these books, but such a law would not stand up to legal scrutiny. The principle to which you appeal guarantees you the right to lend any book you like, but it doesn't entitle you to receive public money for it, against the wishes of the community from which that money is to come.
Say someone requests (an inter-library loan for) Mein Kampf [1] or -say- Das Kapital [2]. Would you advocate a) defunding the library for lending them that book, we should not give them public funding if they loan out reprehensible books b) funding the library, we should give libraries public funding so that they can fulfill the function of letting anyone read any work for any reason. or c) should funding for libraries be divorced from whether or not they would loan a person that book? or d) other.
Let's get this straight upfront: I'm not talking about anti-Nazi laws. In Germany it is illegal to sell to lend games which glorify war or violence to kids. Germany banned this game and there isn't a nazi or swastika in sight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmPjsBDN9Xw
Nor am I criticizing Germany for it. Germans are entitled to their values. But the point illustrated is that America isn't unique in deciding what is or isn't appropriate media for children to have access too. Germany's violent video game bans go further than any of these American book bans, actually banning the sale of these games to kids. None of the book bans in America ban the sale of these books to kids. Even libraries are not banned from lending these books, provided they can find other sources of funding.
As to your question, my personal belief is your answer b). Within practical reason (expense, availability) libraries should get and lend whichever books are in demand no matter how many other people those books offend. Since money and shelf space are scarce, prioritize the books with the greatest demand, regardless of how many other people hate that book. People who want books banned from public libraries to "protect kids" are stupid; parents need merely go to the library with their children and personally supervise what their kids read. That's how I would cast my vote, but I'm not a dictator and if the rest of the community votes to defund the library instead, that is what it is. The first amendment does not guarantee funding for public libraries, funding is provided to libraries voluntarily. If libraries want funding they need to convince a sufficient majority of the population to vote for that funding. And if people don't like how a library is being run, they're well within their rights to vote against funding that library. I wouldn't have it any other way, this is a democratic society and people voting the way they feel is the entire point. My personal preference is not the law, I only get one vote just like everybody else.
If you want to prevent this kind of defunding attack, I think there are several options: State or federal legislation to guarantee more funding to public libraries is one possibility; this would make libraries resistant to local defunding efforts, but of course passing such grander funding laws would perhaps be an even greater challenge. I think this is worth attempting nevertheless. Alternatively, public libraries can be funded by private donations. The 'public' in public library means that it's open to the public, necessarily that it's funded by the public. Many public libraries across America were founded and have been substantially funded by private donations.
I guess we're not substantially in disagreement then.
Note that the Anti-Nazi laws in Germany were not -iirc- put in place by Germans, but in fact by Americans. In 1945 these laws made sense to deal with the situation at the time: in a society that had been severely distorted by NSDAP propaganda. As German society has changed, they make less sense now, and people have slowly come around to changing/removing these laws. I'm sure you can see why they are doing so very carefully. I understand the original reason for the laws, and I support the very careful removal/change of the laws.
In case you're curious (I was!): it is entirely possible to get a library loan for Mein Kampf in Germany. A quick google shows you might get a heavily annotated version printed by the state of Bavaria, but it's definitely available.
I agree with you on b). Nor do I disagree with democratic decision making by the community in general. I might have some opinions on people trying to subvert democratic systems to backdoor censorship and/or propaganda. (See also above, with that odd situation in Germany with quite a story to it.)
I think institutions in most western countries are -these days- quite well armored against incidental subversion. That's actually pretty good because that makes it easier to catch before things really go wrong. However, the laws, traditions and processes themselves only slow things down. You still need to actively catch people doing it and work to prevent it, so end of day you still need to maintain (eternal) vigilance.
I had books at school teaching sexual education but nothing like the explicit pornographic stuff they have now. Nothing teaching anal sex or male/male or female/female. Nothing trying teaching kids to hide things from their parents.
Some of the books today are absolutely disgusting. The old books are tame.
You're asking about this, but not about sexual content being shown to grade school children or the fact that teachers are trying to hide it from the parents?
The papers are a proposed permanent injunction that both the publishers and IA have (mostly) agreed on, although the IA wants the injunction to only apply to books that are in print and licensed by the publishers as ebooks. The publishers want it to apply to all books.
I don't know why IA decided to post about it in such a cryptic way, unless maybe it was a condition of the ruling, and they're doing the absolute minimum to satisfy that condition.