xuxebikoInternet Archive's digital library has been found in breach of copyright. The decision has some important implications
The legal ruling against the Internet Archive has come down in favour of the rights of authors.
srasmusI hope all the writers who support this lawsuit understand that they are contributing to a long standing effort to outlaw libraries in general. Nobody makes direct money off of sharing things. Get ready for DRM involved in every single thing that you do.
Listen, I love libraries as much as the next person. We have very clear laws that protect libraries.
Is copyright a little fucked and a little too slanted towards those rights holders? Yes.
Did anyone really think it was OK to start adding books and movies in? And provide those for free to everyone simultaneously? Libraries don’t do that.
Libraries can do that. Okay, technically, it’s illegal, but under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, since libraries are run by political subdivisions of US states, they can’t be sued with the state’s permission which means that a state government can literally not allow the library to be sued for copyright infringement and then they’d get away with it.
The trade-off is that this probably permanently burns all bridges between the library and publishers, who would likely not want to deal with the library any more.
Even assuming that is a viable application of sovereign immunity, which I am not at all convinced, at a minimum you’ve described a very strong due process violation. No, libraries cannot just arbitrarily infringe copyrights.
The applicable Supreme Court precedent here is Allen v. Cooper. The State of North Carolina published all pictures of a shipwreck within its custody on its website as “public record” and the photography firm that owned the copyright sued. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot abrogate a state’s sovereign immunity under its Article I legislative powers and thus ruled in favour of the state.
That case is still being litigated:
Allen v. Cooper: Back with a (Queen Anne’s) Vengeance
A casual reading of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Allen v. Cooper might have led one to reasonably believe that it ended the plaintiffs’ copyright case. But, as with so many other issues encountered in the legal realm, much lies below the surface.