Ernie SmithJun 28, 2024
The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Jun 28, 2024
@ernie That's what they started out doing. And if they had kept doing that, they probably never would have been sued, or if they were, there's a good chance they would have won.
But then they started entering into agreements with libraries all over the country: let us integrate with your online card catalog, and then we can let people check out one digital copy of any book your currently have on your shelves. Qualitatively different, much more questionable in terms of copyright law.
(continued)
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Jun 28, 2024
@ernie And then COVID happened and they removed all borrowing limits and let anyone check out any book, infinite copies. And that's when the publishers noped out, decided they had gone too far, and sued.
What they did during COVID was clearly theft and clearly deprived authors of income. There was no ambiguity. It was a shitty, stupid overstep.
They got sued and established a shitty precedent because they went too far and pissed off the publishers too much. It was dumb.
Show threadErnie Smith

@jik It wasn’t a shitty, stupid overstep. It was a well-intentioned overstep at a time when people couldn’t go to the library.

Was the result damaging and ultimately out of bounds? Yes. But I absolutely draw the line at calling it dumb. The publishers moved out of bounds too here—they didn’t have to go after the whole thing. That was their choice.

Let us not lose context here.

Jun 29, 2024 at 12:06amWeb
Show threadJonathan Kamens 86 47Jun 29, 2024
@ernie Ah, so now we're moving the goalposts.
You knew when you posted your first post above what IA _actually_ did, but you chose to describe it inaccurately so you could make IA look better and the corporations who sued them look worse than actually justified by the circumstances?
And then when called out on it, you came back with "well ok, it actually wasn't as bad as I said, but lord, it wasn't good."
Yeah, no.
I don't waste my time here with people who pull shit like this.
*plonk*,,