(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2020 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA couple people have now asked me what I think about the Internet Archive/Free Library drama, and since I've now seen a lot of screaming on all sides of the issue, I too am going to drop my Hot Take here!
Background, in case you somehow missed the drama:
a.) The Internet Archive, which holds a large collection of digital books scanned from in-print copies at libraries around the country and usually lets people check them out one at a time for fourteen days, has decided that for pandemic times it's going to let lots of copies be checked out one at a time for fourteen days instead of keeping people on a wait list, in an initiative they're calling the National Emergency Library
b.) The Author's Guild promptly put out a statement saying that this was more or less piracy and taking money out of the mouths of hard-working authors by making their books available for free, In These Times More Than Ever
c.) authors and librarians/archivists on Twitter have as a result spent the past few days shouting at each other about this from respective perceived moral high grounds!
I'll start out by saying that, as an archivist, my opinion generally is that the copyright laws in our country are too strong/too restrictive, and often prevent fair access and reuse to the detriment of the public good; if I were to have the power to reframe copyright law entirely, I would probably reel it back in to a relatively short term limit of 15-20 years after which the author/creator would have to deliberately make the choice to re-up copyright and officially register it, or else the thing goes into the public domain. Also, my day job as a moving image archivist often involves stretching copyright law to the limits of its ability to allow us to a.) preserve content and b.) make it at all accessible, so please take my words with as many grains of salt based on that fact as you need to.
So a thing that I haven't seen mentioned much in this case is the fact that the Author's Guild v. Internet Archive debate about digitizing old books is one that's been ongoing for some time, and as is often the case, there's more nuance than either side is presenting. The Internet Archive has, for a long time, been actively involved in the broader fight to make available quote-unquote orphan works -- things that are technically in copyright, but there's not enough information about the author or copyright owner to bring them back into print or make them available any other way, so without some kind of demi-law-breaking they're unlikely to ever become available again. For backstory on this project, it's worth reading about the Author's Guild v. HathiTrust, a battle which I think stands behind a lot of the current positioning wherein the Internet Archive is like "YES, digitization and access CATEGORICALLY GOOD!" and the Author's Guild is like "NO, digitization of in-copyright books is CATEGORICALLY BAD!"
Ideologically, I generally agree more with the Internet Archive here. I think the problem of access to orphan works and out-of-print books is one that needs to be solved, and the Author's Guild is, as always, far more interested in obstructing all solutions to that problem than in finding actual solutions. I also think the Author's Guild has a tendency to drastically scaremonger in a counter-productive attempt to lock down all access that's not Actual Sales To One Single Person (a difficult model to enforce in the digital era), and that a library making books available on a loaner basis for fourteen days, even making books available to a lot of people on a loaner basis for fourteen days, is not in fact the same thing as wholesale internet piracy. So that's why I'm annoyed at the Author's Guild.
HOWEVER. The Internet Archive also definitely has a tendency to go too far, and ignore not just laws but things that I would consider as archival ethics, when it's convenient to them (for example, in the kind of web archive sweeps that they do which often do not ask permission and sort of run roughshod over people's privacy.) Good practice for digital libraries is to a.) try not to step too hard on copyright toes to the best of your ability to judge via metadata and b.) have really good, visible, clear takedown procedures in case you are actually harming someone's livelihood and inviting a lawsuit by putting something up. The Internet Archive has in fact put takedown procedures in their FAQs, but, like, it's in a Google doc rather than part of their main searchable page, it's not super easy to find, they don't have much of a team dedicated to it so they're likely to become rapidly overwhelmed, and if they were going to do something like this there should absolutely be a button on EVERY PAGE that lets you file to take the content on that page down. Basically, it feels to me like an initiative that's not particularly well-designed and that's somewhat intended to be antagonistic and escalate the fight in ways that are not helpful to the things I think are important: securing digital access to orphan works and in-copyright-but-out-of-print-and-otherwise-inaccessible books. So that's why I'm annoyed at the Internet Archive.
And that is my hot take! I'm irritated at everybody here! Thank you for coming!
Background, in case you somehow missed the drama:
a.) The Internet Archive, which holds a large collection of digital books scanned from in-print copies at libraries around the country and usually lets people check them out one at a time for fourteen days, has decided that for pandemic times it's going to let lots of copies be checked out one at a time for fourteen days instead of keeping people on a wait list, in an initiative they're calling the National Emergency Library
b.) The Author's Guild promptly put out a statement saying that this was more or less piracy and taking money out of the mouths of hard-working authors by making their books available for free, In These Times More Than Ever
c.) authors and librarians/archivists on Twitter have as a result spent the past few days shouting at each other about this from respective perceived moral high grounds!
I'll start out by saying that, as an archivist, my opinion generally is that the copyright laws in our country are too strong/too restrictive, and often prevent fair access and reuse to the detriment of the public good; if I were to have the power to reframe copyright law entirely, I would probably reel it back in to a relatively short term limit of 15-20 years after which the author/creator would have to deliberately make the choice to re-up copyright and officially register it, or else the thing goes into the public domain. Also, my day job as a moving image archivist often involves stretching copyright law to the limits of its ability to allow us to a.) preserve content and b.) make it at all accessible, so please take my words with as many grains of salt based on that fact as you need to.
So a thing that I haven't seen mentioned much in this case is the fact that the Author's Guild v. Internet Archive debate about digitizing old books is one that's been ongoing for some time, and as is often the case, there's more nuance than either side is presenting. The Internet Archive has, for a long time, been actively involved in the broader fight to make available quote-unquote orphan works -- things that are technically in copyright, but there's not enough information about the author or copyright owner to bring them back into print or make them available any other way, so without some kind of demi-law-breaking they're unlikely to ever become available again. For backstory on this project, it's worth reading about the Author's Guild v. HathiTrust, a battle which I think stands behind a lot of the current positioning wherein the Internet Archive is like "YES, digitization and access CATEGORICALLY GOOD!" and the Author's Guild is like "NO, digitization of in-copyright books is CATEGORICALLY BAD!"
Ideologically, I generally agree more with the Internet Archive here. I think the problem of access to orphan works and out-of-print books is one that needs to be solved, and the Author's Guild is, as always, far more interested in obstructing all solutions to that problem than in finding actual solutions. I also think the Author's Guild has a tendency to drastically scaremonger in a counter-productive attempt to lock down all access that's not Actual Sales To One Single Person (a difficult model to enforce in the digital era), and that a library making books available on a loaner basis for fourteen days, even making books available to a lot of people on a loaner basis for fourteen days, is not in fact the same thing as wholesale internet piracy. So that's why I'm annoyed at the Author's Guild.
HOWEVER. The Internet Archive also definitely has a tendency to go too far, and ignore not just laws but things that I would consider as archival ethics, when it's convenient to them (for example, in the kind of web archive sweeps that they do which often do not ask permission and sort of run roughshod over people's privacy.) Good practice for digital libraries is to a.) try not to step too hard on copyright toes to the best of your ability to judge via metadata and b.) have really good, visible, clear takedown procedures in case you are actually harming someone's livelihood and inviting a lawsuit by putting something up. The Internet Archive has in fact put takedown procedures in their FAQs, but, like, it's in a Google doc rather than part of their main searchable page, it's not super easy to find, they don't have much of a team dedicated to it so they're likely to become rapidly overwhelmed, and if they were going to do something like this there should absolutely be a button on EVERY PAGE that lets you file to take the content on that page down. Basically, it feels to me like an initiative that's not particularly well-designed and that's somewhat intended to be antagonistic and escalate the fight in ways that are not helpful to the things I think are important: securing digital access to orphan works and in-copyright-but-out-of-print-and-otherwise-inaccessible books. So that's why I'm annoyed at the Internet Archive.
And that is my hot take! I'm irritated at everybody here! Thank you for coming!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 10:43 pm (UTC)I appreciate your hot take! I am shocked that there are more than two clear-cut sides to an issue!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 11:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 11:10 pm (UTC)Ideologically, I also fall more towards the archive side, but agree with the author's side. The big, sweeping initiatives like this don't/can't do enough checking on the copyrights and the orphaned works. We've seen that in the field recently with both Mike Ford's and Zenna Henderson's works.
In the latter, NESFA negotiated to release Ingathering as an ebook (I'd destroyed a a 2nd paper copy to make a personal ebook version) and paper/ebook versions of her other short stories.
"Common knowledge" was that Ford's family would never allow his non-Star Trek novels and other works to be republished. It took Isaac Butler, a new convert, to dig into the issue and help get Ford's works republished (starting this year!)
It, of course, also helps I'm employed with a well-paying job so I can afford to buy just about whatever ebooks/books that I want.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:25 am (UTC)The real trouble is that for every Ford and Henderson, there are a hundred other books where the author is unknown, or the copyright is in dispute, or nobody cares enough to go around and get it republished. And the money and time that you would take to clear it is quite possibly more than anyone could make off it in any case. In cases like those, I'd much rather see the book made available now for free than cross fingers that someone would get round to republishing it someday -- but then, if I was in charge of copyright law, I'd probably have everything enter the public domain once the author was dead anyway ....
no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 11:47 pm (UTC)I've also been a consumer of fan scanlated manga, fansubed anime, and fansubed dramas since the 90s – and obviously fanfic and fanvids.
So, I kind of have an angel librarian on one shoulder and a media pirate on the other. I haven't really looked too closely at it, but I've always wondered if the IA really does limit itself to only scanning books it owns physical copies of and only lending that number of digitized copies. If it does, then I generally think what they're doing under normal circumstances is reasonable under copyright law. Generally, if you actually own a copy of the book, you are entitled to lend it to as many people as you want, as many times as you want, so long as you don't make money doing so. You aren't allowed to copy or transform it. I think the IA is really treading on the edge in terms of transformation, but, in the US, we have allowed that people can make backup copies of tapes and CDs, and scanning a book is not far from that.
As for the unlimited lending policy for the duration of the pandemic... at heart, I think it is a well-intentioned thing...and I'm secretly okay with it. But legally, I think it does breach copyright law and goes well beyond fair use and any other defense. There are a lot of laws and rules people would like to suspend "for the duration" but the suspension of many of these rules is not actually necessary for us to survive and some would end up making life far worse. I think suspending evictions makes sense, but the government deciding to suspend habeas corpus would be very concerning, given the risk that "the duration" might never end.
As far as the AG is concerned, I haven't been there in a long time, but I do know a lot of authors and when it comes down to it the traditional way of publishing books and trickling small percentages of the sales down the line to various entities, agents, and finally the author, is not really a viable. I know a couple of younger authors who have made the transition to all digital publishing and make a much better living than more traditional authors – even those who technically sell many more books in hard copy. I actually think the [communist] Chinese have ironically stumbled on the best way to capitalize on modern digital book sales – or maybe they should be just called sales of stories? Writing sales? While I think the idea of waiting for each chapter would drive me nuts, I do really like the community concept.
Well, except, it's going through the throes of figuring out how to behave in good faith with your fellow community members. It seems a lot worse than some of the uglier e-list fandoms wars. I wonder to what extent having so much external control of public life makes people so vicious online.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 11:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 11:52 pm (UTC)Ideologically I am very definitely with the IA on most things and with Authors Alliance rather than Authors' Guild on the parts where we disagree. But living authors should definitely have the right to profit off their actual works, including the right to work with publishers if they so choose, without IA infringing on them. (Orphan works are a separate issue.) And that is a separate discussion from the absurdities of copyright law, international rights regimes, and IP maximalism.
Anyhoo, I agree with you! And most of all I am irritated with the people on Twitter calling small-time creators idea landlords.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-30 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:51 am (UTC)Throwing that emergency library solution open to the entire internet was, shall we say, perhaps indicative of that tendency you mentioned (they really are stretching copyright so hard it's squeaking), but I respect the hell out of making one aspect of an incredibly stressful and challenging switchover to distance learning for so, so many schoolteachers in often underfunded school systems relatively simple.
Honestly, there's so much media coverage of beloved indie bookstores like Powell struggling for $$$ and doing layoffs (and then subsequently surges in online ordering to help them out financially) that I don't think the Author's Guild has much to worry about re: book sales at this time. People who can afford to buy books may even be buying more of them than usual right now. People who can't afford to buy books because they've just been laid off or furloughed aren't going to suddenly find the funds to buy books even if the Author's Guild was successful in shutting the National Emergency Library down.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 01:34 am (UTC)I had thought that classroom texts -- material that every kid in a given class reads, whether an actual "textbook" (i.e. GEOMETRY 101) or a general trade book used as a text (say, CATCHER IN THE RYE) -- were a thing separately managed from a given school's library collection. As a corollary, I'd therefore have expected a given school's classroom sets of any given class text to represent a larger quantity than you'd have under the library's purview.
[On the third hand, I freely acknowledge that if you have one "classroom set" of books and three or four periods' worth of students in that class, you do in fact have the problem of rapid distribution you describe. But on the fourth one, I'd also have thought that there'd be enough commonality of titles used in schools nationwide that (a) the preponderance of that material ought to be available in e-form by now, just because demand would support it, and (b) that it would be a fairly compact set of titles overall, rather than needing to encompass a large and seemingly disparate body of material.]
So I'd be very interested in more information about how the classroom textbook situation actually works these days.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 01:17 am (UTC)In this case, which appears to revolve mostly around OpenLibrary.org -- a separate project -- I wish the larger discussion was clearer about the relationship between the parent entity (IA) and the specific offending sub-unit.
////
Now, then: what's puzzling me is that IA's supposed rationale for the Emergency Library makes no particular sense if one actually looks at it carefully.
Their claim is that they've done this in the service of students who are now out of school not having access to textbooks or assigned readings, which are now locked up in the closed school buildings and libraries. I have trouble believing that this is in fact the case.
For K-12 schools, you'd expect that kids could/would have been able to take home class textbooks on the last day before closure. (I know, in poorer districts textbook sharing may have precluded all students from doing this, but I can think of a variety of ways short of the IA's model for coping with that situation. ETA: Crossposted; see the thread above mine where I admit I need more data on this point.
Meanwhile, for college students: most book-form texts should already have been acquired for the current term, and it should have been possible for "library reserve" texts to either (a) already exist in e-form, or (b) the necessary number of extra photocopies to be discreetly created to cover all students, who'd again have had a reasonable chance to collect them before the relevant college library closed itself off.
At most, the IA's claim justifies opening up access to academic library collections so that college-level students can continue reading material for independent research of various kinds...but based on the general descriptions, it sounds as if there's a lot more content than that included in the actual "National Emergency Library".
////
Having said all that -- like a number of others above, I have connections and sympathies in multiple camps. I agree that there are good reasons to digitize broadly, but I am also very much in sympathy with authors who find copies of their works being circulated for free in direct competition with properly licensed editions. (SFWA, for instance, strikes me as having been a smarter player than the Authors' Guild in this and related aspects of larger copyright reform initiatives.) On the whole, I think the IA is in danger of losing the goodwill it generates with the Wayback Machine if it pushes too hard on the OpenLibrary side.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 02:02 am (UTC)This is a side note and perhaps beside the point but having worked on reserves at a large and well-funded university library: ahahaha, one wishes. Plenty of important textbooks are not available in e-form whatsoever (or if they are, they're not set up for library purchase because they want to get all the students' money individually, so you can't do e-reserve with them--and no university library wants to be the first one to stretch the limits of copyright like IA is doing and get sued). And all the profs have their favorite textbook for diff eq or whatever, so it changes constantly, quite often there isn't The One Text Everyone Uses even across different semesters at the same college.
(Plus, a lot of the college/university library shutdowns are happening ad hoc without giving people a chance to pick anything up. There are questions (and good ones) about the safety of everyone thronging in for "here's one day when you can come check out books." The thing with schools might be similar but I have less info there.)
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 01:35 am (UTC)I love the Internet Archive, but I found my feelings about the Emergency Library souring when I started randomly looking for books I know are still in copyright that have ebook editions, and found way too many of them. I love the idea of rescuing orphaned books, especially if they're never even going to make it into Google books, but this does seem to be really pushing at the margins, deliberately.
(Idea landlords, WTF?)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 01:38 am (UTC)The argument that the Free Library exists to preserve orphan books doesn't hold water when authors like J K Rowling are having to send them DMCA takedown notices. There are a lot of authors who barely scrape by, but whose books are anything but orphan works, and the fact their books are turning up in the Free Library without permission being asked says that the Free Library doesn't care less about authors. And that's a fairly unique attitude for a library.
You note that there's a problem with the ethics of the Internet Archive in the web crawls it does without asking permission of the original creators, but that's exactly what it is doing to authors. It's forcing them to do the labour of finding the copyright breach and protecting their rights, while cutting itself a break on actually respecting the law. Their entire business model is based on systematically ignoring authors rights and hoping no one sues them. And that says they don't actually give a damn about ethics, or the livelihood of content creators. And ultimately, if people can't earn a living creating content, there won't be new content to archive.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 03:47 am (UTC)I honestly don't think they're hoping no one sues them; I do think they are quite likely expecting a lawsuit and hoping that it is precedent-setting on some of the right of first sale stuff that has been a thorn of contention between copyright owners and copyleftists ever since digital content became a big thing. And I'm honestly more of a copyleftist than otherwise, so I do sympathize with their stance, but as you say, a.) there's a big difference between making an enemy of big corporations like Disney and pointlessly antagonizing small independent creators because it was easier to throw a whole bucket open than do the metadata work to filter out stuff with available ebook editions and b.) I do not think they will win the inevitable lawsuit, and I think the backlash has the potential to go badly for all of us.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 01:58 am (UTC)And, like, I have long waved the dual flags of DRM IS BULLSHIT and FUCK DISNEY FOR FUCKING UP THE COPYRIGHT SYSTEM, and yet, yeah, I think the Internet Archive did overstep in this case. But also...the headtilt I did when I saw they were not letting people download things forever, that it did have a set two-week expiration limit. It was quite a headtilt! A this is what people are getting so upset about?? headtilt, even. BUT ALSO, I completely understand why this has gotten hackles up! Because it was a dick move on IA's part!
Basically, your feelings are largely my feelings, grains of salt and all, and I am just going to keep sitting back and making sad Nathan Fillion flails at the whole mess for a while.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 02:57 am (UTC)I have a small and no doubt selfish but intense feeling of dismay at do we have to have this endless PIRACY v ART WANTS TO BE FREE discussion again RIGHT NOW, and do we have to have it on Twitter? Twitter of all places, where nuance goes to die?
I'm also personally really dismayed attention has been diverted from discussions of "Look, people need art! Look at these wonderful artists giving away their work for free! Boy, artists are really screwed over in the modern world, aren't they...." back to yelling about PIRACY and IDEA LANDLORDS. I'm Team Nobody there, or at least Team Can't We Have Nuance.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 03:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 02:58 pm (UTC)"Okay, those are all ancient and obscure, so even though they're actually available in POD and ebook, I'm not too fussed about it (and if we could get usage data I'd be completely fine with having them up there)...we reverted rights to that, and the author's dead, so not our circus...that's the extremely out-of-date edition of a law guide, and anyone checking that out and taking its advice deserves what they get...huh, this one isn't that old; I'm not comfortable with that being there....OMG THE AUTHOR OF THAT BOOK HAS A GOOGLE ALERT AND SENDS US NOTICE OF EVERY FAKE-PIRATE PHISHING SITE; TAKE THIS ONE DOWN NOW."
So, yeah. I think they're way overstepping. (And they've got the publication dates of the works; how hard would it be for them to say "let's only do this for works older than YEAR", because a novel published in 2019 probably isn't an orphan work?)
And on the other hand, I'm annoyed that my favorite not-exactly-orphaned-but-stuck-in-copyright-limbo works, Jennie Lindquist's Golden Name Day trilogy, aren't in the Open Library. Possibly because of the Garth Williams illustrations; I bet his estate is a lot more vigilant than Lindquist's.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 04:06 am (UTC)I'd guess that anything that isn't there isn't there because no one has donated a copy to the IA yet, but it could also absolutely be that Garth Williams already snuck in their to file a DMCA!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-31 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-02 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-12 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 08:45 pm (UTC)