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tptacek | on: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
IA's arguments that this was fair use seem exceptionally weak:

* Their "transformation" argument comes down to easing access, which has already been shot down in previous cases; unsurprising, since Napster could make the same argument.

* Their "nature of the work" argument came down to the fact that some of the books they scanned were nonfiction.

* They made a halfhearted attempt to claim that "amount and substantiality" weighed neutrally in this case, despite copying entire books wholesale and making them available in their entirety.

* They brought experts to make their "commercial impact" argument who limited their analysis to physical books(?!) despite the publishers coming to the case with competing ebooks.

It's wild to me they thought they could win this case. There's the law as people at IA and on message boards want it to be, and there's the law as it is. For people who want those two concepts to come closer together, this case seems like a major setback and an egregious strategic blunder.

codedokode | parent
If you buy a physical book, you have a right to lend it for free or re-sell it (first-sale doctrine). The publishers want to establish a precedent that you cannot do the same thing with digital books: the library must buy a special license and pay for every reading.

So this is about stripping people from their rights regarding to books made with a new technology.

tptacek | root | parent
It's not the same thing. When you give a book to someone else, you lose a physical object and they gain one. To "give" an ebook to someone, you have to copy it. We have a whole body of law about when it's OK to copy things.
codedokode | root | parent | next
IA allowed to read books throught the website so no copies are made. When lending a book through file download they used DRM to prevent reading after the lending term ends.
tptacek | root | parent
I'm sorry to have to disagree with you here but in fact every page of a book you show inside of a web browser is under the law a copy of that page of the original book.
codedokode | root | parent
When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina (if you want to reduce to absurd).
JumpCrisscross | root | parent | next
> When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina

Not how our retina, the optic nerve, visual cognition or visual recall work.

Dylan16807 | root | parent
Please explain how you think retinas work. And they didn't say anything about visual recall.
tptacek | root | parent
If you all want to nerd out about how eyeballs works that's cool, this is the place for that kind of thing, keep it chill, etc. But the law absolutely does not agree that looking at a painting equates to creating a copy of that painting; under the Copyright Act, the colloquial term "copy" means fixing a work into some physical media from which others can recall it.
codedokode | root | parent
So if you stream a movie from a hard drive over the Internet without "fixing" it anywhere, so that the viewer cannot "recall" it, but only watch, then you are not making a "copy" and not breaking the law?
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| root | parent
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account42 | root | parent
> When you give a book to someone else, you lose a physical object and they gain one.

But you don't lose your recollection of the book contents.