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gibolt | on: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
This comment plus the parent changed my opinion on the case. They still may have gone too far be loaning out copies, but the fight to return to physical book loaning practices is worth it. Ownership and long-term availability matter.
trinsic2 | parent
Yea, I don't like the whole loaning out idea either. Loaning implies ownership. Corporate propaganda has done a good job of convincing people otherwise. I came across an article that was really good at explaining the issue of ownership around digital goods that people who want to have a balanced view of the situation should read. https://linustechtips.com/topic/953835-you-own-the-software-...
ethbr1 | root | parent
The biggest piece lost in the conversation around digital/IP rights is awareness of how it worked pre-digital.

First sale doctrine (in the US) said the buyer owned the physical copy and could resell or do what they wanted with that single copy.^

Obviously, that isn't portable to a zero-copy-cost digital realm.

However, the "buyers never actually own anything digital" modern reality is vastly different than the historical norm, in favor of publishers and platforms.

What was missed was the conversation around what baseline we should establish around digital ownership.

We've nibbled around the edges (you have a right to decrypt something you've purchased, in some cases), but we never clarified it sufficiently.

And without clarity, buyers only get whatever rights publishers/platforms decide to grant them.

IMHO, we'd be better served by establishing a clear floor of digital ownership rights, that no publisher or platform had the legal right to remove or obstruct.

That's how we did it previously, and it worked well...

^ There were some exclusions around mass/public broadcasting, but those were pretty limited.

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