Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/24/internet-archive-forced-to-remove-half-a-million-books.html
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Contributed by Natalie Dressed…
This is highly upsetting.
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I thought that they were on the edge with that one. I’m just glad that it didn’t end with some massive penalty that would put all the IA at risk.
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Especially since many conservatives (including the majority owner of the parent company of HarperCollins) seem to hate the idea of public libraries in general.
Internet Archive buys these books and lends out only the copies it owns. The publishers aren’t losing revenue any more than they are on books purchased by libraries. It’s not a pirate site but the publishers and the judge have treated it like one because they committed the unforgivable sin of cutting out a for-profit middleman (Overdrive).
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As Doctorow would say: “libraries are older than copyright”
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This coverage is utter bullshit. You know who else ‘won’ the court case Against IA? All the individual authors whose works IA was pirating. All the books IA was offering in this pool that they had to take down are COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE. “I don’t want to have to pay for a book” is nonsense. Pay the writer, and the publisher.
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Talk about bullshit… 
They HAVE been. I’m guessing at library prices, not retail prices, which are more expensive. Much like a traditional library, these are paid for books being loaned in the same manner as a traditional library books.
Sharing information is a public good, which benefits all. If authors aren’t being paid well, you should look to the publishers and the shitty contracts they offer, especially for young/newer writers who aren’t as established. 
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That’s a pity. I’ve been using it to get access to texts that are otherwise unavailable, not even by ILL, in Ireland in subjects that are under written about.
I guess they will remain so.
What publishers want is to charge libraries €1,000+ for individual loanable copies of these books.
And no, they have no fucking intention of passing that on to the authors.
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all three years, waiting for this moment to arise . . . 
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Paying for a book and lending it out != pirating.
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Disclosure: I used to work at a major university press, where part of my job was anti-piracy officer.
We offered legitimate library editions in print or digital formats on terms. Various libraries accepted them, took the books, and made them available to borrowers according to the terms. The Internet Archive didn’t want to accept those terms, so they took copies of the books and made them available on their own terms.
It actually does cost real money to make books.
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Which were different in what way? They don’t loan more copies then they’ve bought, for one.
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Obviously I’ll just be pirating every book these publishers release from now until eternity. If it’s a book I would have otherwise purchased, I’ll find a way to get the author the money they deserve for it.
One way publishers decide what writers get contracts is following sales numbers. If sales plummet due to people pirating the text then the publishers will not offer the author more contracts.
ETA:
And self publishing means doing a heck-ton of extra work to get your book out there. Doing it right is another full-time job.
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And the e-copies that they “sell” to individuals are DRM-locked, with no first-sale doctrine, and can disappear when a switch is flipped at the mothership.
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As I understand it, where IA got hit was that they were buying print books, scanning them, and lending out e-copies.
The Ruinous Publishers successfully argued that the e-copies were transformative works (new copies) that require their permission to create/distribute, which they won’t give because they want all e-copies “sold”, especially to libraries, to be DRM-locked under their control.
And yeah, books as a service, is a poisonous concept.
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Triple the price, automatically expires after 18 months or 26 loans?
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